Sacred Awakenings Series: Bishop John Shelby Spong
Produced by The Shift Network, hosted by Stephen Dinan
Many thanks and blessings to our volunteer transcriber, Beth Edmonds
To listen to the full audio, register at http://www.sacredawakeningseries.com
Stephen: I want to introduce Bishop Spong. His books actually sold more than 1 million copies. He was the bishop of the at the Episcopal diocese of Newark for 24 years before he retired in 2001 although in talking to him before the call it hardly sounds like he's really retired. He was a teaching bishop and a champion of inclusive faith, written books like The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Discover The God of Love, a fairly provocative title. He's been a visionary thinker who has really spent a lifetime studying the Bible and been shaped by it, but also helped to evolve our understanding of it as well. He is a visiting lecturer at Harvard and universities and churches worldwide and he still delivers more than 200 public lectures each year. And his recent books include: Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, A New Christianity For A New World, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die, and Here I Stand. So he's really appeared on almost every major media outlet and we are really honored to have you here tonight. Thank you for joining us, Bishop Spong.
Bishop Spong: It’s my pleasure, Stephen. Good to be with you and with the audience.
Stephen: Wonderful. Well, I find it’s always nice to have a personal back story that led people into their role as a spiritual leader and I wonder if you can take us back to what really sparked your passion and interest for the ministry?
Bishop Spong: I can't ever remember wanting to do anything else, which is probably unusual. I even remember playing church when I was a little kid three and four years old. It was a strange church. I grew up in an evangelical Episcopal church in the Bible Belt of the South and it taught me that segregation was the will of God and it quoted the Bible to prove that; it taught me that women were by nature inferior to men, and quoted the Bible to prove that; it taught me that it was okay to hate other religions and especially the Jews, and quoted the Bible to prove that; and it taught me that homosexual people were either mentally sick -- that was the liberal position -- and if they were mentally sick we ought to try to cure them or they were morally depraved -- that was the conservative position. And if they were morally depraved it meant they had chosen this evil lifestyle and they ought to be repressed or converted, or maybe even killed if their name was Matthew Shepard.
And my pilgrimage in life somehow when I got through all of that when I worked through each of those revolutions I had to deal with the Bible because the Bible had been interpreted by my church as in-favor of all those positions which I was rejecting. Now the easy thing to do would be to reject the Bible and to reject the Christian church and join Harvey Cox's secular city and become a member of the Church alumni association OR to stay in and struggle to change the nature of what it means to be religious in general and Christian in particular. And I for some reason, and I'm not sure I know why, chose do the latter, and I've never regretted it. It's been an incredible life. I don't believe that uh, I don’t believe that God is a Christian. I don't think that any religious system captures the ultimate truth of God or reality or anything else. But I think they can be, religious systems can be, doorways through which we walk into life's deeper mysteries, and I think if you want deeply enough you transcend all the limits of all human religious traditions and you walk into what I call the wordless wonder of whatever that ultimate reality is into which we ascribe the name God still largely in our society. And I'm still on that journey. I don't denigrate any stage of my journey. I don't denigrate even my fundamentalist upbringing because it's all helped me to journey beyond the boundaries and into a new kind of understanding of what life is all about.
I have a favorite biblical text -- I suppose all religious people or Christian preachers have to have a text of some sort, but John quotes Jesus as saying that his purpose in life is that all might have life and have it abundantly. And that sort of guides everything I do. If an activity doesn't give life, if an activity diminishes the life or any human being, then I don't believe it can possibly be of God. And so I've had to struggle with my own church over whether or not women were fully human, and we've won that battle. About 45% of our clergy in the Episcopal Church today are women, and the head of our church is the first woman bishop we’ve ever elected to that position. And she's really a tremendous human being. And then the struggle with people of color, and that's been won too by and large. I'm sure not all black people feel it's been won but at least in the church…when I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, if a black person had come to my church they would have probably been arrested. And today my church in North Carolina has one Episcopal bishop and he's an African-American elected by the people. And he's a tremendous human being. And my church today has many homosexual clergy open and affirming homosexual clergy and we now have two bishops, Bishop Robinson in New Hampshire and we just elected and confirmed a woman named Mary Glasspool in Los Angeles to be the assisting Bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles. So, in some sense, that battle has also been won. And I think all of us are more deeply human because we've worked through those prejudices and have come out on the other side.
Stephen: I appreciate you sharing at such depth and it really is a remarkable journey that you've undertaken. It strikes me as kind of unusual to have somebody who is so pushing the envelope of the evolution of the church to really have such a high position as a bishop. I wonder if this whole tension between maintaining the tradition and the roots of the religion and being this kind of catalyst for change and evolving paradigms and expanding the vision of who we include in our definition of the sacred and things like that. How have you held that tension between the role of holding the tradition and continuing to evolve it?
Bishop Spong: Well if you understand the tradition it is always evolving. There's no such thing as the faith wants to live it to the saints as if it dropped out of heaven fully developed with footnotes. That's just not accurate. Christianity has been evolving since the first day. One of my favorite theologians is a German Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis in World War II named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Bonhoeffer was writing to one of his friends while he was awaiting his own hanging and he said just as Christianity had to break the boundaries of Judaism in the first century in order to become a universal and worldwide faith, so in our generation Christianity's going to have to break the boundaries of religion in order to be able to live in the 21st century. And I really believe that's correct, and Bonhoeffer coined the phrase religion-less Christianity which a lot of people think is an oxymoron, but that's exactly the way I think we are going. I think we've got to get beyond religion into a new understanding of what is holy and beyond religion into a new understanding of what it means to be human.
The one thing that we human beings all have in common is our basic humanity, and then we have our single world that we’ve got to take care of. And I don't think we are doing a very good job of it. The dinosaurs ruled this planet Earth from about 185 million years ago until to about 65 million years ago. That's about 120 million years. That's a long time for a single species to be sort of at the top of the food chain. I don't believe that human beings are going to last anywhere near that time because we are the only creature I know that viles its own nest; where the only creature I know that over breeds and wrecks the environment with too many people, and so I'm not at all sure that the human enterprise will go on. But what I think will go on is an ever deepening consciousness that is continuing to evolve and continuing to develop and it's this sense of consciousness that makes me believe, and I would even go so far as to say know but I don't know how I could justify the word know, but it certainly makes me believe that I am part of something that's a lot bigger than I am, and that all of us are in this relationship with this ultimate consciousness that we call sacred, we call it holy , we call it transcendent, we call it God. Most of us can't define it and the great sin of the church it seems to me and the great sin of religion is that all of us keep trying to define God in some human terms and then as soon as we’ve got that done we excommunicate everybody that doesn't agree with our definition, or we burn them at the stake, or we go to war against them, or we engage in religious persecution, which is the typical behavior of religious people, so that the idea that we might someday get beyond religion into a deeper sense of our own humanity is a very appealing idea for me.
Stephen: What are the practices that have really helped to open you most deeply to that sense of the sacred or the holy on a kind of day-to-day basis?
Bishop Spong: Well, I'm an overdeveloped left brain and an underdeveloped right brain kind of person, and so in order to get to me you sort of got to get me through my head through my mind which makes me not a good candidate for being a mystic. Mystics seem to be more right brained people. But that's the... you know, I'm a student. I don't believe I'll ever learn enough. I am a perpetual student and I constantly read and I constantly take courses that help me to understand the nature of the world in which I live. And the deeper I get into knowledge the more I run into something that is, well I don't know how to say it, something that connects all of life together. I think the boundary between animals and human beings is not near as severe as once we thought; and I think the relationship between plants and animals is much more intimate than once we thought; I think the idea that all of us participate in something that's beyond ourselves and that something beyond ourselves lives in and through each of us is a more profound idea than once I thought. Even St. Paul is quoted as saying that in the book of Acts he is quoted as saying that God is that in which we live and move and have our being. That's the kind of mystical God that I am drawn to rather deeply.
Stephen: You've written a book called Jesus for the Non-Religious, and I'm just wondering if this kind of more expanded, almost post religious world view while still honoring the tradition, how do you now hold the whole story of Jesus in the kind of larger frame of our spiritual evolution?
Bishop Spong: Well, I spend a lot of time working on that. The first thing that's important I think for people to know is that most of what people think are Orthodox Christian positions are also evolving things. For example, the story of the virgin birth of Jesus which a lot of people would like to claim is part of the true orthodox faith, well it didn't enter the Christian tradition until the ninth decade, some 50 to 60 years after the death of Jesus. Paul didn't seem to know anything about it, Mark didn't seem to know anything about it, and they are the first two writers in the Bible. It enters the story in Matthew and it’s repeated in Luke. Matthew would be the mid-80s; Luke would be late 80s or maybe even early 90s; and then it disappears in John. The fourth Gospel, which is after all of them, doesn't feel that that’s a very adequate way to describe Jesus. I think what was going on in the life of Jesus is that human beings believe that in that human life they confronted a transcendent dimension that they call God and they didn't know how to talk about that. Their understanding of God at that point was almost universally that of a supernatural being who lived above the sky somewhere and was sort of keeping record books up to date on all of our behavior. And if God is this supernatural being in the sky and you've experienced God in the life of this human Jesus of Nazareth then you've got to work out how God from up there got into Jesus down here. And that's what you see happening when you read the Bible the way it was written.
Now Paul says that Jesus was completely human until God raised him into the meaning of God at the time of the resurrection. Mark says Paul was, in Mark's early 70s, Mark says that Jesus was a completely fully human adult male who came to be baptized and the heavens opened and the Spirit of God was poured down upon him and he became God infused. And then Matthew says no, the Holy Spirit was his father and so he was divine from the moment of conception and Luke says the same thing but in a different way, and then the fourth Gospel says that no, that's not adequate, Jesus was a part of who God is from the foundation of the universe. So each of these writers, the later they are in history the earlier they want to date the origins of what this divine quality is. But I think the issue that we've got to deal with is what was there about Jesus that caused people to say God was in this person and is that different from God being in you or God being in me.
Well as I go back and look at the Bible in a non-literal way I find that over and over again the impact of the Jesus experience is that people are lifted out of their limitations and their fears and their prejudices and their insecurities so that they can create a whole new sense of what it means to be human. I find it fascinating that Paul, and in one of his earlier epistles says that if you're inside the Christ experience you discover there’s no longer a Jew nor a Greek, a male nor female, a bond or free, and I think he could have gone on and said black or white or Asian, or gay or straight or bisexual or transgendered.
There's something about being inside the human inside the experience of the God presence in Jesus that causes all human barriers to disappear. And if you read the Jesus story, he's always on the side of those who are the outcasts. He's on the side of the leper, he's on the side of the Samaritan, he's on the side of the woman caught in the act of adultery, he's on the side of the woman who has a chronic menstrual leak that she's unable to get cured and so she's made to feel by her religion chronically unclean. And the power of that story is always that in the life of Jesus a deeper sense of humanity is created in people, and because they have this deeper sense of humanity they come to believe that God has brought them into a new being, if you will, and that this is the power of the Jesus experience.
Now Jesus was a radical for his age. I mean he talked to the Samaritan woman by the well, he has female disciples according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he took on the religious establishment time after time after time and I think, I think it's pretty terrific role model, and he does it always in the name of an enhanced humanity. The more deeply and fully human each of us become, the more I believe we understand and participate in who God is and what God is. But that would take a long time to try toput that into a full theological frame of reference.
Stephen: It is really, I mean, an exceptional and beautiful exemplar but you’ve just kind of… the unique aspect sort of dissolves away that he's really more of a forerunner for all of us.
Bishop Spong: Well I'm not sure if I'd quite say that. That is I’m not sure that I think the uniqueness disappears because I think we are all...I think the nature of human life is to be in touch with the ultimate and universal consciousness, and some how I think Jesus was more in touch with that than most. So, he's very specific for me in that I judge the amount of contact I have with the universal consciousness by the standard of his life, and so I judge everybody else, so he is the standard for me but I don't think that I can suggest that God limits whatever God is and however one defines God. I don't believe you can suggest that this holy other is limited to my understanding or my analysis of how this God operates. I think that's the great sin of all religion, and I think that's very sad commentary.
Religion overwhelmingly, in all of its forms, is more about looking for personal security than it is about looking for the deep truth of God, and I think that that shows up. When somebody threatens our security we want to burn them at the stake, or bomb the World Trade Center, or start a crusade against the infidels in the Middle East, or whatever we have done, be it anti-Semitic, all these things we have done throughout Christian history. Christian churches victimize many, many people and we've been victimized. One of the things about Islamic fundamentalism today is that Christians in the West are having to experience from very hostile Islamic fundamentalists the same sort of hostility that during the crusades we dumped on the Muslim world, and I think history has a very long memory and I think we need to be aware of that. And the Eastern tradition talks about karma. Well I think the crusades from the 11th and 12th and 13th century put a lot of bad karma into the world between Jew and Muslim, I mean between Christian and Muslim and I think we are still having to work some of that bad karma out.
Stephen: So, you've really traced the history of a lot of the modern evolutionary edge of Christianity. I'm wondering if you project forward, so 45 years from now, what do you see Christianity itself evolving towards? What's the next...
Bishop Spong: Well I think the denominations will die. I think they'll die within a century. They're not very important now. Most denominations say nothing about Christianity. They say a great deal about where your ancestry was filtered through. That is if you’re a Lutheran in America today it’s probably because you have ancestors that came from Germany or Scandinavia; if you're an Episcopalian like I am, you had English people in your background; if you're Presbyterian you probably come from Scottish stock; if you're Roman Catholic you come from Irish or Italy or Southern European stock where that tradition is dominant. But I don't see that that’s got much future. Jesus didn't know there was an England or an Ireland or a Scandinavia, and it doesn't seem to be terribly important to the essence of the Christian faith. No, I think we are evolving toward a different understanding of humanity. I think tribal boundaries are falling apart. It's hard to see that when you listen to politicians who invoke God to bless America at the end of every speech. But in other countries they are invoking God to bless Europe or Germany or France or Afghanistan or whatever.
But I think we’re getting past that. I thought there was enormous consciousness-raising election in 2008, and it wasn't just that we elected an African-American to be president, but we had a very viable woman candidate who came within an inch of being elected herself. We had a Mormon candidate -- 50 years ago, no Mormon could have been a candidate for the presidency of the United States. We had an Hispanic candidate. We had a clergyman, Mike Huckabee, who ran, and we even had a man who'd been married three times and divorced twice. He was the mayor of New York, and he was still a viable candidate. At one point he led the polls. Now that says to me that there's something changing in this nation and I hope that it's a coming to an awareness that we have a common humanity that’s so much more important than the things that are always dividing us.
And if the Christian faith is as I think it is, the power of God entering into human life to make us so deeply and fully human that we can allow others to be deeply and fully human just as they are, instead of judging them because they're not like us, then I think we get past the boundaries that have divided the races and the tribes and the genders and sexual orientations and left-handedness and right-handedness and all the other things that we have used as barriers to keep certain parts of the human race down. And I think that’s a great thing to be celebrating.
Now, institutional religion’s not doing well. But I have an idea that we are in a real struggle for the soul of America, whether we are going to stand with some sense of responsibility for one another in a one world or whether we are going to go down the pathway of excessive greed and play the game, I don’t what the world is all about but the concept that “I am going to do what I can to get mine and I’ll either do it legally or illegally” is in part what brought this country to its knees a year ago in the economic meltdown.
I think it’s a battle right now in the congress of the United States between whether you are going to have a government that is sensitive to the needs of all the people or whether you are going to have government that is so individualistic that it doesn’t really care what happens to the masses so long as each individual feels that he or she is well taken care of. And that’s a chronic battle that has gone on in the human race for along time and I think we’re headed in the right direction though when you check the news everyday in Washington you are never quite sure ‘cause today we saw, we saw a portrait of a man with Parkinson’s disease that attended a tea party rally and he was sitting out there trying to say, well, you know, “I need health care desperately. No insurance company will insure me because I've got a pre-existing condition.” And the crowds were hooting him and hollering him and saying you're not going to get any handouts here. I don't want to live in a country that doesn't give health care to all of its citizens, just basic primary healthcare, now this country's rich enough to do that. I don't understand why that isn't a priority for our people. But healthcare is just one symbol.
Another is the environment, and we can not any longer act as if anybody can do anything they wish in the name of profits if it's going to wreck the common environment which sustains the life of the people of this universe. And one person is of equal value to another it seems to me because that's what it is in the eyes of that which I call God. I don't know that God is playing favorites and saying I like Westerners better than Africans or middle Easterners.
And so I think we've got to develop a universal consciousness and I think we're in the process of doing it. It's not easy and it's never a straight line. There will always be fits and starts. But I think we are moving generally in the right direction. In my lifetime we've gotten rid of segregation, we've created a far different equality for women, and I think the battle of a gay and lesbian people being full and participating citizens with all the rights of everybody else in our society is pretty well won. And I think now we've got to begin to address our common humanity in terms of our common environment. I think that will be the great pressure for the next decade. 25.56
Stephen: Wow, you have so much deep wisdom on so many different areas. It's fascinating to hear you speak. I'm curious, what is your next learning edge? You say you're always studying new things. What are you most enthused about right now?
Bishop Spong: Well, right now I'm spending an enormous amount of time on a very old-fashioned subject and that is the study of the fourth Gospel. Now that, to a wider secularized audience, might be really strange, but I find the fourth gospel very fascinating because it's been interpreted in most of Christian history in favor of really orthodox patterns. It is the fourth Gospel is the one who most makes Jesus out to be a divine incarnation of some external heavenly being.
It's interesting when you compare the story of the crucifixion of Jesus in the four Gospels. In the early gospels, Mark and Matthew, the only thing that Jesus says from the cross is my God, why have you forsaken me, which is an incredibly intensely human cry of a man about to die. But that disappears in the later Gospels and he becomes so secure in his divine nature that in Luke the last thing he says is “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And in John which is the last Gospel, he says, “It is finished”, the work of the new creation, “My vocation is complete,” and he becomes more and more divine.
I see divinity as a quality of humanity. That is I think the more deeply and fully human we become the more we become lives through which all that God means can flow, and that's the way I see Jesus. So I see the fourth Gospel much more as a mystical story of oneness with the holy than the way it's been interpreted as the God above incarnated God self into human flesh, which I think turns Jesus into… sort of Jesus is to God what Clark Kent is to Superman. That is, he’s a human being in disguise but he's not really human.
I find the human Jesus terribly powerful because it’s through the human that I always experience the presence of the divine and it's not the other way around. They are opposites in my opinion. One flows deeply into the other. So my task is to be as deeply and fully human as I can and to try to build a world where everybody can be as deeply and fully human as they can. My motto is that we are called to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that we can be, and then we can build a world where everybody has a better chance to live fully and to love wastefully and to be all that they can be. And I think that’s what the mission of the Christian church is, not to convert people so they'll all be Christians but to transform the world so that they can all be human. It's a very different thrust.
Stephen: Beautiful vision. Wondering before we take some questions from our listeners, a quick question, how do you see the relationship between religion and science since that's often created as a polarity?
Bishop Spong: Yes, and I think most people do and I think it is if religion means a bunch of propositional statements made about God. I just finished writing a book on why I believe in ever lasting life or eternal life, and as I look around in our world today most concepts of eternal life are in low esteem primarily because the presuppositions with which we have always thought about eternal life have been pretty well destroyed by science.
We used to think of God as sitting above the clouds somewhere in the sky keeping record books up to date on the basis of which people’s eternal destiny would be determined. But that's really hard to believe in that kind of God if you live on the other side of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and Hubbles telescope and Einstein and Stephen Hawking. We now know that in our own galaxy that the earth is not only not the center of the universe, it's not even the center of our galaxy. It's out about two thirds from the edge of, from the center of our galaxy, and then in our galaxy there are stars that are…there are 200 billion stars in our single galaxy, most of them bigger than our sun, and some of them are even bigger than the Earth's orbit around the sun. That's a pretty good-sized star. And there’s something like 1 trillion, I mean 100 billion to 1trillion galaxies out there in the universe, so locating God out in space somewhere is very difficult, and so I think that sort of erodes confidence.
Now the ideas that we've had that the world is operated on meticulously precise mathematical laws, that is we can do space travel today because we can tell you absolutely with perfection where every heavenly body is going to be at every moment so that we can send rockets out to rendezvous with other rockets out in space and build space stations and that mitigates against the idea that God is this supernatural being that's going to invade the world and set aside the laws of nature to cause the United States to win a war or to bless America or to create a miracle, and I think that idea is sort of fading.
And the final thing that I think is the ultimate blow to a real conviction about life after death is that we use to define human life as a little lower than the Angels, created in the image of God, and endowed with an eternal, immortal soul that would return to God when we died. And then Darwin came along and said well maybe you're not a little over than the Angels, maybe you’re just a little higher than the apes, and that you really are an animal with a developed brain, and that great barrier that we once thought existed between animals and human life is not near as vast as once we thought. So science is been the enemy of that kind of religion.
But in my life science is opened me to mystery and to wonder in this universe. Last year I took a 96 lecture course on the origins of the universe from Prof. Alex Filippenko at Cal Berkeley, and you know it shatters a lot of your primitive understandings of God as an old man in the sky but it fills you with a sense of awe and wonder at the mystery and the majesty of this gift called life. We know that the universe was formed between 13.7 and 13.8 billion years ago and that it was full matter, just matter. There was no life in this universe. It took about 9 billion years for life to come. Does that mean that somebody, some supernatural being suddenly stuck life into this materialistic world? No, I don't think so.
I think that material develops to the point that life comes out of material, and then consciousness comes out of life, and then self-consciousness comes out of consciousness, and I think we are evolving toward what I would call a universal consciousness in which we feel at one with the source of life in this universe. And so science becomes for me today an ally in the search for truth and understanding of what it means to be human, and I'm just sorry I haven't gotten enough time left in my life to study any more science than I'm able to do. There's a company in Virginia that puts university courses on DVDs and I've taken every scientific course I can get my hands on and in every one of them I've found just a deepening awareness of the mystery of life and the reality of God. So I've turned into kind of being a mystic, and that surprises me because I really am a left brained rationalist, but there is a place where you take words as far as words can go and then words themselves are time bound and time warped, but the ultimate consciousness, the ultimate reality that transcendent nature of life, the meaning of God, those are beyond the power of words; beyond the power of religion; beyond every definition of God and that's the journey that I'm on and I still find it consistent with the roots in my religious system, but I think we all have to transcend the limits of our religious systems as we walk into the wonder and mystery of God.
Stephen: Beautiful. Well let's get some questions from the audience. Normally we would do an e-mail poll but the Bishop Spong said the best way to stay in contact with him is to just go to his website, JohnShelbySpong.com and you can register and be a member there. That is the easiest way. So if you have a question, just hit one and I would choose the folks at random here. Jeff, you’re up.
Jeff: Hey, that was great. Bishop Spong thanks very much.
Bishop Spong: Hello Jeff, how are you?
Jeff: I'm terrific. I'm glad I connected with you. Your books have changed my life.
Bishop Spong: Thank you.
Jeff: My real question is though and you will probably get a lot of questions tonight, I have three sons, trying to raise them. I was raised Roman Catholic and I'm retired actually from that. Since my father died I've been trying to find meaning in life 10 years ago and I've been searching ever since. I'm wondering how you stay involved in the church when you really don't get what they do anymore and I'm not sure how to raise my kids anymore. I have young boys. They are in their early 20s now and I've got them completely confused too.
Bishop Spong: (laughing) I wish I could tell you that I've done a better job than that with my children but I don't know that I have. And I don't know how to answer that. I can only say that I think that there’s nobody’s life that doesn't have to grapple with the realities of tragedy and meaninglessness and all the other things, the slings and arrows
of the outrageous fortunes that we call life. What draws me into my church is one, the power of the community; two, to sense that there is something beyond it toward which we are walking; and the third thing is I sit lightly. I don't believe that the creeds were written to be sort of theological girdles or corsets or straitjackets into which we had to push our flabby faith. I think the creeds are love songs that fourth century people sang to their understanding of God and I had no great difficulty singing my fourth century love song.
But I don't know that if I was considering writing a creed today that I would use a three tiered universe Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed, the early creeds of the church, but I think they're comfortable as pointers and markers along our journey. I find…sometimes I find church really difficult. When I was an active bishop it was a little easier because I controlled the worship, that is, I lead it. And I could sort of dispense with some things that I thought were bad and I'm a critic of it now. I think that worship that concentrates on how unworthy human beings are is just dreadful.
You know I go to my church and I'm told that I'm a miserable offender, that there's no good in me, that I'm not even worthy to gather up the crumbs under the table, and I sing hymns about how I need to be washed in the blood of Jesus, and that makes me almost want to throw up. And I just can't envision that mentality. But you know I think we've developed a kind of fetish with blood on the Catholic side of Christianity, we like to drink it, and on the Protestant side we like to bathe in it. And it makes me believe that maybe Protestants have more external sins and Catholics have more internal sins so we can debate that a little bit.
But I think we've got to get beyond the idea that human life is fallen and depraved and sinful and evil and original sin. I think we ought to punt original sin. I think human life is mysterious and wondrous and I think the Christian story needs to be told in terms of how you empower people to be more deeply and fully human and to be able to give up their life and their love away. You can't give your life and your love away unless you know who you are and unless you've experienced enough love so that you’ve got some to give away. And if we can get the church to begin to work in that, than I would be very happy.
I do believe I'm never going to be able to change the church if I’m outside it so I have a deep commitment to staying inside and being an uncomfortable presence inside. But you know, I'm 78 years old, and in the course of my lifetime I've seen the church changed dramatically. You know, it's really just amazing to see the transitions that we've made in our understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be black or white, what it means to be male or female, what it means to be gay or straight. And I think that if you take a long enough view you do see progress. And it's enough to keep me struggling inside this institution, though you have to pick and choose because there are some places where I don't think I would survive very many Sundays.
If I can make a commercial for the Episcopal Church and it's not any virtue on our part, but we are the Church of England and when England separated itself from the Vatican it was over Henry VIII's marriages. It wasn't over a great theological issue. So you can hardly be moralistic in a church that was founded by Henry VIII. And then we, England became an empire that had to be broad enough, Christianity and England had to be broad enough to include everybody in the United Kingdom and then ultimately broad enough to include everybody in the British Empire. So we don't have an infallible pope, we don’t have an inerrant Bible and Will Rogers used to say that he liked being in a Episcopalian because it interfered neither with his religion nor his politics, and maybe we need to be more fluid in churches and less rigid, but you see that then takes us out of our security seeking and puts us into a truth seeking mode and that's not what most people look for in religion. So I would hang in there if I were you and struggle and be an uncomfortable presence and let your discomfort be known and help this institution keep evolving because I see great evidence that it is.
Jeff: Okay, terrific. Well, thank you.
Stephen: That's a great answer.
Jeff: Yes, thanks very much.
Stephen: We have David Bland.
David: Bishop Spong, this is David Bland with the Theosophical Society in America.
Bishop Spong: How are you?
David: We are looking forward to your coming in April.
Bishop Spong: I am looking forward to that too.
David: Quick question: Could you discuss the relationship you see between near-death experiences and the research and observations you've made in your recent book on eternal life?
Bishop Spong: Well I could try though I've studied near-death experiences and out of body experiences and the work of the parapsychologists and even was part of the leadership of a conference at Georgetown University back in the 80s that was called together by Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island to look at this and we brought all sorts of people together for a weeklong seminar, lots of papers, and I finally left it all out of my book, and the reason I left it out is not that I have strong convictions either for it or against it, but I never could find a way to document any of the data. It's all so deeply personal.
You almost have to be a psychoanalyst to talk to somebody who claims to have had an out of body experience or near-death experience. You have to be a psychoanalyst in order to separate how much of that is reality and how much of that is the brain closing down and how much of that is the fear of death that creates the fantasies that you so deeply want to believe. And I didn't know how to answer any of those things, so I just left it out. I feel the same way about reincarnation. I don't deny reincarnation but I don't have any way of documenting it, and I'm tired of trying to write books about things that I don't know anything about. I’ve studied these things but I don't want to be in print on them until I'm much more convinced of the reliability of the data. And I've not yet become convinced of those things. That's not to say they aren't so.
I've got a daughter who's got a PhD in physics from Stanford University and she's quite convinced that what people call out-of-the-body experiences is just the physiological process of the body shutting down right before it dies and then in some instances it doesn't proceed. It comes back and so they've had these... she would explain in a quite naturalistic way. And I don't know that she's got the truth either. But, you know, there are other perspectives on that and I wish I were a universal expert but I'm not and until I can say… I believe deeply in life after death but I come at that from my own experience which may also be delusional.
You know, I wanted to call this book Pious Hope or Pious Delusion or Realistic Hope and my publisher didn't care for that title. But I think that we've got to look at both sides of those issues -- at the pious hope side, I mean the pious delusion side and the realistic hope side and until I can find more documentation of verifiable data. Not just somebody's story which we have plenty of. I read John Hick’s book in which he documents these. It's 1000 pages long and very tiny print. And he documents these really unusual cases and they are deeply impressive, but I couldn’t interview the people and I couldn't get enough documentation to want to put my name on a book that talks about it so I omitted that from the book.
David: Thank you very, very much. I look forward to seeing you.
Bishop Spong: Thank you. I look forward to being there.
Stephen: Thanks, David. How about Rev. Mary Miller?
Rev. Miller: Hi.
Bishop Spong: I was hoping we would get to a lady at some point. I believe that every other question ought to come from the other half of the human race and churches don't do that very much, so welcome Mary.
Rev. Miller: Thank you. I am so excited to talk to you. I bought your first book back in 1992 about, you know, the whole aspects about the Gospels not lining up and about fundamentalism and the problems with using just straight fundamentalism. But my question to you is that I was wondering what you thought about the Nag Hammadi Library and whether or not how that fits in with your study of the Bible and how it interfaces because I'll tell you something, I’ve studied the Bible, I've studied the Nag Hammadi, and I'm still kind of wrestling back and forth with it. Thank you.
Bishop Spong: Well, thank you. The discovery at Nag Hammadi was really a pretty wonderful one. It's been terribly slow getting out into this, this is 1945, that’s 55, 65 years ago. It's been terribly slow getting out into the public mainstream. I think the book that's come the furthest has been the Gospel of Thomas which is only about 120 verses, one chapter, but it's pretty well found intact in the Nag Hammadi discovery. And the Jesus Seminar was so deeply impressed with that that they changed the canon and put out a book called The Five Gospels and included Thomas. And they even argue for Thomas being maybe even the first Gospel, and there's just a lot of debate going on.
My favorite theologian who works on that and I think as knowledgeable is Elaine Pagels who is at Princeton University’s Department of Religion. And I've read her book on the comparison of Thomas with John, Beyond Belief, I've read it twice now, and I just think Elaine is a first-rate scholar. I'm still not sure I'm convinced that the Gospel of Thomas is much earlier than 110-120, and I think it's not an original piece, but Elaine…if anybody could convince me, it would be Elaine Pagels, who’s a dear friend and I think a terribly impressive scholar. The one thing that I think we need to say about the Nag Hammadi discoveries is that it put us into a deeper understanding of the origins of Christianity.
There was no such thing as a single orthodox Christianity that fought off all the challenges of all the heretics and remained firm. We had a number of Christianities at the beginning and the one that we call orthodoxy today is not necessarily the one that's right but it's the one that won. And then they were able to suppress all other interpretations. And some of the ones that were suppressed had their books, well they had their books burned, and you remember in those days you had to copy, hand copy, in order to get a book. So books were very rare, so if you didn't…if a book wasn’t in favor, nobody was going to pay the price to have it hand copied. So when you get into authority, the orthodox party could pretty well suppress all the other points of view. What Nag Hammadi has done is to introduce us to these contending points of view.
A professor at the University of North Carolina named Bart Ehrman has written a book called Early (Lost) Christianities, which I think is probably the best book I've seen on the early development of the Christian faith, and he certainly makes the case that there was no such thing as one orthodox position. Orthodoxy finally won but it won primarily because of the power of the Roman Empire and the fact that the bishop of Rome sort of became the heir to the authority of the emperor of Rome when they moved the head of the government to Constantinople. And so there was this power vacuum left in Rome and so the bishop of Rome was the number one officer there and he began to accrue the power that had once been the power of the Roman emperor and built a Roman kind of Christianity into the powerful structure that the Roman Catholic Church is today. And I don’t want to be negative to my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters but I would say that Christianity has never been as specific, as orthodox, as firmly defined as they would now define it, and they're not alone because every other group believes they have the only true faith too. And I don't believe we'll ever discover the true faith because I don't think the human mind could ever embrace the mystery of God. So I welcome this as a way of relativizing the literalistic claims of Christians through the ages and I think it helps us move more closely toward truth.
Rev. Miller: I was going to say that, you know, it certainly shows what they did to Miester Eckhart, if you know what I'm talking about.
Bishop Spong: Well, he's fascinating. Meister Eckhart actually succeeded Thomas Aquinas in the chair of theology that Thomas had held and that must've been a really shaking experience for the church to have Aquinas be the theologian and have him be replaced by Meister Eckhart who died when he was on trial for heresy, so we don't know whether he was a heretic or not. But Meister Eckhart to me-- I really think he perceives the reality of God the way I do today. I am deeply into being a Meister Eckhart fan and I think you've got to get beyond the structures.
In the subtitle of my last book- I called it Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, because I think those are barriers to truth and so I think we've got to pursue the reality of God beyond those human boundaries, and when we do I think instead of God falling apart as a fundamentalist thing…you know if you don't have something concrete to hold onto there’s gonna be nothing. We don't fall into a bottomless pit. That’s not my experience. My experience is when I get beyond the boundaries of orthodox religion and beyond the boundaries of the traditional definition of God as the supernatural being who is directing the affairs of the universe, that I become more deeply aware of the holiness of life and more deeply aware of the presence of what I call God.
Rev. Miller: That is just beautiful. Thank you.
Bishop Spong: Thank you, Mary.
Stephen: Thank you, Mary. Well, it has been such a rich exploration, Bishop Spong. We only have a few minutes to really do our break-out groups but it is a really important part of the call.
Break out groups take place.
Stephen: Bishop Spong, just a wealth of incredible information, mind expanding, heart expanding tonight. I'm wondering if there are, what are the key messages that you really think are most important for us to take away for this time. We're in a time of very accelerated challenge on a planetary level from everything from sustainability issues to peace issues, economics, what some of the deepest spiritual principles that you think we need to bear in mind to navigate our times in a graceful way?
Bishop Spong: I think the first one would be to recognize that no human being can ever tell another human being who God is or what God is. It's simply beyond the power of our ability. A horse can never tell another horse what it means to be human. I wonder why human beings think they can tell another human being what it means to be God. But I think we can tell another human being how we think we experience the Holy, because that's ours. That's not God, that’s our experience. We might be delusional but I don't think so. And I experience God as life calling me to live; I experience God as love calling me to love; I experience God as being calling me to have the courage to be; and if that's my understanding of God then my mission is not to convert the world to my religious perspective but to expand the world so that everybody has a chance to live more deeply the life of God; to love more wastefully with the love of God; and to be all that each of us is called to be in the infinite variety of our humanity, and our task is to support one another in the role of being human and to love us into being loving people.
And I find that the more deeply you live in the more could you poses your life the more you're free when the time comes to lay that life down without any great fear and just take whatever the next step is across that boundary. I was fascinated when I was doing my study on eternal life when I read some of the theologians that have most impressed me that at the end of their lives they have always written kind of mystical book. John A. T. Robinson who was my mentor in England before he died, John A. T. Robinson's last book is called In the End God. Paul Tillich who is the theologian that most shaped my life, his last book was called On the Boundary. Michael Goulder who just died in January, the last book he wrote he actually stepped outside of organized religion and he wrote a book with John Hip called Why Believe in God which is a…it’s just a powerful, powerful story. And I think that the God consciousness is bigger than any of our creedal systems and so I keep walking into the beauty and wonder of that consciousness and I think when you do you become more human and then you begin to build a more human world and you begin to be free to give your life away and that's what I think the essence of the Christian faith is all about.
Stephen: Well it's just beautiful listening to you and I just get on such a deep level what it means to be both honoring of tradition as well as expanding tradition through your living example, so thank you so much for sharing with us here tonight.
Bishop Spong: It's been a pleasure to be with you and all of the people who signed on. I appreciate that.
Stephen: Great. Do you want to... sometimes I just close with a little prayer or a blessing if anything sparks or moves you?
Bishop Spong: Well, the benediction I've always used to conclude services in my church when I was a Bishop is:
Send us anywhere in the world you would have us go, only go thou with us and place upon us any burden you desire only stand by us to sustain us, break any tie that binds us except the tie that binds us to thee.
And that would be my prayer for those who are listening tonight.