John Shelby Spong, former Newark Episcopal Bishop, a leading spokesmen for progressive Christianity, was featured on 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, and FOX News. Harvard lectures led to gift book 330. (For his books I’ve read, click on his name.)

The book’s flaps say “Bishop John Shelby Spong has devoted his life to championing an authentic Christianity based on love, not hatred. In his bestselling ‘Why Christianity Must Change or Die,’ Spong convincingly demonstrated the limits of traditional faith and the toll its outmoded beliefs take on human life. Now the controversial champion of a more open and progressive Christianity courageously presents his inspiring alternative of what true faith should be today, offering a unified vision of authentic Christian belief for the third millennium. What does God look like beyond theism? Who is Christ when traditional concepts such as incarnation, atonement, and the Trinity no longer communicate any meaning? In answering these questions, Bishop Spong goes beyond abstract theology to present his vision of a radically new humanity rooted in God, yet matured beyond the need for a supernatural parental deity. ‘A New Christianity for a New World’ offers an understanding of Christianity that is free of exclusivity and shame. Bishop Spong empowers those who are disillusioned by religion to discover a God who is the source of life and the source of love, unbounded by the limits of any tradition. The Church of tomorrow, he writes, must be able to ‘incorporate all of our reality. It must be able to allow God and Satan to come together in each of us. … It must unite Christ with Antichrist, Jesus with Judas, male with female, heterosexual with homosexual.’ After explaining why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, and the rules and dogmas of the Church are not just inoperative but dangerous. Spong offers his contemporary vision of the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth. This work is the ultimate legacy of his struggle to discover and promote a faith system that can live in our new world. Only someone who has spent a lifetime crusading for change and the rights of outcasts in the Church could give voice to such a reasoned, just and loving faith. With Bishop Spong we can take the brave step to discover the Christianity of tomorrow.”

My reading of the above description from the book’s flaps convinced me to read it. (The first book of his that I had read in June 2006, ‘The Sins of Scripture’ (book 157), was a disappointment to me for it was too negative. The current book was definitely not a disappointment! The above flap description does not emphasize that Spong, one of many who have written of our compelling need to rise above (or mature beyond) traditional concepts, describes a task that is still a work in progress – a work that many others (such as Marcus Borg) refer to as an “emerging Christianity” that is still being discovered – a work that does not require a Christian to “suspend reason” to accept the traditional doctrines but will be able to move into the future without conflict as our knowledge increases. I have read many of such authors (especially many book by Marcus Borg; click on his name to list them) and I know I’ll continue to do so, for I am convinced that a more credible Christianity – one that is free of the outmoded man-made concepts that have caused so many people to either abandon traditional Christianity or to abandon consistency with modern knowledge by “regressing” into the fundamentalist belief that God wrote the Bible, making it literally true. Recognizing the use of metaphor, allegory and symbolic stories in the Bible provides deep and mature insights that fundamentalism sadly lacks. But in this book Spong avoids confrontation with fundamentalism. Instead he presents his arguments in a straightforward manner, first declaring why traditional theism is dead, then building anew, using the Bible together with reason to reinterpret it, so as to avoid errors made in the evolution of the extensions of the traditional theology. He makes a very convincing case for abandoning a theist understanding for a progressive (or emerging) understanding of the Bible and the Christianity of Christ.

Listing the books contents gives one a summary of his path of reasoning (my comments appear in square brackets): Preface is The Origins of This Book: From ‘Honest to God’ [by John A.T. Robinson (book 145, reread in Jan 2006)] to ‘Why Christianity Must Change or Die’ [by Spong]; Ch 1 is A Place to Begin: The Old Is No More; Ch 2 is The Signs of the Death of Theism; Ch 3 is Self-Consciousness and Theism: Siamese Twins at Birth; Ch 4 is Beyond Theism but Not Beyond God; Ch 5 is The Original Christ: Before the Theistic Distortion; Ch 6 is Watching Theism Capture Christianity; Ch 7 is Changing the Basic Christian Myth; Ch 8 is Jesus Beyond Incarnation: A Nontheistic Divinity; Ch 9 is Original Sin Is Out: The Reality of Evil Is In; Ch 10 is Beyond Evangelism and World Mission to a Post-Theistic Universalism; Ch 11 is But What About Prayer? Ch 12 is The Ecclesia [his new name for churches] of Tomorrow; Ch 13 is Why Does It Matter? The Public Face of Ecclesia; Ch 14 is The Courage to Move into the Future. [Spong uses the word Courage in part because he greatly admired Paul Tillich, one of whose books is ‘The Courage to Be’ (book 296); see also book 184, Tillich’s ‘Dynamics of Faith’.] Bishop John Shelby Spong greatly admires John A.T. Robinson, Paul Tillich, and Karen Armstrong. (Clicking on her name will show you the several books by her that I’ve read and reviewed).

I found Ch 8 – Jesus Beyond Incarnation: A Nontheistic Divinity – to be exceptionally insightful in the deeply meaningful picture it presents of Jesus that resonates very strongly with my own views from the New Testament. I doubt if Spong’s progressive interpretation of Jesus will change much, if at all, as progressive Christianity continues to emerge. Chs 9-11 elaborate on Spong’s new Christianity. Chs 12-14 present a realistic view on the great difficulties Spong predicts for a wide public acceptance of his new Christianity by many of today’s Christians.

I choose Ch 14 for a selection of quotes: “Jesus is this for me the doorway into this God. His life reflects the life that I call God. His love reflects the love that I call God. His being reveals the Ground of Being that I call God.” … “I will never again assert that my Christ is the only way to God, for that is an ultimate act of human folly. I will say, however, that Christ is the only way for me, since that is my experience.” …”I have moved into dangerous and religiously threatening places. I have walked beyond theism, but not beyond God. I have allowed theism to die, recognizing it for what it is – a human explanation of the God experience – not a description of who or what God actually is. The old debate between theism and atheism becomes, for me, not wrong but sterile, vapid, and inept.” …”I have now moved to this new place, and I challenge the church to move with me. I do so not because I reject the church, but because I am convinced that if we stay where the church now is, the faith we profess as Christians will surely die.” …”Once we have moved to a new place with a view of God radically redefined, we will learn to pray again, not as children imploring the protection of a heavenly parent, but as adults in touch with and empowered by the source of life itself. How the ecclesia will help us to do that is part of what lies ahead.” …”They [the new ecclesia] know that in the God who is the Ground of Being, and in the Christ who manifested that gift of being, there is neither east nor west, tribe nor ethnicity, male nor female, gay nor straight, true believer nor heretic, Christian nor Jew, Muslim, Hindu, nor Buddhist. There is only a God-filled humanity, wonderfully diverse, yearning to live, eager to love, daring to be, and wanting to journey in community into the wonder and mystery of the God who is Being itself.” …”I welcome the reformation. I hope that I have been one of its enablers. I yearn for it to succeed so that my grandchildren can say, “God is real for me, and Jesus is my doorway into this reality.” This ends the book, which I give my very highest recommendation. Think six stars!