Focus 580; Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile

Good morning. Welcome back to the second hour of focus 580 This is our telephone talk program. My name is David Inge. Thank you for tuning in the producer for our show is Jack Brighton. And at the controls today is Brian Wagner. In this part of focus 580 we'll be speaking with John Shelby Spong. He is the Episcopal Bishop of Newark in New Jersey and is the author of many books one of which we will discuss this morning in this part of the show. Bishop Spong is someone who is regarded by many people as a hero perhaps also as a pioneer for his attempts to redefine Christianity in a way that may well bring back people who feel that somehow they cannot as adults relate to the Christianity of their childhood. He also is a figure that for the same reason is regarded by others as a heretic. And in fact his writing and speaking on the subject has resulted among other things in a number of threats against his life. His most recent book is titled Why

Christianity must change or die. And the subtitle is A bishop speaks to believers in exile. And it is an attempt as I mentioned to to in a sense to rethink Christianity perhaps to define a new kind of Christianity for a new age that it would make it possible for people who feel that they are Christians in exile and that's a term that he uses to apply to himself. Have fun can find a way back. The book was originally published in hardcover last year and is out fairly recently in paperback it's published by Harper Collins or Harper San Francisco is available in the bookstores as well as many of his other books including perhaps his best known and best selling book rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism. He is planning to retire as a bishop after more than 20 years and become a lecturer at Harvard University next year. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina received his Master of Divinity

from Virginia's Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary. He was consecrated bishop in 1976 He's also been a sportscaster and newspaper editor as done many many interviews and spoken widely around the country. And we are pleased that he is joining us this morning he's talking with us by telephone. The number if you would like to join the conversation is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 that's for champagne Urbana. Folks we also have a toll free line go to anywhere that you can hear us and that he's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. And if you match those numbers with the letters on the phone you get w i l l that may or may not make it any easier to remember the number locally 3 3 3 WRAL toll free 800 1:58 wy allow anyone is welcome to join in the conversation. We only ask callers to keep their comments brief so that we can keep the program moving along and accommodate as many different people as possible. But of course anyone is welcome to join the conversation.

Bishop Spong Hello. Yes Hi David how are you. I'm fine thanks and thank you very much for talking or to be with you. And I must say I think I read with some amusement in the preface in your introduction talking about how frequently the word controversy has been attached to your name to the point where you felt it almost had become part of your name and and that was after I had done the same thing so I guess I feel I must confess that I that I'm on the same train although it's I gather that by this point you're a you've come to some accommodation. I'm certain a combo of that. I don't know what else to do about it except to get comfortable when you talk about being feeling that you are a believer in exile. What do you mean by that. Well I mean that the Christian faith which I adore and try to follow is is basically a faith it was. It's shaped in the first century and in a Jewish context Jesus was a Jewish

man of the first century. So the first things that people believed about him were shaped in terms that first century Jewish people would understand that meant that they use their frame of reference their level of knowledge. And they tried to capture Jesus within that explanatory framework the Christian creeds are written in the fourth and fifth centuries and they reflect the point of view of the Mediterranean world more Greek thinking and more of a philosophical background but still they reflect the knowledge of all that was available to people in the third and fourth centuries. And you and I live in the 20th century and we live at the dawn of the 21st century and the the world has expanded its knowledge tremendously. And you can no longer literalize the patterns of yesterday we don't do it in any other area of your life can you imagine a doctor trying to practice medicine based upon a first century or fourth and fifth century medical textbook or an engineer trying to build a building based upon the available knowledge of that era. But Christian. Somehow still act as if they've

captured truth for all time in these ancient symbols. What I want people to understand is that there's a very big difference between the experience of God and anybody's explanation of that experience. The experience might well be true and eternal but nobody's explanation is that when we liberalize our explanations and say we have captured the ultimate truth of God we become idolaters and eventually the faith tradition that we represent will dive across explanations are always time bound and inevitably they die. Have you been in the book you talk about how you feel about your relationship with God how you feel about God how you feel about the person of Jesus now. And. It it seems as if what you are doing is talking about something that that almost transcends our ability to frame it.

You know we don't have a God language we don't have a human language. If horses had gods don't you suppose they would look like horses so human beings gods inevitably look like human beings they look like the human beings that lived in the particular air of it at the concepts were shaped. When you look at the Jesus story for example the experience the exclamation that surrounded Jesus among his early disciples was that in some way the holy God had been revealed or made known or met in the life of this Jesus of Nazareth. The only way they understood God in that era was as a supernatural being up in the sky. So they had to develop a mythology that enabled a supernatural being up in the sky to get down to the earth. That's what the virgin birth story is. And then once his god was down on this earth they had to develop a mythology to get this god back up to heaven where God is supposed to live above the sky. So the cosmic ascension on the other side of Jesus life became the mythology that accomplish that purpose. Now the trouble with both virgin birth and

cosmic ascension is that virgin birth assumes a view of genetics that first century people had as common knowledge. That's absolutely not so today they didn't believe in the first century that the woman contributed anything to the birth of the new baby. They thought she just nurtured the male seed to maturity. So if they wanted to tell the story of the Divine origin they only get rid of the human father they never have to get rid of the human mother. But in 17 24 we discovered that women produce egg cells and are genetically co-creators of every life at that moment. Virgin birth stories died as literal biology and on the other in the cosmic ascension assumes a three tiered universe. I don't know anybody today that lives in a three tiered universe. You know we're post Galileo people didn't post Copernican people even the Vatican in 1991 announce that after all Galileo was right the church had been wrong in trying to condemn his thinking. We had a space age people and you can't tell the story of Jesus ascending back to God by going up into the

sky. In our world if Jesus ascended far enough he would get not to heaven but into orbit or he would sink into the infinity of space. We can't mix those metaphors as we do. At least we can't mix them if we try to treat them as literal historical occurrences. That's what I'm talking about. The explanation was an attempt to make sense out of the experience. I think what we've got to do is to few of the explanations of the ages back and try to bring people into a living encounter with whatever that primary experience was and that's where I believe the Christian faith go will make a reformation that will enable it to live in the next millennium. What I am sure that some people in listening to you if they're familiar with your the fact that you have questioned. Or some rather key concepts of Christianity including the resurrection I think some people would generally say that that was the key concept that's what the whole thing was about. I mean in me I'll just let me rattle my question and you could prove

just that. That I think that what will trouble some people or what will confuse them is that they will say that in in questioning those those key concepts and and going beyond them that what that now what we're the point we're at is not Christianity anymore it's something else now that made it may be and may be just as good it may answer some of the same needs and we may say that you're as as much as you or anybody else would be as much a person of faith. And yet they would say but you're not a Christian anymore you're something else. I've certainly heard that a number of times I think that's wrong but I have certainly heard that let me say that I don't have any question about the fact that something occurred after the crucifixion of Jesus to convince the disciples that he was still present alive and available to them. I can't make sense out of the story without that. The disciples at all for sake and fled. And yet something reconstitutes them with

enormous courage and enormous energy. These Jewish disciples began to acknowledge that they can't think about God any longer without including Jesus in their definition. And I can't think about Jesus without including God in his definition for Jewish people that was an enormous revolution remember they were the stiff necked people who were willing to die rather than the bow their heads to Caesar and so they were the only people given an exemption in the Roman Empire from the custom of bowing their heads at the name of Caesar and also something happened that occurred that they had done a fad with the first day of the week that caused a new holy day to be born. If you really do need to understand that people's religious emotions are wrapped around the customs and the Sabbath Day tradition was the overwhelming identifying custom of the Jewish people and to make a new. Holy day on the first day of the week which for the first 50 60 70 maybe even 100 years existed side by side with the Jewish Sabbath until Christianity became more gentile and the sabbath began to disappear and Sunday became the

holy day. Those are enormous bits of evidence that something happened. But when you go back and read the biblical story you do need to remember first of all that the Bible didn't drop out of heaven fully written it came into existence the way all books came into existence. Paul wrote between 48 at the very earliest in 64 at the very latest. Paul died before any gospel was written. Paul doesn't have a concept of a physical resurrection. Paul says that the risen Christ was seen by a number of witnesses but among those witnesses he includes himself. He says that he saw the risen Lord like everybody else saw the risen Lord. And there's nobody that thinks Paul saw the physically resuscitated Jesus who walked out of the grave. When you get to the first gospel to be written which is Mark written somewhere between 65 and 75 were dated about 72. People need to recognize that there's no story in the first gospel about the risen Christ appearing to anybody. And yet there's certainly resurrection faith. You don't

really get a physical resurrected Jesus until the ninth decade when you've got the writings of Luke and later of John. And even there it's very compromised. Luke's risen Christ is always walking and talking and eating and asking them to examine him to make sure he isn't a ghost. But at the same time he portrays the risen Christ as appearing and disappearing materializing and dematerializing. That's that's a strange kind of way to talk about a physical person. And in John's Gospel the last gospel written in the tenth decade and John has the story of Thomas wanting to reach and touch the wounds of this Jesus that sounds very physical but. Same time this Jesus has just appeared inside a locked and barred upper room. You don't walk through walls if you're physical. So what the gospel writers were struggling with was to try to make sense out of an experience and then to try to explain it in ways that the common mind could understand. What we have done is to take their

explanations indeed their later explanations and literal rise. And to say that the acid test of the Christian faith is that you believe that in some physiological way the resurrected Jesus walked out of the grave. I don't believe that's the essence of the original Christian story. And what I'm trying to do is to get people beyond the explanations back into touching whatever the Christ experience was. It's not easy but I think if you don't do that Christianity will not survive another generation. Let me introduce Again our guest for this part of focus and we have some callers who we'll get to right to. Our guest is John Shelby Spong he is the Episcopal Bishop of Newark in New Jersey and is the author of a number of books including the one that we're talking about here this morning in which he makes some of the same arguments and lays out the same thoughts that he has been doing here so far the title of the book why Christianity must change or die. The subtitle A bishop speaks to believers in exile. It's published by Harper San

Francisco was first published last year and now is out in paper. Bishop Spong is in fact. The author of 15 books including one that was and I think still is is his bestseller rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism. Questions of course are welcome 3 3 3 W I L L toll free 800 to 2 to W while we have a couple of local callers here to begin with in Champaign starting with line 1. Hello hello David. Thank you for having this program on today. And Bishop Spong thank you for coming via phone line at least in the searing your That's pleasure hard surface. I've long been in conversation with you through your books. I've appreciated those a great deal I think I come to slightly different conclusions than you do but it's been an important part of my own journey times I've come to different conclusions the next month I think. Religion is always a growing experience not a static one.

Well I hope so for both of them. That's always true for you because it certainly meant that for me and in my work over the years I am I. I just want to say what a powerful voice I found you to be and I know that there are lots of critics and I know that you hear that a lot and I think it's important to hear that those people who supported as well. I also am really curious about. If you could articulate for us here in this program what you consider to be those four central elements of the Christian tradition that you hold on to and so that you can continue to call yourself a Christian in the reason I asked that is because I find myself moving to a place where I'm a much more comfortable considering myself a religious person. I tend to Unitarian Universalist Church.

I'm much more comfortable borrowing from a lot of different traditions and in their core truths and so forth but I'm less and less comfortable saying I'm a Christian. Let me try to really try to respond. That's a good question. I think it's terribly important that I walk in a historic competition and that I I wrestle with the way my ancestors in faith tried to process their experience. I said earlier that Jesus is a first century Jewish experience. I think it's important that we try to capture those two or symbols we refer to Jesus as the Passover. Who is who broke the power of death. If you don't know something about your Jewish background that's a meaningless word. We call Jesus the Lamb of God and we say he takes away the sins of the world and most Christians have not the slightest idea that that comes out of the Jewish day of the Atonement Yom Kippur War where a lamb was slaughtered to be a gift to God and where a goat had the sins of the people on his back and was driven out into the wilderness to cleanse the people of

their sentence he was called the scapegoat and you can read about him in the Book of Leviticus. Those are obviously symbols that don't make a lot of sense today we don't do animal sacrifice in this world today. And so what has happened is that what people not understanding are Jewish symbols at that point have literalize them and even sing hymns to the blood of Jesus which I think I think I find rather grotesque. And you know I don't understand that at all and we keep talking about Jesus as some sort of human sacrifice that God required. Well if a human father required the sacrifice of His Son we certainly wouldn't worship him. We would arrest him for murder and for child abuse and yet we were caught in this. But I think it's still important that our walk in the tradition. I like to wrestle with with the way third fourth century Christians came to understand the God that they met in Jesus and tried to articulate that in the power of the creeds. I guess what keeps me inside the Christian faith and I really just I really am a deep

devotee of that tradition is that that I want to be in my generation what the gospel writers were in their eyes and what the writers of the creed were in they has. I want to make the experience of the God I meet in Jesus available through explanations that my generation can respond to. I also want to recognize that my explanations won't be no more eternal than theirs a hundred years from now the world could come to a totally different understanding of reality and it would render my explanations invalid. There's nothing wrong with that. The experience is what is valid. One of my core beliefs I believe God is real but I don't locate God somewhere up in the sky as a supernatural miracle worker who invades the world periodical or sometimes acting in a in a very human way like hating the same people that you hate. We see evidences of that in our biblical story I think that God is at the heart of life. If I had to define God I would define God as the source of life the source of

flaws in the Ground of Being. The reason I assert that I meet God in Jesus of Nazareth is that in the portrait of his life I find an abundant life an incredible love and a capacity to be what God has created him to be and the way I worship this Christian God is to live fully and love wastefully and to be all that I'm capable of being and the only thing I want to missionize about is not to convert people to think like I think but I want to missionize the world so that every human being in this world has an opportunity to live fully outside prejudiced stereotypes being imposed upon him or her and to love wastefully and to have the courage to be whatever God is created that person to be. I think that's a gospel message that the world is still eager to hear and I'm eager to proclaim it and I want to proclaim it as one who walks in the historic tradition of my forefathers and faiths in our foremothers faith.

I couldn't agree with that message more. I find that truth and values in a number of times. Oh I don't mean for a minute to indicate or or try to or assert that the God I worship is operative only in the Christian West. I've traveled in China and I've met holiness in Buddhist priest and Buddhist holy men and I've been in Buddhist temples where the presence of God is very apparent. I've been in India and I've done the same thing with Hindu people. One of my closest friends is a rabbi in Richmond and I've seen the light of God in that Robin More than once. I think that doesn't carry a lesson about religion particularly when you're insecure about it where you try to assert that you possess the whole truth of God and that anybody who disagrees with you happens to be wrong. I think that's nothing but Arak and human idolatry. It's God's business who God calls into communion with God it's not my business and I'm content to live according to my light and to try to share the love that I experience in God and to share it with all

people without assuming that there's something wrong with them because they don't use the same words and phrases that I use. Well thank you for your time. Thank you very much for calling. Let's go next to another caller. This is also champagne line too. Hello hi. I'm very confused now after your last explanation because I was calling as an agnostic or probably as an atheist. And I want it to seem like you are picking and choosing what tenants of faith to believe and you talked about enormous bits of evidence and and then we're discounting other things that you characterize as really sort of ridiculous to believe in. And it seems to me that once you start to do that it's very difficult to continue to be religious at all. But then

you say you say that you're tied to the Christian faith in the Christian history and then in that in your last statements here saying that you find this feeling of God in all these other faiths and you know it's it's hard for me to understand why. Why you still hold on to Christianity if you work through these errors and why you don't to either be agnostic or or be in fact atheist and and just live on the basis of an ethic. I'm going to just don't think I'm able to do that but let me try to counter on that. I think that all religious traditions are human not defined. They're all human. We we wrestle inside the

tradition of our births. My my opportunity I think as a Christian is to explore the Christian faith system as deeply as possible. I'd like to get beneath its limitations I'd like to go so deeply into its core that I would escape its limitations but at its heart my hope is that my Buddhist Hindu Jewish Muslim and other religious peoples of the world would do the same thing within their tradition. If you go back and look at the history of the Christian faith you will find that we have we have grown enormously. We have done all kinds of new things in the light of new knowledge. We used to argue about whether or not Adam and Eve had navels For example I've heard that debate take place in a long long time. We have Christianity. He's been caught up in some of the sacrificial language of its Jewish origins. That language is today becoming increasingly rappelling. I'd like to sort of open up that language and go back to see what it was that my Jewish brothers and sisters were trying to say about their god experience

and then find a different kind of language that we can that we can use to tell it to talk about it. My sense is that the ecumenical future will not be between various branches of Christians. Indeed I think the only real difference between Episcopalians Lutherans Roman Catholics and Presbyterians for example is which country in Europe they got filtered through. I don't think it's got very much to do with the heart of the Christian gospel and Ulta. Really I think we've got to recognize that Christianity has become the tribal religion of the Western world and Islam has become the tribal religion of the Middle East and world and tourism and Buddhism of a tribe or religions of the Far East. And Judaism is that scattered to heaven within the law of the Western world. And somehow we've got to find a way to recognize that that all people seek God in a particular way and that God is in the heart of life and that nobody possesses God. But we all are journeying into the mystery and wonder of God. And I will do my journeying

into that ministry from within my Christian frame of reference but I hope alternately to escape that as I hope the others will finally escape that in the great ecumenical debate of the 21st century I think will be to see the essence of each of the great religious traditions of the were mutually enriching. All of the peoples of the world and I think that will be a great day. Well it seems like we're to saying is that a cold war or a definition of religion is really impossible because it's a very personal thing. I'm saying that that the experience of God I believe is the universal human experience. The way we define that experience is in terms of the values culture knowledge and our place in history. I find I define my god experience through Christian categories because I was raised in the Christian West and I find myself deeply drawn to those explanations. I don't want to get rid of them at all. They are

deeply informing of my life and they ring with an authenticity. Once I scrape away the sort of the pre modern mindset that put them into things like virgin births and cosmic ascensions. But once that's done I find an incredible power in the person of Jesus of Nazareth who calls me beyond my limits and beyond my boundaries into a deeper humanity and into a are greater human consciousness and I want to journey in that path until I have exhausted this wonder and I don't think that's going to take place in my lifetime. Every day I just sort of feel that there's more joy and wonder for me to discover in this faith tradition. And I want to plummet steps and scale its heights and love the experience. I think that's what I have to offer the world and I try to offer it with a kind of humility that says. This doesn't mean it's the only way at this. That way I can make a witness and this is what I have experienced in my journey and you take it for what it's worth. Well thank you. I'm actually more

confused than ever. Thank you I've maybe that's the best way to be. The bigger worry about most is religious people who are confused who got it all right. They're the ones that put their wagons in a circle and shoot at anybody disagrees with them and occasionally burn somebody at the stake. So keep your confusion but make it positive. We are past the mid point here we have several of the callers will try to get everybody and again we just need to ask people to to try and be brief so that we can accommodate as many callers as possible 3 3 3 W I L L toll free 800 1:58 WFLA. Next caller. Bloomington Indiana line number four. Hello. I Bishop Spong. I guess it's your idea that traditional evangelical Christianity is no longer relevant. There are several examples. The most gripping from Columbine High School just last month several examples of modern America affluent people in contemporary America who found traditional

evangelical Christianity most most relevant most dynamic to take take the case. So let me give about three examples but first the case of can't take the rest of the hour. You have you have probably heard of Cassie Bruneau who was formerly an out of control teenager. She formerly participated in anti-Christian things like witchcraft. She was sent to an evangelical church she was dramatically converted to evangelical Christianity. Her life was undeniably transformed her fellow students said so. She expressed her outspoken belief in God. And then she gave her life for that belief. And even the cynical major media had to show great respect for that young lady. Well I have great respect for that young lady too. I don't want to be set up by a Christian to be someone who wants to cast aspersions or or doubts upon people's convictions I grew up as an evangelical Christian. All I'm saying is that there's enormous power and I experienced enormous.

Confident and lots of other good things in it and it gave me a tremendous love for the scriptures which I've studied every day of my life since I was 12 years old. So I don't want to denigrate those values. I'm not speaking to that world. I'm speaking to the world of people whose minds can no longer be twisted into what I would call first century pretzels and the literal lies about the ancient symbols of the Christian faith. I think God alone is infallible not the Pope or the Bible. And I think we've got to find a way that we recognize that we walk into the ministry of God and that we cannot ever tie this god down into our own particular tradition our own particular symbols. That doesn't mean that we're not going to find some beautiful lives created by the evangelical tradition just as I found beautiful lives among Buddhist and beautiful lives among tenders and I want to give thanks for those lives wherever I see them. So there's nothing negative in that. But I think we do have to reach beyond.

The traditional boundaries of orthodox or fundamentalist or even Jellicoe or even conservative Roman Catholic theology to begin to say to the young people of the world who live in a different kind of atmosphere that they can still worship God with their minds without being bound by the literal traditional symbols of yesterday. I'm saying they don't live in a different kind of atmosphere. Take for instance second the second example after the massacre at Columbine the students they were offered the standard secular public school grief counseling Professional Psychology and they spurned it. What did they do. They crowded into traditional Christian churches seeking Christian of Christian counseling. I'm not here to advocate secular religious secular counseling either I do a great deal of what I would call Christian counseling in the course of my life in ministry. What I'm suggesting is that you're setting up a false dichotomy. You're hearing me

defending a secularity which I would not want to defend. And you're you're countering that with the kind of evangelical Christianity which I do not want to attack. I just think you better broaden the categories in both directions. You say you don't want to attack traditional Christianity and yet you attack the resurrection you attack all of the basics. You see I don't think so I don't agree with that. What I think I might have attacked and I would like to use that word I've raise questions about the literal innocent of the biblical account of the resurrection. I do not raise questions about the reality of the experience of resurrection. Written a whole book on that subject and the book attempts to try to peel back the layers of liberalizing tradition which I believe distorts more than it helps and get people back to the essence of whatever the Easter experience was that certainly gave life to the disciples in a dramatic and powerful way. But what one more one more comment David and I'll get off you Bishop.

It's the hood people churches today that are dying that it's your theology that the dying the dynamic growing churches are unabashedly Evangelical I don't agree with that. I'm sorry. I think the whole the whole Christian in a comprise including the evangelical churches is in a decline. I think if you look at the statistics you will find that that Christians of all sorts aren't keeping up with the population growth of our nation and our world and the percentage of the number of people who claim to be Christians is actually declining against the population of this nation and the population of the world. There are momentary. Blips on the EKG chart when you've got a charismatic pastor who can build a congregation based upon his personality. But I'm talking about the long range thing. I do not believe that the Christians of the 21st century will be able to sing the Lord's song in that post-modern world if that song continues to reflect only pre-modern images that are frankly not believable to

well-educated people. And I just want to keep the symbols being broken open so that we can constantly reappropriate them and find a new way to talk about. I do not talk about the experience. I do not want to lose the Christ experience underneath the inadequate explanations of antiquity. And I think the era that evangelical Christians make is to literalize their explanations. The error that liberal Christians make is that they charge of abandon the tradition. I don't want to do either one of those things. I will appreciate the comments of the caller were really moving along very quickly and have about 10 minutes left and have some other callers in if they would indulge me for a second I do want to ask quickly just to get back to the to the subject of the resurrection. Is that is the resurrection. Metaphor it is it is a useful metaphor. I would not want to call it that David because. I don't think that's a big enough word. I think the resurrection in its essence was the

impending upon the life of this world of the enormous reality that I think surrounds us at every moment but which we see only in glimpses. I find it fascinating that most every person I know when you're open the doors and allow them to talk about it will talk about moments in which they think they've experienced transcendence or otherness or the reality of God and they don't know quite how to process that experience. I think we live in a God filled world and if we are open to it and if our our consciousness can be expanded then our eyes can be opened. I think we live in a in a far more defined human counter than mine. The most recognized and the resurrection to me was an incredible experience where the divine imposed itself upon the consciousness of the of the human and and it caused them to see beyond the boundaries of time and space into the reality of God. What the resurrection ultimately

means for me is that that life that we that call Jesus of Nazareth is in fact the ultimate revelation of who God is and God cannot be destroyed by death and neither can you or or I if we are in touch with the God who is eternal and immortal and beyond all of the limits of my humanity. And to me that's that's not a metaphor that's a reality of an experience. My quibble is only with the people who then say well I can explain that. And it really means that a body that was deceased on Friday was resuscitate it and his corpse fossils were all reinstituted in the brain damage that comes from being dead for three days was reversed and billions of miracles took place and this man physically walked out of the grave. And there you go then when when they got to that point they didn't know quite what to do with the risen Christ. That's when they had to develop the cosmic ascension to get him back to where God is. I think if you look at the earliest part of the Christian tradition you'll find that what they really thought the resurrection was was that God.

It somehow raised Jesus into the reality of the being of God and it was out of God that they began to see him as a whole new dimension of humanity and that's a pretty powerful story. That's not just a metaphor. Let's talk with another caller this will be line number three very brief question. It sounds to me that you approach would all fall on in his approach when he used the word Allah to station which I guess means getting behind the literal meaning to what may be have been caused by elections or whatever. Whatever things that have caused whatever Biblical accounts have been caused to arise from. Could you comment on that please. Well I certainly have read a few months been a very important person in my background I think he's probably the major New Testament scholar of the twentieth century New Testament scholarship is impacted by both MOND in the same way that psychological knowledge is impacted by Sigmund Freud everybody does such as the New Testament got to deal with bouffant you can be an anti

bouffant the owner of neo Mani in our booth Mani M but you've somehow got to deal with that and what the man tried to say is that the language of God in the language of human experience can never be identified. I cannot speak the language of God I can only speak the language of human experience. So inevitably when I try to make god. Statements out of my human experience the best I can do is to try to define my experience in terms of a god language if I literal as that language then I've created the new idolatry and both men went back to the New Testament and he said that's exactly what we have in the New Testament. How did Jesus really walk on the water for example or did the Jewish writers of that gospel go back into the heap or Scriptures where the power of God over water was celebrated in song and dance and Liturgy where they began to say in the Hebrew Scriptures that God can make a pathway for Gods self in the deep and God's footprints can be seen upon the sea. And

when they encountered the presence of what they thought was the living God and Jesus of Nazareth they simply attributed to Jesus. All of this God language of their religious past. I think that's a far more profound way to look at the story of the walking on the water. And that's what food on this talk when he says we've got to be mythologized the text. We cannot we cannot literalize the mythology of the people who tried to interpret the reality of their experience in the first century metaphors. Can I ask one more quick. Sure what place would verifiable history play in your understanding of difficult dance. Well that's very difficult to assert. In our Cecille B DeMille when he did the movie The Ten Commandments tried to literalize the Red Sea experience and and I don't think it's a very flattering view of God because God opens the Red Sea and allows the Hebrew people to get through and then he closes it up to drown all the Egyptian side that appears to me not to be a very favorable view of God if you happen to be an

Egyptian and I have to think God is a God of all the peoples of the world. So you get very negative sort of things in that drama. When I look at the Jesus story I'm convinced that there was a man named Jesus of Nazareth. I'm convinced he lived in the city of Nazareth I can I can envision no other reason why they would have called it Jesus of Nazareth I think he was a follower of John the Baptist and was actually baptized by John the Baptist because the Christians had such a hard time explaining why the Senlis one was baptized for the forgiveness of sins and I'm quite convinced that he was a teacher of renown and that he was put to death by the Romans. Now that's the external of the history it seems to me in the Creed captures that when he says he suffered on the punch. This pilot was crucified died and was buried. Everything else in the Creed seems to be an attempt to interpret the meaning of that life and I think that's where we've got to separate locust from Mr. Haas. Most grasses are rational process and mythos is our attempt to make sense out of experiences that are bigger than life

that our own literal language can never really capture. And Jesus but dissipates in that kind of breakthrough. And that's where my faith comes from so I would make a separation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith that I see in and through the Jesus of history. Thank you very much. And I certainly think you're SCO to another champagne person here line number. Hello. Hello. I'm sure you've encountered this issue before for me. For me the word God has so much baggage that I no longer find it useful or usable. And except at the same time I can in very powerful ways access an experience fields of universal energy or at least that's how I think about it. And so you know wow I find that there's you know

something about the experience of life and the universe and you know this opera life is just maybe an aspect of something much larger. You know some kind of personification of a human bein or you know of. I don't know good in evil or that kind of stuff somehow just doesn't doesn't you know work for me. Let me let me try to stick to that the word God is obviously a compromised word. Every language of the world has a word god in that language. But the content that fills that God word differs from tribe to tribe and nation to nation and yet we define all of that is God so must of the content we give to the name God is a very human content. The theologians under whom I studied most in the late 50s and early 60s was a German reformed theologian named Paul Tillich and Paul Tillich refused to use personal words for God not

because he said God is impersonal but because personal words are so limiting to what he was trying to describe. And he even declared that we ought to have a MARK TORRY him on the word God for a hundred years and nobody would be allowed to use it because when it's used today it elicits all kinds of images that are quite limiting to what we're trying to describe and that Telic went on to say when I think of God I think of God as the ground of all being not a being but the ground of all being. But that's. A difficult concept but I start with that. That's my first definition of God. Had Then I add to that that God is the source of all life and the source of all love. Now let me try just to work that out quickly. If God is the source of all life then the only way I can worship that God is by living fully. If God is the source of all love the only way I can worship God is by loving wastefully. And if God is the ground of all being the only way I can worship God is have the courage to be everything that God has created

me to be. And then I take that definition of god out a look at Jesus of Nazareth and I peel back the layers of a first century mythology that surrounds him and I see a life that is whole. And I see love that is incredible and I see one who is who he is where the people are calling for is him to be made the king and the Palm Sunday procession are calling for him to be executed on Good Friday. He still he does not need the sweet narcotic of human praise he does not whine weep or beg when his life is being threatened. He's a person who's capable of giving His life His love and his being away. That's why I believe I see God in Jesus of Nazareth. Once again my only sense of being a missionary for this god is not to make people think the way I think or turn everybody. And to be a Biskup alians or even to be Christians I think the only responsibility that I've got as a disciple of this God is to live in such a way that I can help transform the world so that every

human being of every ethnic and variety of every gender of every sexual orientation can live fully and love wastefully and be whatever God has created them to be. That's my image of what it means to bring in the kingdom of God. And so the word God as I carefully redefine it becomes none the less a powerful word that I want to continue to use. How do you define living our means loving wastefully. That's the way I love my wife I love her wastefully and I'm happy to say that's the way she loves me and what I mean by that is I don't stop to count the cost of what I'm get out of this I just sort of spread love around. And some of it is never responded to it's just sort of an overflow like or like a spigot on the sink that overflows the boundaries and just goes everyplace that's what I think ought to mark the life of the Godzilla person in my terms I would define that as the Christian person loving wastefully is a is a powerful phrase that I have up to I love to

use. I'm I'm afraid that I must jump in here because we are at the end of our time and must apologize to have a target. Well I certainly. Have to end. I'm sorry we have some folks we can't take but perhaps on another time we would have the opportunity to talk again. They would I answer letters. Everybody that writes me and I got an enormous amount of letters. So if you're if your listeners would like to write me they can certainly do so and I would be happy to try to respond to their questions and in the mail. Well thanks for for your time. Thank you very much. Our guest our guest this morning is Bishop John Shelby Spong he is the Episcopal Bishop of Newark in New Jersey. He's the author of 15 books and the one that we mention here this morning if you would like to read it it's titled Why Christianity must change or die. A bishop speaks to believers in exile. It is now available in a paperback edition published by Harper San Francisco.