Bishop Spong: You have published twelve theses and an accompanying "Call for a New Reformation" on the Internet, a highly democratic communication device, and have invited debate. For all sorts of practical reasons you are probably right to debate them with those you call "recognized Christian leaders." However your words are now out there for all who wish to respond.  I hope mine is a useful reply and furthers a dialogue in response to your call to reexamine the relation between modernity and the language and logic of the presentation of the faith.

It is the fact of your call for renewed effort to address faith issues that is for me your most valuable challenge. So I begin my response by admiring your courage to push for engagement. It seems to me that much of what you say in "A Call for a New Reformation" is not particularly new or surprising to those who read much theology.  But the blase response of some of your critics belies the fact that little of what lies behind your theses has been openly discussed in the church. Some of what you say needs urgently to be engaged among church people.

You have asked for debate, and that is telling, as was my initial plan for response.  I almost accepted the invitation to debate before I realized that in doing so I would, without examination, be buying into what I perceive are your underlying premise and tactics.

The premise seems to be that there are two worldviews at odds, one pre-modern (which we may call classical) in terms of which Christian creeds and scriptures have been framed, and the other modern, in which our 'ordinary' existence is framed.  If you were to develop the context for the debate, I suppose you would present these two worldviews as mutually exclusive contexts for making truth statements.  You would have the debate be between 'traditional' Christians who speak nonsensically (from the context of the 'ordinary' lived world) and those who are trying to be Christians in a modern context (who might seem heretical to those same traditional Christians.)

The operational style of debate also suggests that one or the other worldview will at some point be seen as a winner in the struggle for our allegiance.  Allegiance will go to the worldview that offers the best context for interpreting the experiences most important to us.  The assumption is that for most people the modern worldview has prevailed. The argument is that if that is so, then Christians had better give up the language and constructs of the classical worldview.

The call for debate seems to me a call to draw a line in the sand, to side with one or the other of these worldviews, and to show how it is possible to live at the end of the twentieth century with the results of the choice made.  So your first question seems simply this: How can a modern person who is a Christian continue to frame faith in the intellectual constructs of the pre-modern worldview. Your call is to take the modern world seriously as the context for religious discourse, or failing that to stop such discourse.

The real critique I have of your challenge for debate is that such a challenge contains a modern fallacy. That fallacy is the notion of the dispassionate observer.  As we move out from modernity I would contend that we already know that worldviews are themselves a matter of location, not a matter of logical coherence or correspondence with something called 'the facts.'  That is, we are not presented with an 'either/or' choice here. Rather, we need to explore just what sorts of stories we wish to tell, and then choose the constructs, the worldview and language in which we will tell those stories.  If I want to tell the story of how electrical current is generated in a chemical battery I will use a very different language from one I might use to tell the story about how possessiveness has poisoned human relationships for as long as anyone can remember.  But it would be unnecessary to debate which of these is the better language.  Rather, it might be useful to hear and speak with respect and with open hearts and minds to many stories from many perspectives, and to use them as seems useful.

So I want first to look at your theses not from the context of debate, but as a friend in dialogue with you about stories we both care about. At the same time I am very aware of the temptation to debate, and know that others will precisely do so, or worse, decide that you are unworthy of debate.

I am also convinced that little of the theological explorations of the past half-century have made it into the liturgical and preaching experience of most believers. So, in a confusing time the classical stories will be clung to as if they indeed were the whole and only truth. Those who cling will not be friends in dialogue, but enemies in debate. Fundamentalism seems on the rise, but I would hope it does not have to be met by a new fundamentalism couched as modernity.

What I believe is needed is dialogue, in which we share the telling of the stories about where and who we are.  At the end of the modern age what we seem to need is a good understanding of how our own context influences our stories, and a bit of humility as we listen to each other.

There are a large number of ad homonym and quite vitriolic comments being made about you as a result of this and other efforts, comments that my experience of you belies. Indeed, I experience you as an often graceful and caring person of great faithfulness. You are, as you say, in exile, and admit it as a vocation. I believe that is a powerful vocation, but one filled with dangers, for the person in exile is often subject to great stress. Neither exhaustion nor exaltation of self is necessary or useful to this enterprise, and given the opportunity your critics will be quick to charge you with a martyr complex, egotism or worse. So I pray for your peace in all this.

In your book, Why Christianity must Change or Die, you recall the problem of Israel in exile being asked to sing the old songs.   When you are asked to sing the old church songs in the new and strange land of post-Christendom, you do not. Instead you call for a new song, knowing and perhaps hoping that the giant sleeping church might wake. The danger is that the lethargic giant might get annoyed when awakened, and even one who relishes a fight could be worn down by it all. Given all that, why contend?   I believe the answer is that not questioning is to give the Fundamentalists the opportunity to claim their faith stories as the only ones of value. So I am glad you are contending. But I continue to push for an engagement that is dialogue, not debate.

You are quite right to suggest that Christians need to take seriously the jarring breaks between both the religious language and classical formulations of church doctrine and the understandings of modernity and emerging sensibilities in a 'post modern' world.  But more importantly, in much of your writings you bring to the fore serious moral issues. The consideration of these justice issues requires reassessment of ancient prejudices. That seriously threatens many people, for these prejudices have been grafted onto our understanding of scripture and tradition, as well as on to theological reasoning.

You claim that your theses challenge the "very nature of the Christian faith itself."  I believe you misspeak, and in so doing undermine your own best motives.  These theses can provoke a more profoundly centered and articulate faith. Whether they do or not is part of what needs to be critiqued.

I believe they challenge the specific language that the church has used for talking about location - God's, ours, and the intersections and matrices of these locations.  It seems to me that these are not an attack on Christian faith, but on our understanding of location. And, included in location is the issue of just what we mean when we use the word "God." Do we 'locate' God in a special place, in a special form, etc.

I do not feel threatened by your theses on these matters, but I find myself puzzled by your mix of a rather truncated history of theology, occasional belligerent and sometimes authoritarian language, and profoundly interesting challenges in such a short and densely packed set of comments and theses.

Let me be specific, and unpack from your theses what I believe is the stuff of good conversation, dialogue, storytelling, and yes, if you wish, debate. I turn to your theses written here in Italics, and to an initial response.

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead.  So most theological God-talk is today meaningless.  A new way to speak of God must be found.

   Well, Theism is not dead. Far from it.  There are large numbers of people who do in fact live within a religious framework in which they understand God precisely to be creator and ruler of the universe, who stands outside space and time, and who reveals his sovereignty and presence in many ways. Whether Theism is a belief system that makes sense or tells stories that make sense in the modern world is another issue.

   If what you mean to say is that you believe Theistic God-talk is meaningless in the framework of modernity, you may be right.  To those who live in a world where the categories of modernity hold it seems more and more likely that Theistic God-talk will be considered irrelevant.  I have many friends who find it is so. For those who continue to be full or even part time Theists, more and more filters will need to be applied to make the categories and language work in the modern world. The discontinuities between the claims of Theism and modernity can even lead to serious interior dislocation if the claims are seen as exclusive.  The issue is not that Theism is dead. The issue is that Theism is unsatisfactory for those who find it jarring to live with the assumptions of one worldview and have a religious language based in another worldview.

   I would suggest, however, that Theists speak on at least one level with a clarity that is not so easily found in modernity. Theism would hold that it is the Creator that gives meaning to existence, and that in some way value exists because God values.  If thinking of God in a theistic way ceases, what then? Without a creator there is no created order, and no creator's intention. Where does value arise in a universe of chance?

   You say, "a new way to speak of God must be found."  Actually new ways (plural) have already been found, and, indeed, have been there all along. They have not, however, held center court.  Perhaps it is time to consider them as more central. Marcus Borg, in The God We Never Knew takes the idea of Panentheism and holds that as a model.  Much of the current wide ranging discussions between Christian and Buddhist meditators gives promise of working beyond Theism.  It is a time when Christians need to listen to insights brought from outside the theistic borders of their doctrines. But Theism, as a way of defining God, is not dead.

   So I would suggest that the only part of your first thesis that remains, as an interesting challenge for dialogue is the last sentence, made plural, "New ways to speak of God must be found." That is arguably the one imperative of all that you have written that would easily lead to dialogue with other traditions. We might hope that all thoughtful believers would be willing to enter such a conversation.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

   Well, God can be conceived of in theistic terms, these days admittedly in a somewhat tortuous way. This being so, the doctrine of The Incarnation is one way to answer the question, "Who do you say Jesus is?" And that is the question here. The pre-modern Christology is possible if you buy into the premise of the God of Theism.  What is possible if you don't?  Using words like bankrupt and dead certainly puts your feelings forward, but it does little for your argument.

   Perhaps it would help if you simply said that, in the language of the modern world, it is not possible to talk of God in theistic terms in any simple straightforward way. Thus you contend that the specific and special doctrine of the Incarnation stretches the framework of modernity in ways that makes sense only with great difficulty.

   But new possibilities can emerge if the trappings of the special doctrine of the Incarnation are removed. If we hold the proposition that the presence of the Sacred can be understood by reference to, and reverence of, people and things in the 'real' world, incarnation becomes a way to talk about the experience of and the presence of the sacred, the divine in the world. Christology has a way forward in which it can say that Jesus is, for Christians, the uniquely experienced presence of the holy in our midst, and that in Jesus we have the presence or the incarnation of God's Wisdom or Word.

   So, as I see it, not much is to be salvaged from your second thesis, except for a proposition behind, "The Christology of the ages is bankrupt." That perhaps could be restated this way: "Traditional high Christologies are so theistic that they lose most of their meaning in the modern or postmodern context."  That I could discuss, but "bankrupt" just pushes buttons.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

   What in the world are we to make of this statement?  In the first place, I am not very clear that the creation stories of Genesis support the idea the sort of "perfect and finished" creation you credit them with.  I will grant that that is what we have often attributed to them.

   I understand the sense of the stories is that God thought what was created was good, and that at some point God felt the basic task was done.  "Good job!" seems to have been the assessment.  One way to read the story that follows is that if it was good enough, then who could want more than was provided?  It turns out humans seem to want more.  So the fall seems to have something to do with failing to be satisfied, or with an economy of greed. The story does a fair job pointing that out.

   In your list of modernist touchstones you do not mention Marx, who at least had part of this story of possessiveness and greed in his analysis. Marx and Engels wrote that the written history of all existing societies to this point has been the history of class struggle. That struggle has been exhibited in an economy of greed that has set humans at odds with one another, with destruction as its end. The fall is very great indeed. The story told by Marx and Engels is not a story totally divorced from the story told by their prophetic predecessors, although its worldview is quite different.

   There is nothing particularly right or wrong about mythology, pre or post Darwinian. Myths are not refuted by science in any case. Rather, science is about a different sort of storytelling, stories whose details change as the methodological use of information and new insight increases.

   This particular thesis just falls short of being a real thesis. Darwin is not the location of the split between the Creation stories and fact. Darwin is a story from one location, and Genesis is from another. The conclusions of these two very different stories includes observations about how we understand something we all experience in this world, namely meanness. In both, the conclusions seem to have something to do with getting higher on the food chain. A question that might grow from this is, "Is sin and mercy a possibility for humans or is meanness simply the norm in an evolutionary reading of origins?" Well, there's an topic for discussion and storytelling!

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

   Well, as a doctrine, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. This is a debate within circles that are concerned with the creeds. The creeds were not produced as scientific documents but were meant to define what we understood when we said that Jesus is both human and divine. So unless you are intent on claiming that the doctrine of the virgin birth has something to do with "literal biology", the thesis fails as a topic of much interest.

   I must admit that for me that the doctrine of the virgin birth is of secondary importance, as is the Gospel narrative on which it is based. Of first importance is just who we believe Jesus of Nazareth is.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

   Newton is not the location of the dividing line in the answer of how to understand the accounts of miracles in the New Testament, with miracles on the one side and mechanics on the other. The accounts have to do with Jesus as remembered. The central miracles are that when there was hunger, in Jesus there was bread, where there was thirst, in Jesus there was drink, and where life was broken, Jesus made life whole. The New Testament miracle accounts are located in the experience of holy presence.

   The miracle accounts should not be subjected to such either / or thinking that gives us only two options (an outside force operating on matter or misunderstood internal forces of matter itself.) Miracle accounts are first experiences of the holy. As experiences of the holy they are verbalized in visionary ways.

   Miracle accounts produced to convince the gullible of the power of the miracle worker are, to my reckoning, despicable. They degrade both holy experiences and needy people. I do not believe the miracle accounts of the New Testament were produced to convince. I think they were told because they were remembered with joy.

   You place this thesis here as an implication of the refutation of Theism and in the context of Newtonian, that is, modern physics. In spite of the glee with which religionists have grabbed onto "new" physics, for most work-a-day activities, Newtonian physics works just fine. To the extent that miracles are about the extraordinary, they are precisely so in the work-a-day world. But I believe modern science, or even the new science has very little to say about the experience of the sacred, in New Testament or modern times, and thus very little to say about the experience of the sacred in events.

   I do very much agree that we might gain a great deal of insight about the miracle stories of the New Testament if we would stop trying so much to explaining them, and rather listened to what they said. The reaction to miracles was generally to be filled with awe, or to thank God, to sometimes ask Jesus to stay, and sometimes to ask him to go away. That is very different than settling in for along debate on just how and why it happened.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

   Seldom in a single sentence have so many been castigated for holding what at its core is a small comforting hope. It is a small hope to believe that when Jesus was to die, he had some thought and purpose that he was doing this for me, a sinner. But it is my hope. And if for me, then perhaps also for the whole world of people. It is a hope for the reconciliation of the Holy and all of life. "Barbarian," "primitive," "dismissed?" These are strong words. Much too strong.

   At the same time, the Doctrine of the Atonement, whose basis is found in something like that small hope, is complex and far out of touch with that first small hope. I know you treat this subject in Why Christianity Must Change or Die. In a somewhat different but related way in my book, The Challenge of Change, Anglicanism in the Post Modern Era, I suggest a de-emphasis on Atonement Theology and a stronger affirmation of incarnation (not necessarily the Doctrine) as the basis for a working Christology. "Sacrifice" is a very difficult concept, an idea to be used very carefully. There can be nobility in self-sacrifice. But too, it is a word that can apply to whole groups we are willing to "sacrifice" for the "good" of our people.

   I believe it will be hard to have any dialogue about this thesis in its present form. Rather some new thesis needs to take its place that would address what you might like to get at. Here is a suggestion: "Jesus' willingness to take up the cross might better be understood, not as an economic issue concerning payment made to release the condemned, but as a compassionate act of inclusion."

7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

   It is certainly true that the Resurrection of Jesus is not like the raising of Lazarus, for whom the question of death still remained. No, within the narrow confines of the thesis your conclusion is right. But what about it's beginning point? It seems weak. Perhaps a better beginning point is this sort of question: "Is 'Jesus was raised into the meaning of God' an appropriate way (in the postmodern world) to talk about the Resurrection?"

8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

   If you can talk of the Resurrection as "Jesus was raised into the meaning of God," then surely you can talk of the Ascension as the movement of being raised. "He ascended on high into the meaning of God," might work, although I don't recommend it. (There is the problem of the passive "was raised" and the active "ascended". One would have been done to him, the other he would have done.)

   The event or the experience of the Ascension, rather than the doctrine in the creedal formulations, is visionary in character. Visions are not bound to particular cosmologies, although they take place within cosmological viewpoints. "Not capable of being translated" is pretty harsh. You might have more confidence in poetic vision. I think this thesis is inadequate. Stories are very often translatable. The doctrine is another matter. We might ask what the doctrine of the Ascension is good for. And, having done that, how might we say something relevant for our day about that good end.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

   If by "govern" you mean, "determine," of course not. Every bit of writing is a slippery thing, devised or used by humans with subtle cunning; parsed and decoded by scribes and legalists, used by purists and libertines alike to ends never imagined. But so what? Literalists may cringe at your proposition, but most of us already know that everything written is written for our learning, and our learning changes the meaning of what is written.

   If by "govern" you mean "guide", then this is another matter, particularly if the "our" of "our ethical behavior" means the community of followers of Jesus. You have spent a large part of your life trying to understand the meaning and value of the biblical accounts. Even with all the difficulties some of the texts present, you still seem to me to be guided by the biblical material to consider certain parameters for ethical behavior. You at least still consider it important to argue with the texts!

   When we move into the strange land of the post-modern there will be more and more difficulty in knowing just how to be guided by the material of the bible, or any other sacred writing. Your caution that "there is no external, objective, revealed standard (written)... for all time" is a good one. But I do not believe that means there are no standards derived by us from scripture. Rather, it means that we must take account of ourselves as we choose form the material the standards we find important.

   This thesis hangs on the word "govern." I am not a biblical fundamentalist. I don't think biblical writings govern. I do think they guide.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

    What if prayers of petition are particularly personal stories told to make it clear that we have hopes or fears, desires or angers for which we envision closure. We know that closure will come, why not confess our visions as well as admit our condition? And if we are telling that story, then tell it with power. Rather than say, "I wish I were well", pray "God make me well!" Then the confession is complete - we say what we want, and admit the power of our investment.

    It seems to me that your point here is not about making the request, but expecting the result. We can not continually pray to stay alive and be successful. At some point our prayer will be met with failure. Or worse, some can not pray to die and have it happen soon enough.

    If prayers of petition were understood as essentially confessional, they would be accounts and stories that do not require results that for modernity would be considered magic. Rather they would be what they are.

    Nothing of this sort of conclusion would preclude the holy in fact being found present in the unexpected and yet hoped for results envisioned by such prayer.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

    This is a difficult pair of sentences. The second is proposed as a conclusion to the first. But guilt can operate quite independently of hope in an afterlife. Reward and punishment systems provide nicely for guilt without any reference to afterlife or to God. Guilt is a mechanism of social control. So the two sentences stand separately.

    Guilt seems to me a poor motivator, useable but not preferable. Abandonment of guilt by the Church as a motivator sounds good to me. Reward and punishment systems seem to be primary as much in the modern world as in any religious system. But the hope for life (presumably a pleasurable life) after death should remain a hope (if so desired) by people regardless of their rewards or punishment while alive. Separating hope and present rewards or lack of rewards sounds right.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

    I am confused by your statement, "All human beings bear God's image?" What sort of an image can a non-Theistically defined God have? You have spent a lot of time on the subject of theism, so I assume you are not now talking of God in that sense. But if God is not in some sense a person (and therefore supernatural) what sort of image might it have that we might bear, being natural. I really look forward to dialogue on this, and for enlightenment!

    It doesn't seem to me that the first sentence is the clause behind the "therefore" in the second sentence. But I agree with the second sentence, particularly if its close is "...rejection or discrimination by members of the Christian community." The problem is that some would contend that "sexual orientation" is not an external description, having to do with observable features, but rather an internal disposition, having to do with volition.

My criticism of what you have produced is primarily that by making these debate points you simply compound the problem of the intellectual arrogance of modernity, that is, the notion that there is a certainty of any worldview. If we are not careful, the absolutism of "the scientific world view" replaces the absolutism of the scholastics. The message that gets delivered by both sides is "you are either with me or you are wrong."

I have never taken well to being told I am just flat out wrong. I have learned much more from having someone who encouraged me through new doors or down new paths. That is what I believe you want to do. Debate, at least on the theses you have offered, just is not enough.

The desire behind these theses, as I understand it, is to revisit the sources of our faith and find new ways to state what we have received and have experienced. It is a profoundly important desire, and I stand with you in your hope to see discussion happen.

• Back to Work: Reflections on the aftermath of Lambeth 98, and why there can be no rest, By Mark Harris. 9/5
• What part of the word 'full' don't they understand, by Mark Harris. 8/11
• Why what the Bishops do at Lambeth matters, sometimes. By Mark Harris. 8/4
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages.
• Louie Crew's home page.
• Send mail to: lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu

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