John Shelby Spong: A new christianity for a new world

By PHILIP CULBERTSON

At the end of this, his 19th book and most recent challenge to the church to rethink its policies and assumptions, Bishop Jack Spong claims: "Knowing that when a place becomes unliveable people must either move or die, I have chosen to move."

Spong is a brave visionary, and even in retirement remains the subject of vilification by the more conservative quarters of Christendom.

In the early 1990s, some members of the Episcopal Church (Anglican) in the United States attempted to try him for heresy, in a move reminiscent of the heresy trial in New Zealand in the 60s of the Rev Lloyd Geering. The charges against Spong were dismissed.

This book is primarily a sequel to Spong's earlier work, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Here, Spong tries to move beyond his history of acerbic challenges to traditional formulations of dogma and creed, to sketch out a post-theistic theology that he believes will allow faith to remain vital.

Since, he claims, the vocabulary of traditional faith is a human construction that boxes God into categories that service patriarchal chauvinism, all language with which we speak of God must change to set God free. Worship must change, and the sense of Christian community must be redefined.

Spong writes cautiously, in an attempt to avoid anticipated charges that he is an animist or a humanist or worse, an atheist. He is, in fact, so careful that the book doesn't find its stride until the eighth chapter.

He stays in touch throughout with his spiritual mentors, including Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Don Cuppitt and, above all, John A. T. Robinson, whose Honest to God created a theological storm in the early 1960s.

Bishop Spong has a huge following in New Zealand. This book will not please his critics, many of whom have already made up their minds about him without tracking his theology as it has developed over the past 30 years.

But it is not for his critics that he writes. Rather, he writes for his disciples, those believers in exile, those people who live on or even beyond the borders of the church, who yearn for a relationship with God but can't stomach the church's teachings any longer.

I have read all of Bishop Spong's books. I've never found one in which I agreed with everything he wrote, but I have never found one that did not stimulate me to rethink significantly my own theology and faith. He is one of the most widely published authors in the Protestant church, and a theologian whom the church must take seriously, if for no other reason than so many people on the fringes of the church take him seriously.

HarperCollins

$34.95

* Philip Culbertson is the Director of Pastoral Studies at St Johns Theological College.