Summary
Title: A New Christianity for a New World
Author: John Shelby Spong
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
ISBN:
Pro:
• Critiques traditional Christian beliefs
• Critiques basis of theism
Con:
• Ignores Christianity outside of United States
Evidence indicates that world Christianity is growing and conservative
Description:
• Argues that Christianity is filled out outmoded doctrines
• Argues that Christianity needs to change in order to survive
• Argues that Christianity needs to abandon theism and become more progressive
Book Review
John Shelby Spong is a leading spokesperson for a liberal vision of Christianity, having written numerous books defending a progressive take on both Christian doctrine and on theism itself. His previous work, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, was an attempt to explain in detail all of the things which he believers to be wrong with Christianity and why it will be necessary for Christian churches to make changes and adapt to new circumstances. This book is a continuation of his earlier arguments.
In addition to arguing what he considers to be wrong with traditional conceptions of Christianity and theism, he attempts to explain what he thinks the future "ecclesia" (church) will look like. He is not, he says, attempting to create a new religion - rather, his goal is to encourage the further development of Christianity into something more liberal and progressive.
Unlike most liberal reformers Spong is not just looking to change how Christianity is viewed and what it teaches. Instead, he is looking to change how people consider the basic premise of theism itself. He conveniently starts out with a narrow vision of theism, limited only to a belief is a single, omnipotent, loving, creator god, which of course makes it rather easy for him. According to Spong, theism:
- "...was born as a human coping device, created by traumatized self-conscious creatures to enable them to deal with the anxiety of self-awareness. It was designed to discover or to postulate the existence of a powerful divine ally in the quest for human survival and in the process to assert both a purpose to existence and a meaning to human life."
Thus Spong has to start out by defining theism very broadly, but he never justifies defining it narrowly later on. This equivocation is unjustified and unacceptable. It allows him to avoid admitting that he is still a theist because he believes in something he calls a god, but it is unclear why this should be a concern of his. What is wrong with simply opposing one version of theism instead of theism generally? What does he accomplish that makes it worth presenting theism in a way that ignores the diversity of the world's religious traditions?
Part of Spong's argument relies on reinterpreting early Christian history and portraying it as different from traditional accounts. According to Spong, what we think of today as Christianity is really an accumulation of later beliefs and supernatural ideas:
- "...if we can demonstrate that this theistic overlay of supernaturalism on Jesus is not original, then clearly it also cannot be eternal; and if it was added to the Jesus-story well into Christian history, it can certainly be removed from that same story later in Christian history without destroying the core of the story. The theistic interpretation is not the essence of the resurrection experience; it is a later explanation of the essence of that experience."
This is, however, the premise used by the fundamentalists against whom Spong argues. Fundamentalists also believe that the "true" nature of Christianity is whatever the "original" Christianity really was. By accepting this premise, Spong has given away too much to fundamentalists and traditionalists because he has given away the argument that what is original must necessarily be "fundamental." He has given away the idea that a belief system can change, evolve, and progress.
By arguing that his interpretation of Christianity is like what the original Christians thought, he has stopped being progressive and has instead become conservative because he has cast himself in the role of someone trying to conserve original meanings and practices.
