Spong

I’ve been suffering from a sort of (non-clinical) ADD for the past two weeks. I’ve started about five books and haven’t been able to get into any of them. I often have this problem after finishing a novel I really liked. I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for. Anyway, when I can’t decide what to read, I can rarely decide what to blog about. I’m working on the process thing, but if I found it damnably difficult to articulate it without being overly technical back when I was pushing it, think how hard it is to write a sufficiently compelling articulation of what I don’t believe anymore that still gives the reader some idea of why one might believe it (and this in a blog entry of reasonable length)! Anyway, it’s coming.

In the meantime, since we’re on the topic of being charitable to one’s theological opponents (and since I want to kill about a half hour before lunch), let’s talk about Spong. He’s taking a well-deserved theological beating over on Faith and Theology, but Ben Myers has posted an interview with him which I recommend. Reading it, I can’t help but like the guy. I think he’s doing a great deal of good in addition to a great deal of harm. I think he understands (much better than most of his detractors) a sort of basic religiosity that at least most contemporary middle-class Americans can identify with that doesn’t usually find expression in the languages or liturgies of any particular religious tradition. Moreover, he recognizes this as a good thing, and realizes that if Christianity seeks to supplant this rather than tap into it, we cannot hope to speak effectively to contemporary people. And he’s been a real champion of gay rights in the church, for which I am grateful.

That said (and I think this is basically Myers’ criticism of him), tapping into this religious impulse of one target population does not mean that the only viable Christianity in these times is simply the religious impulses of people on the street dressed up in vaguely Christian apparel. Spong presents himself as middle option between atheism and apathy about religion on the one hand and fundamentalism and other oppressive orthodoxies (in the pejorative sense of the term) on the other. In fact, he is not avoiding extremes, but rather the rich breadth of the Christian tradition, both ancient and modern. His basic assumption seems to be that a fundamental change occurred in the Enlightenment that completely invalidated all previous Christian expression. From the interview:

Since that time there has been another revolution that changed the whole way that we see the world, and Christianity has got to redefine itself in terms of this new world. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo destroyed the dwelling place of God above the sky, and in effect the theistic definition of God with it. After the destruction of this God, we’ve got to find a new way of talking about God beyond theism. The only alternative to theism that our world seems to know is atheism. We’ve got to find a way of getting beyond that opposition. We’ve got to find a new way of talking about God.

I certainly appreciate the effort to overturn a false dichotomy (as I said, I can’t help liking this guy), but though he presents a third option, he has basically bought into the underlying assumptions of that dichotomy wholesale. Instead of saying that since neither theism (as understood by the Enlightenment) nor atheism are compelling we need something completely new, he might have examined the history of Christian theology more closely to see if there is an implicit or even explicit understanding of God that is not killed by Newton. Besides, Newton’s old news, and though I’ve not made much of a study of it, relativity and quantum mechanics are supposed to have complicated this matter greatly. The world is perhaps not as rigid as once thought. Spong really makes himself an easy target here.

I had meant to devote a paragraph or two to Spong’s Christology, but this has gone on long enough, and it’s now time for lunch. Besides, casual Spong-bashing should never go on for more than a paragraph, otherwise one starts to sound like an asshole (assuming one doesn’t already).