This reflection is the first in a series of responses to John Shelby Spong’s book ‘Why Christianity Must Change or Die.’ I have read the book on several occasions and, together with other books by Spong and other more liberal Christian theologians, it was responsible for shifting me away from hard line evangelicalism towards my current self- identification as thinking evangelical. This does not mean that I agree with Spong about everything.
Chapter 3 of Why Christianity Must Change or Die is entitled ‘In Search of God’ and chapter 4, ‘Beyond Theism to New God Images’. In these chapters Spong argues in part that we must cast out of the church primitive understandings of God that have no place in our modern world. Spong suggests we must get rid of any notion of God as an old man sitting on a throne or as some kind of middle-Eastern potentate writ large. He suggests that we should no longer see God as ‘a supernatural person who invades life periodically to accomplish the divine will…. An intensely human figure who does grandiose, and expanded, but nonetheless, human things.’ In this I am in agreement with Spong, such a view is too limiting when it comes to attempting to even try to conceive just who God is.
Human language and concepts are simply inadequate when it comes to understanding God. In a very real sense God is a mystery; the ultimate mystery. If we could understand God then God wouldn’t be God. When we talk of a Trinitarian God, for example, we are doing our best to describe the indescribable; that is not to say that Trinitarian doctrine does not say something profoundly true and significant, just that it cannot and would not claim to be the whole truth about God.
If your concept of God is as the ultimate superhuman then you have a very small conception of God indeed! God is much, much more than that. As Spong quite rightly comments, ‘no creature can finally conceptualise beyond its own limits or its own being.’
Where I would part company with Spong is his conception that God is not an external being separate from Creation, especially when he says that God exists within reality, not prior to it. Spong supports Paul Tillich’s statement that God is not a person but ‘rather the power that called being forth in all creatures,’ Spong sees God as ‘the Ground of All Being’, as something within people rather than external to them. He writes, ‘There is no God external to life. God, rather, is the inescapable depth and centre of all that is. God is not a being superior to all other beings. God is the Ground of Being itself.’
Here is where I part company with Spong because I believe that his conception of God is too small as well.
Spong writes as if it is impossible to know anything of God other than that which we discover by looking within ourselves (where we may certainly find a God who appeals to us).
I believe that it is possible to know something of the truth of God because God himself has revealed something of the truth of God to us. God reveals it in creation, that vast mind boggling universe God created. God reveals God’s self through the pages of the Bible, written by fallible humans over many centuries but still containing consistent truths about the divine. God reveals God’s self through the very person of Jesus Christ (and I will tackle Spong’s thoughts about Jesus in the next two reflections). The God revealed in the Bible and through Jesus is a God who loves, a God who is interested in each and every human being, a God who does intervene in human history and a God who sometimes does things that break the apparent laws of science. Most of all he is a God who has personality and being; albeit of a far higher concept than we can possibly imagine.
God has revealed to us as much as we are capable of understanding; but he is much, much, much more than that!
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