Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

by John Shelby Spong

The desire to believe in this something or to feel oneself to be embraced by a sense of transcendent wonder appears to be well-nigh universal.

my appeal was to those who had either abandoned the religion of their childhood as no longer relevant to the life they were living,

The great expansion of evangelical religion, with its rise of mega-churches, has now crested and has actually begun its inevitable retreat. The second generation of evangelical leaders has not been as compelling as the first.

In Europe Christian churches increasingly look and act like museums. Church attendance is down in many cases to less than ten percent of each country’s population.

Among those who are defined today as “millennials”—that is, those who were born from 1979 on, who have reached maturity in the twenty-first century—the religious category called “none” is now the majority category.*

if Christianity is to survive it must undergo so radical a transformation that people may well see no continuity between the Christianity of yesterday and the Christianity of tomorrow.

Almost every church had something called “the Stations of the Cross” on its walls. This was a pictorial display of the final scenes in the life of Jesus. How closely those stations followed the biblical narrative was of little concern. No one bothered to check.

The sinking of the ships of the Catholic Spanish Armada sailing toward Protestant England was even said to have proved that God was on the side of the reformers.

So “the church teaches” became the claim of one side and “the Bible says” became the claim of the other.

The creeds of the church represent a fourth-century attempt to codify that Jesus experience, whatever it was. The creeds thus reflect the dualistic worldview of the Greek mind that dominated fourth-century thought.

Christianity, having recorded its first-century explanations of the Jesus experience in scripture, and its fourth-century explanations in creedal statements, then proceeded to make excessive claims for authority of those explanations, essentially freezing them into their first- and fourth-century frames of reference.

Understanding God in theistic terms as “a being,” supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to the world and capable of intervening in the world with miraculous power, is no longer believable.

conceiving of Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity has also become a bankrupt concept.

supernatural invasions of the natural order, performed by God or an “incarnate Jesus,” are simply not viable explanations of what actually happened.

Atonement theology, especially in its most bizarre “substitutionary” form, presents us with a God who is barbaric, a Jesus who is a victim and it turns human beings into little more than guilt-filled creatures. The phrase “Jesus died for my sins” is not just dangerous, it is absurd. Atonement theology is a concept that we must escape.

that does not mean that Easter was the physical resuscitation of Jesus’ deceased body back into human history.

Jesus’ ascension assumes a three-tiered universe, a concept that was dismissed some five hundred years ago. If

Contemporary moral standards must be hammered out in the juxtaposition between life-affirming moral principles and external situations. No modern person has any choice but to be a situationist.

Let us instead think of prayer as the practice of the presence of God, the act of embracing transcendence and the discipline of sharing with another the gifts of living, loving and being.

If we are to talk about eternal life with any degree of intellectual integrity, we must explore it as a dimension of transcendent reality and infinite love—a

There can be no reason in the church of tomorrow for excusing or even forgiving discriminatory practices. “Sacred tradition” must never again provide a cover to justify discriminatory evil. The call to universalism must be the message of Christianity.

Understanding God in theistic terms as “a being,” supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to the world and capable of intervening in the world with miraculous power, is no longer believable. Most God talk in liturgy and conversation has thus become meaningless. What we must do is find the meaning to which the word “God” points.

The religious institution, along with traditional religious thinking, is declining at breathtaking speed, while non-religious secularity appears to be the ascending majority.

the tenth chapter of Joshua, to be specific, where the sacred text announced that in answer to Joshua’s prayers, God stopped the rotation of the sun around the earth in order to provide Joshua with an extended period of daylight in which to kill his enemies.

What does it then mean in such a world to say: “Our Father, who art in heaven?”

contemporary theologian could write a book entitled Taking Leave of God.* Another could write: Christianity Without God.*

Is the denial of theism the same as atheism?

Thinking people began to recognize just why it was that Christianity must change or die!

up, never to take responsibility. It was no wonder that the parental word “Father” became the name for the church-appointed representative of this theistic deity.

Then came the clarifying answer of this parable. God is not a being separate from the human. If you do not and cannot see God in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick and the imprisoned, then you cannot see God at all. God is not an external being; God is present in the faces of the least of these—our brothers and our sisters.

God is not a being separate from the beings who are human. God is not a being to whom beings can relate; God is rather “Being itself.” God is not a noun that needs to be defined. God is a verb that needs to be lived.

So I begin this search for a way to enter the reality of the God experience with this complex, even circular analysis.

Religion, which was born in the need to provide security for self-conscious creatures wrestling with issues of mortality, finitude and meaning, now finds itself forced to admit that it has no security to offer.

I want to speak to those who know that the religious assumptions of their childhood can no longer form the answers for them.

the external, theistic, supernatural God has taken on the form and flesh of a human life.

No one prior to the writing of Mark in the eighth decade ever seems to have associated miracles with Jesus.

This fact surprises many. Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64 CE, never spoke of Jesus as a worker of miracles. The Q document, if its existence can be definitively established (I am quite skeptical), and if once established it can be dated as earlier than or even contemporaneous with Mark, contains no miracle narratives.* The

the primary Christian myth that involved a good creation, followed by a fall into sin, which then required the rescue operation, which God mounted in Jesus with its climax on the cross of Calvary, producing the pious claim that Jesus “died for my sins,” all of that was destined to come crashing down.

If there was no fall into sin, there was no need for a “savior” to rescue us. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, nor can one ever be “restored” to a status that one has never possessed.

we learned of our DNA relatedness to all living things. We now know not only that we share a 99.9 percent identical DNA with the great apes, but also that we share a DNA connection with the clams, the cabbages and even the plankton of the sea.

If human beings are connected with every other life-form, then how do we tell the story of Jesus?

Human beings share the gift of life with every living thing, both plant and animal.

Self-centeredness is rooted, not in our morality, as we once thought, but in our biology.

We are not “fallen sinners”; rather, we are incomplete human beings. Our old theology is dead. The door begins to open on a new way to tell the old, old story.

they felt shame; they knew that they were naked. A sexual theme is always close to the surface in this account. They then proceeded to cover their shame with fig leaf aprons.

The ultimate punishment, however, was that all living things would have to die. “Dust you are and to dust you shall return.” Since death was universal, the sin that caused death had also to be universal.

Augustine and subsequent Christianity, however, read the creation story as a literal narrative, accounting for the way in which sin and evil had entered the world.

Let me state at once that there is not a chance that any of the birth details in either Matthew’s or Luke’s version of the virgin birth are either accurate or literally true! The data supporting this conclusion are overwhelming.

Jesus would, like every other person, have been corrupted by original sin, since only his father was divine, not his mother. When the Roman Catholic Church declared in the nineteenth century that the mother of Jesus had herself been born without sin, or “immaculately conceived,” they sought to address this glaring new problem.

miracles enter the Hebrew tradition with Moses, then they carry over to Joshua before disappearing in the Bible for almost four hundred years.