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

by John Shelby Spong

whenever God is defined in any other way than as a supernatural being who stands ready to come to our aid, then prayer, as most people have traditionally understood it, loses most of its meaning.

The New Testament uses the word “pray” as a verb only fifty-nine times. It uses the word “prayer” as a noun only thirty-four times,

the death of the theistic God causes nothing less than the death of that activity known as prayer,

Prayer is not about the attempt to change reality; it is about approaching reality in a dramatically different way.

I vowed that day never again to engage in the activity that I had previously called “prayer” until I could pray with the same depth of honesty that I had shared with Cornelia at her bedside.

Prayer is the sharing of being, the sharing of life and the sharing of love. That

If I believed that prayer worked in this way, I concluded, I would immediately become an atheist! I

Can the cumulative power of many prayers actually change the direction of a storm? Is that what prayer does? If so, then prayer is a tool to be used by the mighty, the powerful and the well-known. If that is true, then God clearly cares more for the rich and famous than God does for the poor, the forgotten and the unknown.

I pray daily. My way of doing that is to bring into my mind those I love, to cradle them in my awareness of the holiness in which my life seems to be lived.

Anglican theologian Don Cupitt could and did write a book entitled Above Us Only Sky.*

Purgatory was an enormous step in a new direction for the Christian church. With the advent of purgatory the punishment of hell, but not the bliss of heaven, became time-related.

Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.*

All living things, whether human, plant, or animal, are finite. All living things have a beginning and will have an ending. Is there, then, any reasonable possibility that the finite can enter into the eternal, that the mortal can achieve immortality or that our dreams of life after death can be real? The odds seem very long, but

Some years ago I did a full treatment of life after death in a book called Eternal Life: A New Vision—Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.* I weighed the odds of eternal life, newly defined. My conclusion was that I do believe in it. I find that it makes sense.

“Go make disciples of all nations” meant, to Matthew, “Go beyond the boundaries of your religion, your security system and your fears.” It meant, “Go to those whom your religious tradition has defined as unclean, uncircumcised, unsaved, unbaptized and unbelieving; those denounced as infidels, heretics, agnostics or atheists.”

He also once said: “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”* I