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

by John Shelby Spong

“Dad, the questions the church keeps trying to answer, we don’t even ask anymore.”

I also learned that most clergy are either unable or unwilling to engage the great theological issues of the day because of their perception that to do so will “disturb the faith and beliefs” of their people. Indeed, that was the reaction that my initial theological reflections as bishop prompted.

There is a game being played in contemporary church life where truth is suppressed in the name of unity.

Controversy in the Christian church is seldom just about biblical exegesis and theological formulations. By and large people do not want to engage these issues publicly, perhaps because they know deep down that their religious convictions cannot stand much public scrutiny.

I am not willing to sacrifice my conviction that there is something real that draws me beyond myself, which I call “God.”

In Luther’s mind it was clear that institutional Christianity had ceased to be the “body of Christ” serving the world. It had instead become a profitable business, designed in such a way as to increase and even to enhance the church’s worldly power.

By the sixteenth century the power of the Christian church was so deeply entrenched in the life of Europe’s culture that for anyone to challenge its claimed authority to define truth was regarded as an act of heresy.

An all-male ordained hierarchy, which stretched from the local priest all the way to the papal office, was acknowledged as the only proper channel through which that and the will of God could be discerned by human beings. That claim is what Luther was challenging.

The Nicene Creed had been adopted by Christian leaders at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and it was believed to have summarized the “essence of the Christian faith” for all time.

The sixteenth century was also an age of almost unchallenged belief in a literal final judgment.

The fires of hell quite literally terrified the masses. Guilt was the coin of the church’s realm, and it permeated the emotions of every “sinner” with whom the church had to deal.

For at least two hundred years after Luther, Europe was roiled by this Reformation conflict.

The traditionalists had the power of history and authority on their side. They could quote the doctrines and dogmas of the church, which they believed reflected God’s will. The reformers needed a counterclaim, and they found it in the authority of the Bible, almost always literally understood and called the “Word of God.” So “the church teaches” became the claim of one side and “the Bible says” became the claim of the other.

The Reformation ultimately was not fought over what a Christian must believe to be a Christian, but over issues of institutional authority and power.

The primary change was that doctrinal debate was no longer controlled by the church hierarchy; in other words, the church was no longer acknowledged as the final arbiter of truth.

In reality this single change opened up other vast arenas for transformation. From the leaders of science, freed now from ecclesiastical control, came a new understanding of how the world operated, which challenged the Christian formulas of antiquity.

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. If we literalize the creeds or claims for their eternal infallible truth, we are inevitably literalizing the frame of reference of this long-passed era.

Therein lies the problem: 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. Literalized words are always doomed words since our perception of truth is constantly expanding and changing.

Can the Christ experience be separated from the dying explanations of the past? That is the current theological imperative.

The phrase “Jesus died for my sins” is not just dangerous, it is absurd. Atonement theology is a concept that we must escape.

We are called by this new faith into radical connectedness. Judgment is not a human responsibility. Discrimination against any human being on the basis of that which is a “given” is always evil and does not serve the Christian goal of offering “abundant life” to all.

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.

The laws by which the world operates have not changed since the dawn of time, but the way human beings explain and understand those laws has changed dramatically over the centuries of human history.

In the past, God—whether the Christian God or some other deity—was the answer to almost everything that human beings could not otherwise explain. “Theism” was the name of the operative definition of God that people used, both consciously and unconsciously.

The death of God was officially announced to the Western world in the nineteenth century, and we have not been able to get our heads around that debate since. If theism is the only way in which God can be understood, then the death of theism seems to leave us with a-theism as our only alternative.

This division marks the “culture wars” of modern politics, driving each side toward fiercely held and mutually exclusive positions, between which there is and can be little room for compromise. Polarization, created in large measure by the death of theism, has become the political reality into which our modern world is living.

The secularists are winning, not because they are “anti-God,” but because the forces which have brought about the diminution and the subsequent abandonment of traditional religious thinking cannot and will not be reversed.

In the sixteenth century, the revolution began in the mind of a Polish monk named Nicolaus Copernicus, who from his monastic cell studied the movement of heavenly bodies.

With the discovery of Copernicus, however, the inevitable conclusion was that if the three-tiered universe was wrong, the Bible was also wrong!

Johannes Kepler, however, not only noticed it, but he accepted it and even improved on it by explaining that the earth’s orbit around the sun was not circular, but elliptical. Kepler’s mother was put on trial for being a witch, but Kepler himself generally escaped the wrath of the controllers of orthodoxy.

The third major person in this first incredible breakthrough was Galileo Galilei, a well-known public figure of the seventeenth century, who was a mathematician, an astronomer, a recognized man of letters, a writer, the builder of a telescope, the father of a nun and a personal friend of the pope.

The religious leaders struck back, asserting that the “truth” of the Bible must be protected from this onslaught. Galileo was put on trial for heresy, a capital crime in that day, which was normally punished by burning the heretic at the stake.

A deity who cannot be located somewhere soon tends to be located nowhere.

If the Bible was wrong on this issue, about what else might it also be wrong?

Is the denial of theism the same as atheism? Is there no other alternative?

A major influence in creating this new way of looking at the physical world was the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton.

The laws of the universe were fixed, unchanging, immutable and predictable. There was no place in Newton’s worldview for supernatural power to operate, for magic to occur or for God’s miraculous abilities to be displayed.*

On the Origin of Species also presented a radical new challenge to our understanding of God.

Traditionalists struck back immediately, first ridiculing Darwin: “On which side of the family is your ape ancestor?” That was, in effect, the question the Anglican bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, asked Thomas Huxley in their famous debate on Darwin in 1860 in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

clerics associated with the Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, struck back with concerted attacks in the name of what they called “the fundamentals” of the Christian faith. Aided by the financial support of the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL), this group, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, sent out a series of newly composed pamphlets addressing those fundamentals to hundreds of thousands of religious leaders around the world.

Then came a concerted political attempt to force into the science departments of the tax-supported schools of the United States a pseudo-scientific theory called “creation science,” to temper what supporters called the “faith-destroying” impact of Darwin’s thought.

The irony is that evolution, that life evolves and changes over time, is one of the truths of the Bible. Instead institutional religion and society as a while has literalized survival of the fittest.

When the smoke of this battle cleared, however, the accuracy of a “literal” Bible, the “infallible” pronouncements of a pope, together with the theistic understanding of God had all become unbelievable.

Without an “original perfection” in creation itself, there could not have been a fall from perfection into something that was called “original sin.”

If the story of human life is one of “unfinishedness,” incompleteness, rather than a fall into sin, then the work of God is not to save us from our sins, but to bring about human completeness or wholeness.

It was Freud’s stated conviction that the force behind the creation of all religious systems was the need present in human beings to bank the fires of anxiety born in what he called “the shock of existence.” By this he meant the moment that self-conscious awareness appeared in the evolutionary process. Freud believed that religion was simply the human projection into the sky of a protective parental figure of our own creation. This deity used supernatural power to deal with all the anxieties of self-consciousness, such as meaninglessness and the certainty of our mortality.

One only has to look at our God language to validate these Freudian insights. The theistic God was a being like us human beings in all details, except with human limitations removed.

Only a deity not bound by our weaknesses could address the anxieties of our limits and provide us with the security we sought.

The twentieth century saw the world experiment first with the security found in a controlled society called fascism and, second, with the security found in a classless society called communism.

When we can go no further down this one-way street of no return, finally we begin to raise a different question: Can the reality of God be experienced in a non-theistic way?

A mid-twentieth-century theologian named J. B. Phillips tried to capture the essence of what I am trying to do when he entitled his book Your God Is Too Small.* The meaning of God, he and I contend, cannot be limited to the scope of the human mind.