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

by John Shelby Spong

of Freud’s insights, our theistic understanding of God seemed less and less real. Relentlessly, our theistic view of God was stripped from our minds.

Its adherents might be “Christians” who killed at a Planned Parenthood center, or “Muslims” who, in suicidal missions, sought to destroy those who had taken religious security away from them. Could human life make it without a viable theistic deity? We were about to find out.

The task of a new reformation is not to redefine God, changing one set of limited human images for another, but to find a way to point ourselves beyond every human boundary, most specifically beyond the boundary of words.

God is not “a being,” not even “the supreme being.” A being is something that exists in time and space, but we are trying to describe that which is ultimate, unbound, meaning that such terminology—the category of existence—cannot be used. Our first step then requires that we move beyond the idea of God as a being and contemplate the possibility that God is “Being itself.”

but rather, were trained to say the word Adonai, which means “the Lord.”

So the suggestion was made that YHWH meant “I am who I am.” In our day theologian Paul Tillich would translate this name for God as “the Ground of Being.” Others sought to clarify this idea, suggesting that this name meant “I will be what I will be” or “I am that which causes all things to be.” So this set of four unpronounceable letters became a symbol, a Jewish symbol if you will, for that which is ultimate, holy and real. In this way of approaching the “Holy” the Jews were suggesting that God could be experienced, but never defined. Likewise “transcendence” and “being” could be experienced, but never defined. The spiritual genius of the Jews thus gave us a doorway through which to walk beyond theism without walking beyond God. God is not a being; God is the Ground of Being. It is a start, but it is still just a first step.

Paraphrased thus, Isaiah says: “The eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf will be unstopped, the limbs of human beings will no longer be lame, crippled, withered or limited and the voices of the mute will once again be heard” (Isa. 35:5–6). The presence of God, Isaiah was seeking to communicate, will be seen not in a being, but in the image of human beings achieving wholeness. It was a different insight, perhaps a new breakthrough in human consciousness. The realm of the human and the realm of the divine driven to their depths were not separate, he was suggesting. Isaiah the prophet was using the vehicle of words to speak of a reality beyond words. The divine can be seen only in and through the human. One must look inward not outward to experience the meaning and reality of God.

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.

The only question raised was whether or not God had been experienced as part of the human!

In this statement, also, there was no separation between God and love or between the divine and the human. Indeed, the divine and the human appeared to penetrate each other. Note that while the assertion was made that God is love, this simple definition was never reversed. Nowhere in the text was it said that “love is God.” God cannot be defined. While God may be present in the experience, the experience can never be identified with God.

God is rather “Being itself.” God is not a noun that needs to be defined. God is a verb that needs to be lived. It was and is an ancient idea, but perhaps because it is not always a satisfying idea, it never grasped the core of our humanity. “Being itself” does not offer us a lifeline to security. It does not promise us aid in time of need. It does not put the supernatural at the service of the human. It does not teach us how to manipulate the divine for the benefit of the human. What these minority voices out of the Bible call us to do, however, is to step beyond a theistic understanding of God and to open ourselves to a new way to approach the Holy. It suggests that we are part of the Holy. Theology turns into anthropology. This is where reformation begins; it must not, however, be where it ends. So we press on.

So walk with me now slowly as I seek to find my way through this human thicket. Earlier in this book I stated that there is a difference between an experience and an explanation. That distinction is critical for theological thinking. An experience can be real, even timeless, but in order for that experience to be shared with another, it must be explained. Every explanation of an experience, however, is inevitably bound up in the limitations of human experience. Explanations are couched in the language of, the level of knowledge possessed by and the presuppositions embraced by the explainer. They are thus reflective of the subjectivity in which the explainer lives. God, I believe, is an experience that is real. Creeds are, however, nothing more than attempted explanations of that God experience. Theology thus represents little more than human attempts to organize the explanations. Doctrine then becomes only the attempt to enforce the theology arrived at in those creeds. Finally, dogma develops, which is doctrine literalized and turned into idolatry! All theological systems are, therefore, finally nothing but coercive human creations. Religion is not and never has been based on a divine revelation. No religious system escapes this inevitable pathway that it must walk. The idolatrous nature of all religion, however, should not be used to hide from us the fact that the experience behind the idolatrous religious system can still be real. That forms a new place to begin. The rea...

The transcendent dimension of life that we call God is not separate from me. God is revealed in me and through me. The word “God” becomes not the name of God, but rather my name for the transcendent dimension of my own life. God is the name for the power and the source of life. Perhaps that is what the author of the book of Genesis meant when that writer wrote a myth of creation in which it was said that God breathed the life (or the nephesh) of God into the first human being. God originally was not perceived by this writer as external from us; God was rather met in the life we lived. This means that no matter how many times we pretend that God is a being like us, we are always driven by our experience to see that God remains the power of life within us. God is the life force made visible when we live fully. That is where I start this quest, but that cannot be the terminal point. So we move on to probe our experience of transcendence even more deeply.

So love is also a reality that relates us to something beyond ourselves. That is the meaning of transcendence. Love gives life. The unloved offspring of every species will die. Love thus relates us to something beyond ourselves. Love, however, is never disembodied, never found or experienced apart from life. Love passes through us. It neither originates nor terminates in us. We receive it, and only having received it are we able to pass it on. Love does not keep to be consumed later as “leftovers”; it cannot be preserved. It must be shared or it will die. So love opens each of us to a dimension of the human experience that is transcendent. Love relates us to something that is real, but something that we can neither create nor destroy. God is the name by which we call this experience of love. If God is love, the only way we can worship God is by loving others. The more we give love away, the more we make the experience of God visible. God is not a being, external to us; God is experienced in the presence of love. God is the dimension of transcendence flowing through us.

God is the Ground of Being in which our being is rooted. God is the timeless eternity to which we are attached. So if God is Being, then the only way we can worship God properly is by having the courage to be all that each of us can be. The more deeply and fully we can be ourselves, the more God, who is Being, becomes visible.

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. Radical insecurity must now come to be seen as a virtue, which we must learn to embrace as central to our religion.

A human being, I am quite convinced, has the ability to experience God, but no human being has the frame of reference that would enable that person to describe to another human being what it is like to be God. This means that all of our creeds, our doctrines and our dogmas are human-bound definitions that are, in the last analysis, nothing but human creations; none is the product of what we have called “divine revelation.”

That is why doing serious theological thinking in a public place or through a public medium is so difficult and so fraught with peril. Most people cannot bring themselves to embrace the levels of ambiguity that theology requires.

This debate will, therefore, never be a popular one with the majority of religious people. It is something that we struggling searchers will have to do for them, whether they want it done or not.

I do not understand Christianity as a religious system with fixed points of revealed truth, however. I see it rather as an evolving home in which I dwell happily. The forces that created and that continue to create this evolving faith are a rising human consciousness, an ever-expanding body of human knowledge and a growing capacity to achieve human insight. I do not think that Christianity is now or ever has been an unchanging tradition. This faith system did not drop from heaven in some newly revealed dimension. We rather evolved out of Judaism, breaking its boundaries in the process. We then incarnated ourselves in a variety of forms throughout history, riding each one until it broke open, unable to contain the meaning we struggled to communicate.

Christianity has no ultimate stated certainty; it is an ever-evolving faith system, into which we are privileged to walk if we are to live into the future. I believe that we as a church will endure only so long as we are willing to live in flux. Human beings will inevitably create and recreate the religion they need to survive. Christianity is a human vehicle designed to allow that creative process to go on and on and on. This is what I mean when I identify myself as a Christian.

Allow me to illustrate this with a central Christian symbol, the idea of God as a Trinity. Is this truth a truth about God or is it a description of human experience? Is knowledge of God’s being ever a human possibility?

Theology thus is always about my understanding of God; it is not about God. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, describes a stage in the evolution of human experience. It was certainly not a revealed truth, nor was it the way the earliest Christians understood God. Paul, for example, was clearly not a Trinitarian. For the Jewish Paul, God was “one” and nothing approached or modified that “oneness.” Paul says in Romans that God “designated” Jesus as “Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). God is the designator, Jesus is the one designated; that is not co-equality or Trinitarianism. Paul said that the life Jesus lived, he lived to God (Gal. 2:19). We become alive to God through Jesus, he asserted. For Paul, Jesus was a doorway into the ultimate; Jesus was not himself the ultimate.

Christianity at its infancy, like all religions, was childlike, based on a protective deity. In many ways, early Christianity was a religion of fear and control. Because we had failed to be pleasing to God, Christianity thus became almost totally a religion of penitence, guilt and pleas to God for mercy. It was a system that did not allow us to grow up. We were children seeking to please the powerful “Father” or parent God. It is hard to grow up until we leave the “Father’s house.”

The clear implication of this creedal assertion was that in Jesus a form of God had entered into human life. Jesus was thus a divine being in a human disguise. After all, “incarnation” literally means “enfleshment.” Charles Wesley assumed this when he wrote “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” one of his best-known Christmas carols, which includes these words: “Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see; hail the incarnate deity.”* Because of this strange and alien note in the biblical theology found in this hymn, it is my least favorite Christmas carol.

As this tradition developed, it broadened its Jesus narrative to address problems as they arose. For example, if the external God, who lived above the sky, was to take on human form, a landing field on which this deity could arrive on the stage of human life had to be prepared. God could not be forever bound by the limitations of human life, however, so there also needed to be a launching pad from which the incarnate God could be propelled back into God’s natural domain in the heavens. In time both of these mythological elements, and many others, were added to the Jesus story. Like all other explanatory narratives in the faith experience, they were all too soon literalized and became part of what traditional-thinking Christians called “orthodoxy.”

God had emptied the “being” of God into the life of a servant, “being born in the form” of the human (Phil. 2:5–8)?

People did not see miraculous power in Jesus and then move from that experience to the conclusion of his divinity. The power of Jesus was experienced long before people attributed miracles to his presence. No one prior to the writing of Mark in the eighth decade ever seems to have associated miracles with Jesus.

No, there was something far earlier and perhaps more profound about this Jesus that caused his followers to make the God claim for him. It was, I believe, the breaking down of all the boundaries and barriers by which we human beings separate ourselves from one another. The power of God seen in Jesus was the overcoming of all our fears and divisions. In his presence and through the experience of his life, the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Jew and Samaritan, male and female, Israel and Judah, bound and free, rich and poor, and life and death all faded away. In Jesus there was a humanity that included all and that dismissed none. In this Jesus a human community without boundaries could be seen. God was the power of life, the passion of love, the Ground of Being that draws all lives into a new humanity. That was the experience that drove first Paul and later many others to say of this Jesus: “God was in Christ” (II Cor. 5:19).

God did not invade the world; rather, the human became the vehicle through which the divine could be and was met and engaged.

The corollary of this insight is that no form of life ever “fell” from perfection into what we came to call “sin.” Physical reality knows only an evolving world of trial and error.

If there was no original perfection, there could have been no fall from perfection into original sin. If there was no fall into sin, there was no need for a “savior” to rescue us.

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. Life is all one expression of an evolving whole.

There was no original perfection followed by a fall into original sin. There was only the slow and gradual unfolding of life in an evolutionary process. There were howls of protest in religious circles as these realities began to be processed and established as true.

Nature is survival-specific. By that I mean that the laws of nature protect the various species. Wasps and ants do not talk to each other; they simply do as instinct dictates.

Baptism was then developed to wash symbolically from the newborn human life the stain of Adam’s original sin. If an unbaptized child died “in the sin of Adam,” that child was said to be bound for hell. The Eucharist then became the foretaste of the heavenly banquet, the sign of our salvation. The deepest human yearning was now couched in terms of rescue from this inescapable original sin, avoidance of the punishment due us. So it was that Jesus came to be understood as the savior, the rescuer, and the redeemer. This theology trod roughshod over the idea of Jesus “who came that they might have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Human potential was trumped by guilt and behavior control. So we created hymns such as “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “I Was Sinking Deep in Sin When Love Lifted Me” and “O Savior, Precious Savior”; we also sang of that “Old Rugged Cross” on which Jesus “for a world of lost sinners was slain.”* This was the new template against which Christians would tell the Jesus story. It was also the backdrop against which all Christian liturgies would be developed. This kind of Christianity reigned unchallenged for centuries. It is, however, dying today. The question I have to ask is: Was this really the essential message of Christianity? The institutional church certainly claimed that it was so. I believe, however, that original sin obscures rather than illuminates that essential message. We have only just begun to scratch the surface of Christianity in thes...

The traditional way of telling the Jesus story turned Jesus into the agent of the God who lived above the sky and so came to our rescue. It reflected the dualism of the Greek world into which Christianity got translated from the second century on. It was this dualism that ultimately shaped the creeds, the most enduring version of which was adopted at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

The second and last Pauline reference to Jesus’ birth was in Romans, written in the middle years of the sixth decade of the Christian era. Here Paul writes, making a messianic claim, that Jesus “was descended from David, according to the flesh” (Rom. 1:3). Since royal descent was always through the male line, there is no way Paul could have written this line if he had ever heard of or entertained any idea of a virgin birth.

That is not the way a woman would act toward her adult child if an angel had literally said to her at his conception that he “will be called the son of the Most High,

More than that, on two occasions in this gospel, Jesus is referred to simply as “the son of Joseph” (John 1:45, 6:42).

Every Jew would know that to refer to a grown man in Jewish society as “the son of a woman” was to suggest that his paternity was unknown.

She is the woman whose adulterous affair with King David led not only to her pregnancy, but also to the calculated murder of her husband, Uriah, while he served in King David’s army. The line that produced Jesus, Matthew was saying, flowed through the adultery of Bathsheba. Does it not strike you as strange that Matthew, who was the first to relate the narrative of the virgin birth, chose to introduce that narrative by suggesting that incest, prostitution, seduction and adultery are all in the line that produced Jesus? Is this not an unusual way to defend one’s founder against the charge of illegitimacy? Was

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. Theology does adjust to reality whenever reality comes too close to threaten ancient formulations.

After centuries of laboring to understand stories that made no sense to us, we now discover that the problem was that we did not know how to read those stories. With this insight, our ability to chart a new reformation has passed another huge obstacle! Now we know why miracles were not attached to the life of Jesus until the eighth decade. The miracles were interpretive signs. The writers of the miracle accounts saw Jesus as the messiah from whom miracles were expected. That understanding makes sense and it solves the biggest problem in contemporary Christianity. Isaiah predicted it. The gospel writers included it. We do not have to believe it. Jesus springs free.

All of this is to say that there is in the heart of life an almost universal yearning for oneness, for at-one-ment, that never quite goes away. Much of what we call “the experience of God” is fashioned to meet us at this point of our human vulnerability. It was St. Augustine, writing in Confessions, who gave these words to that experience: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself alone and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”* That is perhaps what atonement means at its deepest, experiential, religious level. As such it is a legitimate part of our humanity.

Jesus did not die for your sins or mine!

How was this Jesus going to accomplish this task of saving the fallen? Here the doctrine of the atonement gets even stranger. God would force the divine Son to suffer the fate that all human beings deserved, but which no human being could possibly endure. Jesus had namely to absorb the punishment that God required in order for the justice of God to be totally satisfied. That is how the story of the crucifixion was told. Remember the scourging scene in producer and director Mel Gibson’s 2004 motion picture The Passion of the Christ? No pain detail was left unexploited. Indeed the more grotesque the pain of Jesus’ death was, the more secure, we were taught to believe, was our salvation. It was sadomasochism at its worst.

When the story of the cross is raised to consciousness and examined critically, however, it is hard not to see in that story cruelty, suffering and even elements of both masochism and sadism.

Jesus “died for my sins.” Does that make any of us feel better? Of course not! It destroys the goodness of God. It turns God into a monster, it turns Jesus into a masochistic victim and it turns you and me into grieving buckets of trembling, guilt-filled jelly. This was not originally, is not now and can never be the meaning of Christianity. Atonement theology must be abandoned if there is to be a Christian future. The repudiation of atonement theology is an essential step before Christianity can ever appeal to the emerging generation.

In the course of history, however, sometimes overt evil is but the prelude to life-giving insight.