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

by John Shelby Spong

Was Peter the first to see this? Was he the one who saw in Jesus a life driven not by survival, but by the love that enabled him to give his life away? Did this vision enable him to see God in a new way, not as the almighty one, the heavenly father or the judge of the world, but as the Source of Life, expanding the early Christians’ understanding of what it means to live; as the Source of Love, freeing them to love beyond their boundaries and their fears without the expectation of gaining love in return; and as the Ground of Being, giving them the courage to be all that they could be and, in the process, freeing others to be all that they could be? Was this the vision of God that they saw in Jesus, who called people beyond the barriers of tribe, race, ethnicity and gender? When he was victimized by those to whom he only offered love, when he died forgiving, loving, freeing, is that when they saw that God was in him? Was resurrection the ability to see that Jesus had taken his humanity to a new dimension and had now stepped into the being of that which they called divine? Was it a step from self-consciousness into a universal consciousness, into an awareness of the oneness of all things?

Resurrection, I now believe, was not a physical act. No formerly deceased body ever walked out of any tomb, leaving it empty to take up a previous life in the world. For Paul and for the other early Christians to whom Paul says Jesus “appeared,” resurrection was, rather, a moment of new revelation that occurred when survival-driven humanity could transcend that limit and give itself away in love to others, including even to those who wish and do us evil. This was the experience in which a new “seeing” of both God and life was born. Was this experience great enough to have been called resurrection? I submit that it was. That experience suggested that God and human life can flow together. It persuaded “believers” that every limit on our humanity can be broken. That is what those early Christians meant when they said: “Jesus lives. We have seen the Lord!” That same resurrection experience must now change the way we understand God and even the way we understand worship. Resurrection, understood as Paul and the early Christians experienced it, is an ongoing and life-reordering process, not an event that happened once in history a long time ago.

Resurrection, you see, was not just something that happened to Jesus; it is also something that happens to and in each of us. For us, as for Jesus, it is a subjective understanding, not an objective event. We will see him, the promise of Mark’s messenger seems to say, when our eyes are open to the meaning of God found in the midst of life, in the expression of love and in the courage to be. That is, we are resurrected when we learn that God is present when, in the words I use over and over, we live fully, love wastefully and become all that we are capable of being. Easter is an experience which thus functions in a number of ways. First, it opens our eyes. Second, it calls us to open the eyes of others and to enable those others to live, to love and to be. It is in the authenticity of our humanity that the boundary between life and death is transcended. The first gospel so very clearly does not say what most of us have always thought and been taught that it says.

Please note an important distinction in this narrative. Jesus is not a victim; he is a victor, glorified and already endowed with heavenly power. He speaks. His words would later be called the “Great Commission”: Go into all the world, make disciples of all nations and lo, I am with you always. Was this a missionary charge to go convert the heathen? Not a chance! There was no institutional church at that time that felt the need to gain converts. The risen Christ was saying, rather, go beyond your boundaries, your fears, your lines of security; learn to give yourselves away and know that you are part of who I am. We cannot now be separated! It is a different message of Easter from the one about which we have previously been told.

God is not a noun we are compelled to define; God is a verb that we are invited to live. There is a difference, and it is in that difference that resurrection is both experienced and entered. That, in the last analysis, is what resurrection is all about.

This leads us to our first ethical principle. The judgment as to the goodness or badness of a particular human action depends, not just on the act itself, but on the context in which the act is carried out. Subjectivity in ethical judgments is thus inescapable.

Relativity, nonetheless, confronts human beings at every turn and in every decision they make. One of the reasons that religious people do not want to admit relativity is that it forces adult decision-making on them. It is so much easier to remain childlike and to pretend that there is a set of eternal rules which one just has to learn and agree to apply. Human beings want to believe that they can define the terms “moral” and “immoral” in a definitive way. It is, however, the existential context of life that more often than not determines what is good and what is evil.

We can safely conclude that the Ten Commandments were never themselves meant to be an eternal code. They changed in history; they were edited. The ethical life has always been an adventure. The subject of ethical relativity is now open, and we will continue to pursue it until we reach new conclusions.

How much relativity or ethical situationism can the average human life manage? The answer is not very much. The urge to have an objective standard of right and wrong, operating in every situation, is a response to authority, not to freedom. The ability to weigh the options presented in a particular set of circumstances requires a level of maturity that most people do not have and cannot embrace. As the world grows more complex, however, that is what is and will be required of us.

St. Augustine is quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that ethical behavior is to be determined by this single assertion: “We are to love God and do whatever we please”—in other words, we cannot go wrong if love of God is at the heart of every decision we make and every action we take.

We have examined the biblical data, which suggest that the Ten Commandments did not have a single source, but came in three versions (Exod. 34, Exod. 20 and Deut. 5) born out of different times and circumstances. Next we found evidence that this code has been dramatically edited at various points in history, destroying forever the idea that those laws were either eternal or unchanging. If the commandments have changed in the past, they are surely subject to change in the future. Thus relativity replaces certainty. The claim that we have ever possessed objectivity through the divine revelation of the laws of God becomes hopelessly compromised by every standard we apply. All of these ethical conclusions are startling to those who like to pretend that right and wrong are objective categories and not subjective evaluations.

we must all become situational ethicists.

If I were to list the ten great moral laws of the universe, a prohibition against making graven images would certainly not be among them.

In the primitive culture of ancient Israel, there were no lawyers to write legal contracts and no courts to enforce the terms of a legal deal. So when a business transaction was agreed to between two negotiators, they would clasp hands and swear in the name of the Lord that they would be true to the bargain to which both had agreed. If later one or the other of them failed to abide by the agreed-upon terms of this deal, they were guilty of having “taken the name of the Lord in vain.” That was this commandment’s original meaning. Is such a law necessary or appropriate today?

It seems that none of these Ten Commandments can be invested with ultimate, absolute authority. On what basis, then, do we determine that good is good and that evil is evil? If it is not on the basis of some absolute standard, then to what do we turn in search of ultimate answers? Does relative truth mean no truth? Does relativity in ethics mean no ethics?

The expansion of life is good, while the diminution of life is evil.

The inescapable question thus becomes: How will love be practiced in the circumstances of our very modern world? The burden of freedom, with its relentless call to maturity, is found in the juxtaposition between life-affirming principles and our existential situations. It is there that modern ethical principles are born.

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, and not once in the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps that relative infrequency will raise concerns, challenge our preconceptions and begin to erode some of our presuppositions.

Is prayer something like a letter to Santa Claus? “Dear God, I have been a good boy or girl so I want you to do A, B, C and D for me.” That is certainly the way that many people seem to understand prayer.

For me prayer remains a profound, life-giving experience, but I no longer understand it to be the petition of one in need to One who has the power to meet that need. Indeed, I regard that outdated concept of prayer to be like a delusional game of magic, a childhood concept out of which all of us need to grow. Perhaps the word “prayer” itself is where the problem lies. The Bible does appear to say that if we bring our concerns before God, God will address them, but is that what prayer is really all about?

It was in the conversation that the meaning of God was shared between two people; it was in the conversation that the boundaries we humans erect to keep ourselves safe from the threat of another were transgressed. 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 hospital experience became a starting place for me in regard to the meaning of prayer. Prayer understood this new way became profoundly real for me, while the form that prayer had traditionally taken began to shift dramatically. From that day to this, prayer has been far more about “being” than it has been about “doing.” This was for me a radical but necessary shift, which gave me a new starting place to enter a great and even transformative adventure into the depths of my faith. Experience always trumps explanation.

Prayer does not bend God’s will to a new conclusion. Prayer does not bring a cure where there is no possibility of a cure. Prayer does not create miracles to which we can testify publicly.

When Paul enjoined us to “pray without ceasing” (I Thess. 5:17), did he mean to engage in the activity of praying unceasingly? Or did he mean that we are to see all of life as a prayer, calling the world to enter that place where life, love and being reveal the meaning of God? Is Christianity not coming to the place where my “I” meets another’s “Thou,” and in that moment God is present?

Prayer to me is 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. Can that understanding of prayer, so free of miracle and magic, make any real difference in our world?

The other realm, called “heaven,” was constructed as a place of bliss and reward; it was created and reserved for the virtuous, the saved, those who acknowledged “Jesus Christ as savior” and who were thus baptized. Please note that by adding the baptized and the “true believers,” the church thus added “belief control” to “behavior control.” One could not think outside the box of orthodoxy, the church was asserting, if one wanted to be “saved.”

Expanded life, life beyond finitude, is embraced. I am convinced that it is real. I will live as if that is so and be prepared for the next adventure that self-consciousness brings my way. The only place I can hold this conviction and prepare for what comes next is in a community of seekers. That is what I ultimately believe the church must be. So to that church with all its imperfections I cling, for that provides me with the place to touch and enter “the eternal.”

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. Any structure in either the secular world or the institutional church that diminishes the humanity of any child of God on any external basis of race, gender or sexual orientation must be exposed publicly and vigorously. 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.

Christianity did not come into being with a Bible that contained “the Word of God.” It was not born with creeds fully formed that its constituents had to believe. It did not place God upon a throne to dispense justice, nor did it place worshippers on their knees in the stance of beggars. It did not possess political power, seek to maintain behavior standards or define good and evil for all to follow. All these things were added later.

The challenges are great: Can Christian theology once again be enabled to interact with contemporary knowledge? Can Christian liturgies be made to reflect reality rather than nostalgia? Can Christianity affirm human oneness while still embracing its radical diversity? Can this faith create a new institutional form that fosters a truth-seeking, universal community? These are the questions which this book has tried to raise, and to some extent address. I now bring this work to a conclusion with the hope that a resounding yes will be heard from a newly enlightened faith tradition. Hints of this kind of purpose have always been present in Christianity. We do not have to create them out of nothing. Perhaps, as G. K. Chesterton has said: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”*

Matthew was, I believe, sounding the call to a universal humanity. “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.” It meant, “Go beyond the barriers you have erected in your biologically driven search for survival.”

When Paul tried to describe to the Galatians what was involved in his call to “put on Christ,” he said that it meant that human divisions must disappear. In Christ there is no longer “Jew nor Greek,” “slave nor free,” “male nor female.” All are “one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:26–29). That is what Jesus meant, and that is what the original Christ experience was, before the Bible came to be called the “Word of God,” before we became scripture’s defenders and before the creeds became the “essence of our faith.” It was also before any form of liturgy became the “only way to worship.”

For example, I can say that I am a Trinitarian because that term describes my experience of God. The Father element of the Trinity means the experience of God as an external Other that is beyond anything that I can imagine. The Spirit means the experience of God as an internal reality that is deep within me and inseparable from my humanity. The Son means the experience of God made manifest in a particular life. The Trinity is not a description of my God, then, but of my God experience. It does not mean that God is a Trinity. That would be an idolatrous claim. My experience of God and God are not the same. God is not beyond my ability to experience, but the nature of God is beyond my ability to describe.

Christianity is not about religion; it is about life. God is not an external being; God is “Being itself,” manifested in all that is. So we look anew at the biblical portrait of Jesus and see it in terms of being, not doing. In the New Testament, who is it that comes to Jesus? It is the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the lepers, the adulterers, the thieves, the broken, the warped, the damaged; and each finds in him the love and acceptance of God. That is what Christianity has always been and that is what the Christianity of tomorrow must reflect.

The Christianity of the future must also be willing and able to dialogue with the other great religious systems of the world without defining any of them as lacking or deficient. Our task is not to judge, but to accept them as they are, to call them to live fully, love wastefully and be all that they can be in the infinite variety of our humanity. We see the Christian life as a journey into the mystery of God, into a new humanity, into the ability to give ourselves away to others as the mark of the presence of Christ in us. The reformation we chart is scary, but it is noble, compelling and freeing. Even more, however, it gives the Christian story a chance to live in a new time in history. I pray it will. I pray it can. I believe it must.

Prior to his death in 2009, Forrest Church was the senior minister of the famous All Souls Unitarian-Universalist Church in New York City. He was also the son of a former Democratic senator from Idaho who sought the nomination of his party for the presidency of the United States in 1976. Forrest Church had an amazing gift with words. For example, the title of one of his books was God and Other Famous Liberals. I always wished I could have thought of that title before he did! 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 have not moved, however, beyond that sense of the reality and that holiness of what I call the “infinite Other.” Human language is woefully inadequate when one seeks to speak of that which cannot be embraced inside the human boundaries that mark the edges of the world of existence. I must, however, continue to use human words since I have no other way to communicate thought. So I do, but with the caveat that words might point to but cannot ever capture or hold that truth of which I seek to speak.

Finally, I believe I experience God, in the words of my greatest theological mentor, Reformed German theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), as the Ground of Being. That is a difficult phrase to embrace. It was borrowed and refined by Tillich from the philosopher Plotinus, an early-third-century-CE Greek philosopher, who was himself not a Christian. If God is the Ground of Being, then the only way I can worship God is by having the courage to be all that I can be; and the more deeply I can be all that I can be, the more I can and do make God visible. So the reality of God to me is discovered in the experience which compels me to “live fully, to love wastefully and to have the courage to be all that I can be.”

I am a Christian. I am a disciple of Jesus. Why? Because when I look at the life of Jesus, as that life has been refracted to me through both scripture and tradition, I see a person who was so fully alive that I perceive in him the infinite Source of Life. I see one who loves so totally, so wastefully, that I perceive in him the infinite Source of Love. I see one who was profoundly capable of being all that he could be, whether it was on Palm Sunday when he was hailed as a king—there is nothing so seductive as the sweet narcotic of human praise—or on Good Friday when he was being put to death, when even the threat of non-being did not alter his humanity. In both experiences, Jesus was and is what he was and is. He was not changed by flattery, nor was his being diminished by the imminence of his death. So I join with St. Paul in the affirmation of faith, “God was in Christ,” bringing oneness out of diversity, wholeness out of brokenness and eternity out of time.