shelby spong on what jesus calls us to do
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Bishop Shelby Spong
17/06/2001Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Bailiwick of jersey in the United States for more than xx years and is now the pre-eminent vocalization for liberal Christianity in the Western world. He is also a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. John Cleary talked to John Spong Lord's day 17th nearly his life and his work.
JOHN CLEARY: �My adjacent guest is someone I spoke to from Tasmania. He's the contentious Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, simply retired: John Shelby Spong. He'due south been disinvited to speak in Brisbane, he's not invited to speak in the pulpits of Sydney, but he's here to speak with u.s. tonight. Some of yous may have heard Jack Spong say a few words to Tony Delroy a few nights ago; well he's forth with us tonight. He's touring Australia to promote his near recent books: his biography, 'Here I Stand' and some other volume on whether Christianity must change or die.
JOHN CLEARY: Bishop Jack Spong, bully to talk to you once more.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Thank you lot, John, it'due south good to exist back with yous.
JOHN CLEARY: We've had a number of conversations over the years, from JJJ, the youth network, to Radio National, to here on Dominicus Nights, and quite oftentimes the theme has been your role as what'southward been seen as an amanuensis provocateur in the church. And one of our national papers in the last week or so has treated you to a flattery, a backhander if yous like, in some means: it compares you with Luther in nailing your 39 theses to the wall of the church, saying in much the same way as Luther challenged the church of his day, so the church must be challenged today to alter or die.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Yes, well I think that'southward an authentic clarification. I have chosen for a new and radical reformation that I've suggested will be and then radical it'll make the Reformation of the 16th century await like a Mothers' Union tea party.
JOHN CLEARY: Them's fighting words!
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: If you look back from the vanish point of 400 years on the Reformation of the 16th century, it was basically near authority and power. Both the Protestants and the Catholics read the aforementioned Bible and treated information technology more or less in the same manner; they had the same Creeds; the real issues were which of these two parts of the trunk of Christ are authorised to speak for God and to represent Jesus in the globe of the 16th century. At present I retrieve what we live in today is a totally different kind of reality. I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I tin can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping tape books. I live on the other side of Isaac Newton; I can no longer conceive of things that I practice not understand every bit simply being supernatural invasions of the theistic God to practise a miracle. I alive on the other side of Charles Darwin and I tin no longer run into homo light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see united states of america rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication. I live on the other side of Sigmund Freud, and I can no longer employ the kind of parent language of the past without beingness selfconscious well-nigh the passive dependency that that encourages. And I alive on the other side of Albert Einstein, and I know what relativity means in all of life, and and then I can no longer claim that I possess objective and revealed truth and it's infallible, or it's inherent, those get claims out of the past that are no longer relevant for 21st century people.
Now my question is: I am a Christian and I desire to exist able to sing the Lord'southward vocal in the 21st century only I tin can't sing it in the accents of the 1st century or with the words of the 1st century, and then how can we reshape the very words of our tradition so that this quondam song can be sung in a new way so that I and my children and my grandchildren can nonetheless admit Jesus as their Lord? That's what I call back the Reformation is nigh.
JOHN CLEARY: The offset affair many people would say is Yep, but so you have the question of the infant and the bathwater. What can yous junk without losing the essence, what is of the essence here?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well that'due south a very important question. I don't think that in a postal service Copernicum earth we tin can even so think of God as a being who sits above the sky and periodically invades the world in a supernatural way. And that's the God that we find described primarily in the Bible. Merely that's also the God who in many places acts in a rather immoral way. A God who can send plague after plague later on plague upon the Egyptians, a God whose last plague is to murder the get-go-built-in of every Egyptian household, a God who will open the Red Sea to let the Jewish people go through and enclose the Red Body of water to drown all the Egyptians is at the very least, not a very pleasant God if you lot happen to exist an Egyptian. And I think that's what nosotros've got to begin to understand. There'due south a lot of tribal retentiveness, a lot of tribal history that we accept called the give-and-take of God. A God that I know happens to be a God of the Egyptians and the Amarites, and the Malachites and the Jews and the Christians equally well. And I call up nosotros've got to broaden that concept.
JOHN CLEARY: A lot of people would come that far with you lot, but a number of them would say Yes, but you lot're going a pace further, you lot're well-nigh going a step into non-theism.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well what I'yard trying to advise, John, is that theism is a human definition of God, information technology is not God. That's a distinction that I notice information technology's imperative to brand. Our English language language really says if you're non a theist, the but culling is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to practise is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God across the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and disbelief. I believe that God is very existent. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. I call this God past dissimilar words. I describe God as the source of life and the source of honey and the ground of existence. I engage God when I live fully and dear wastefully and accept the courage to be who I am. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, and that'due south the God I desire to live out of then that all of the people of this world have a better opportunity to live fully and dear wastefully and to be who they are in the infinite diverseness of humanity. That'south why I call back we can't accept a Christian church that discriminates against people of colour, or that discriminates against women, interim equally if they're 2d-form citizens and not capable of being priests or bishops or pope. And I don't remember nosotros tin can have a church that discriminates against gay and lesbian people or any other people on the basis of who they are.
JOHN CLEARY: There is a tradition which that resonates with, that stands alongside the Christian tradition. That seems to hark dorsum to the Jewish tradition of God, this is the God who cannot exist named, the God who will not be seen, that Moses is not allowed to see, is non allowed to approach, who expresses himself non equally a person, but as a lawmaking of ethics if y'all similar, the 10 Commandments. God says to Moses, 'I volition not allow you see me, just this is the manner I volition express myself to the people'.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: I going a lot in that direction. The God of the Hebrews is a God that man language, we're not fifty-fifty supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that ways just building idols, I think that means as well trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. God is beyond that.
I get into the Hebrew Scriptures often, looking for different means in which minority voices have expressed the reality of God, and I find them. God is the air current in the Hebrew tradition, the life-giving, animating current of air that gets identified with spirit. God is the rock upon which you stand, and you cannot fall when you're standing upon the rock. And when yous become into the New Testament, you accept the get-go Epistle of John saying 'God is love'. I desire to motility that another step, and say, 'If that'due south correct, so love is too God'. And then I want to see God in the air current and in the stone and in the love that binds people together. That's not a beingness, supernatural in power, sitting beyond the sky and ready to do a miracle, that'south a God who is in the midst of life, that'southward a God I am engaging constantly, that'southward the God who calls me into the fullness of beingness and forces me as a disciple and worshipper of this God to endeavour to be an amanuensis of life and love and existence to every other man creature that this earth has e'er produced.
JOHN CLEARY: Yous're taking Christianity back in some ways to s a ready of roots which belong still in the Church building of Jerusalem. It's pre the argument that Paul and Peter had which bankrupt the church out of its Jewish traditions in many ways.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: In some ways that's true, and in other ways, what I'm trying to practice -
JOHN CLEARY: I hateful I'grand proverb are you recapturing the Jewish roots of Christianity, yous want more than of that?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: I hope and then, but across that, fifty-fifty in the Jewish tradition, they put limits on God. I want u.s. to go into the radical roots of our faith tradition and then deeply that nosotros break every boundary and escape every limit. I call back that the limits that we take in the Christian faith today where we claim that merely those of us who do certain things and say certain creeds are really God's people. I don't believe God is a Christian, John, I believe that Christianity is a fashion nosotros travel into the mystery of God, and I don't believe nosotros combined God with the limits of our Christian system or any other religious system. I think that they're just doorways through which nosotros walk into an ultimate mystery that's beyond all of our words. I'one thousand impressed with the mystical tradition more and more as I get older, and one of the things I detect out about the mystics is that on their journey into the wonder and mystery of God, they go to the place where no words whatever longer tin be uttered, so they merely sit in silence in awe and wonder earlier the Divine mystery. There's a sense in which all theology must finally be transcended. All Bibles, all creeds, as y'all journey into the wonder of God.
JOHN CLEARY: Information technology'southward Stoddart Kennedy's line about the unutterable dazzler.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: That's correct, Stoddart Kennedy likewise said God was like the ocean; it never changes, and yet it ever changes; you lot cannot capture it in any epitome.
JOHN CLEARY: Yes. Or once more, that verse form that's in many hymn books:
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire uttered or unexpressed; The murmur of a hidden burn that lingers in the breast.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: That's correct. You find in the Christian tradition over and over again, places where great people of groovy depth and great spirit collided with what seems to exist a very shallow wordy construction of what God is all about, and when that happens, the words but disappear. I find that in the writings of Meister Eckhardt in the 14th century. I detect it supremely in the writings of a man who is my friend and mentor, John A.T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich in England in the 1960s, '50s and '60s.
JOHN CLEARY: My guest, John Shelby Spong retired Bishop of Newark, New Bailiwick of jersey, controversial author, or author controversialist I should say, of books like 'Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism', 'Living in Sin', 'This Hebrew Lord', and nosotros're talking about the possibilities of a new Reformation.
But earlier we get to that, let'south find a piddling chip about who John Shelby Spong is. His biography, 'Here I Stand' has been published by Harper Collins. Looks big, but information technology's a great read; don't be intimidated past the size, folks, this is a book that's eminently accessible and eminently readable.
John Spong, it seems to me that your early on shaping in the church, and your sense of yourself and what's of import, comes primarily from a couple of driving centres. One is growing up in a fundamentalist environment, and the second is the confrontation with race inside that surroundings. Would that be truthful?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Those are certainly major. I grew up in the fundamentalist church, an evangelical Anglican church. But information technology was a church building that taught me a lot of my prejudices. It taught me for instance, that blacks were non welcomed in that church building and that segregation was really god'south volition. It taught me that Jews were evil people. The only Jews I eve met in my church was through my Sunday Schoolhouse literature, and they were always evil people out to get Jesus. Information technology gave nativity to anti-Semitism in me. It also taught me that women were junior to men because women couldn't be priests, women couldn't be acolytes, women couldn't serve on the vestries of our church building, women had to do the kitchen piece of work or the laundry work of the church not the leadership work. And it taught me that homosexuals were evil people. And every 1 of those disputes, whenever I would question them, the Bible would exist quoted to prove that those prejudices were in fact God's will. Well getting out of that system was an incredible experience for me, and it was race was the original thing, because the segregated world that I lived in was finally broken down by law in the Us, and the nation had to adapt to a new bit of reality.
JOHN CLEARY: This is you lot growing up in the '50s and '60s when these problems began to surface with Brown versus the Board of Teaching in the Supreme Court in the United States.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: I'grand a little older than you lot, John, I was growing upwards in the '30s and '40s. The Chocolate-brown versus Lath of Education was 1954 and information technology declared segregation to be immoral and inherently unequal, and it demanded that information technology exist dismantled. And that meant that a whole style of life, which had been justified by the Christian church in my region, had to be dismantled. At present I had some interesting experiences earlier, where I had raised questions within myself, and I recall ane that I tell about in the autobiography, when my male parent, who had taught me ever to say, 'Sir' and 'Ma'am' to my elders whenever I responded to them, punished me for saying 'Sir' to an elderly black man. He said, We do not say 'Sir' to what he called Negroes. And I remember thinking that something'southward really incorrect about that, and I couldn't have been more than than three or 4 years old.
I remember also a fourth dimension when I was the President of the Anglican Young People in our diocese. And I discovered that there was another organisation for Anglican young people who happened to exist what we called in those days coloured. And when I discovered this, I went to my Bishop, or I wrote to my Bishop and told him that when we had the gathering of the Anglican Immature People of our Diocese, I wanted to invite all of the young people, including those who were the minorities. And my Bishop write dorsum and said that would be inappropriate, and our people are not ready for the impact of black boys and white girls coming together in a social context at a youth convention. And I recall saying that I call back my Bishop is wrong.
I didn't have a black classmate in any schoolhouse I ever attended until I was in graduate school at the Theological College. So my church building was securely implicated in segregation in negative race activities. And when the Civil Rights movement began in the United States information technology was clear to me that I had to identify with that motility, because information technology's a movement calling people out of the bondage of prejudice and into the fullness of humanity. I happen to believe that God's prototype is in every homo, and that every man existence must care for information technology with ultimate respect, as I would treat somebody who is a very God presence to me. And the black people in America were the commencement people who made this very clear to me. Later in my life, women and gay and lesbian people also confronted me with the aforementioned dimension simply the commencement was the Civil Rights move and the blackness people who are the children of God and who had to be welcomed in the life of the church. Well the church was living a lie, and I didn't want to be a part of a church building that would say not all of God's people are welcome here.
JOHN CLEARY: Those sides of fundamentalism that you saw requite yous images that seem to be redolent with violence and rejection, of Judg mentalism. It seems to exist compounded, you had a life which engaged this in a fairly direct fashion. Information technology seems to be compounded by the fact that y'all're moving in the South, you come to one of your parishes in Lynchburg, Virginia, and downwards the road, the local Baptist pastor is none other than a very immature Jerry Farwell.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: That's correct. Those were interesting days.
JOHN CLEARY: A formative confrontation I would think.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well it was, and Jerry at that point was merely beginning. Simply Jerry'south career was sort of a typical, evangelical, fundamentalist career. He got his start in Lynchburg preaching at the local town jail to the people that they'd picked up on their drunk sweep on Sabbatum dark, and he sort of literally used the Gospel to scare the living yell out of these people, and convert them. And he moved from that into what was a very segregationist signal of view. Jerry was a racist and I don't think at that place's whatsoever doubt about that. He did everything he could to avoid having blacks and whites come together in schoolhouse, and he quoted the Scriptures to testify that. He even went and then far equally to publicly oppose releasing Nelson Mandela from jail and said that the African National Congress was a communist forepart organisation that needed to exist confronted by Christian people.
Jerry's come a long mode I must say, in his credit. He's come a long way on that issue in the course of his life, and it would be unfair to call Jerry Farwell a racist today. But his origins were there, merely like my origins are there, and I think we need to own that, and movement beyond information technology in a self-conscious way.
JOHN CLEARY: Your pastoral experience was what seems to have transformed you lot. That is, you became a pastor, and importantly as a pastor, a teacher. What were the significant community events, that is you lot describe them as 'learning with and through others' which transformed you.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well they were both public and private, John. One of the jobs of a priest is to be present with people in what our prayer book calls 'problem, sorrow, demand, sickness or any other adversity.' And one is privileged to practise that, that'southward one of the cracking privileges of the priesthood. And equally you do that, yous immediately take to broaden your agreement of life, because people are and so wonderfully rich and diverse, and people are aptitude and twisted in all sorts of directions by the forces that have moulded and shaped their lives. And yous end to be judgemental, it seems to me, the more deeply y'all engage human life. And some were quite public. We mentioned the battle over the desegregation of the schools, but I besides lived through the things like the execution of President John Kennedy, the assassination of President John Kennedy, which put our nation into a very deep trauma. I also lived through the time when the American spy planes discovered that the Russians were putting missile sites into Cuba, just 90 miles away from the United States, and loading them with atomic warheads, and my nation and Russia stood on the brink of a hot war, not a common cold war in the 1960s.
JOHN CLEARY: Which people tin can encounter in the picture, 'Thirteen Days' which is touring the land at the moment.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: That's correct. And you take to engage those bug in the public loonshit. Part of the job of the priesthood is to interpret life of the real globe inside the eternal verities of the God we merits to worship. So it's the combination of those personal pastoral opportunities and those public necessities to interpret God in the low-cal of 20th century reality that I recollect forms the life of the priest. Now unfortunately, I think so many clergy and then many churches spend their time sort of rehearsing the formulas of yesterday, and trying to fit everything into some narrow categories. And becoming quite judgemental of other people in the procedure.
I regard the march in our church to free us from our racism, the tremendous struggle nosotros underwent to sort of bring women into the life of the church, and fifty-fifty the struggle in more recent days to have a new understanding of what it ways to be a gay or lesbian person, I regard those every bit gospel opportunities that accept chosen me even deeper into my experience of being a Christian. But so many people in the church regard those too, controversial times that people have sort of disturbed the church's unity. I'm non actually interested in being a fellow member of a church that is racist or male chauvinist or homophobic. I accept got to be a fellow member of a Christian customs that takes God at God's word and says 'Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will give yous rest.' If we ever hang out a shingle that says 'All are not welcome to come just as they are', then I don't desire to be a part of that church whatever longer, it'southward a very simple process for me.
JOHN CLEARY: Jack Spong, you outline in your autobiography some moments of acute sadness for yourself, but with others that leads you to a new view of what suffering is, and how to understand suffering. There is the story of your own family'due south journey through this, but there'south also a quite stark story almost the immature family who take to witness their viii-yr-sometime boy being scalded to death at Yellowstone Park. How practise yous come to terms with innocents suffering like that, and where is the theology and the mystery of God in that?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: If yous live in this world deeply enough, y'all become aware that in that location'southward an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of suffering that human beings bear. It is actually very difficult to be human, considering you accept to deal with a world that is not ever an easy place to alive.
As a pastor, I remember well a story that I relate in the autobiography, of a couple who moved into Richmond, Virginia, and they came to my church and they filled out a visitor's carte and gave me their proper noun and address and said they were in church and indicated they would similar to take me phone call on them. I called them up on mayhap Tuesday of the next week and made a engagement to come out that evening. As far as I knew, this was a family of four people. He was a scientist from the Dupont Corporation who had recently moved into Richmond with his wife, who was a nurse, and two children.
I went out and we spent the starting time office of the evening doing what you normally exercise: you sort of talk in a shallow way most this, that and the other. And and then I said to them, 'Tell me almost your move to Virginia', and this remarkable story came out. They had actually lived in Buffalo, New York, and they had sold their house and closed their house and put their furniture in storage and taken their family on a trip around the United States. And i of their stops was in the Yellowstone National Park. They entered that park with three children, two boys and a girl. The eldest child and the youngest child beingness boys. And in the course of their time in the Yellowstone Park, the youngest of their sons, an eight-year-old kid named Andy, cruel into the thermal pools of Yellowstone Park and was scalded to expiry before their optics. They entered that park as a family unit of v, they left that park every bit a family of 4. They could not even retrieve the body, they couldn't take closure to this traumatic feel, they couldn't go back to Buffalo because they didn't have a habitation there, they couldn't come to Richmond because they hadn't moved into Richmond even so, and and then this family unit had to journey on their trip where they were going to see some relatives, and that's probably what they needed to practise more than anything else.
And when they moved into Richmond, the people saw them equally a family unit of four, and you don't walk upwardly and say, 'Have you all been traumatised recently?' so information technology was not an easy affair for people to talk about. So when I raised questions about their move, this incredible story came out, and this was the commencement time they began to process their enormous grief and that experience.
Now what accounts for that? The world is only a globe in which things like that happen, accidents happen, tragedies occur, sicknesses occur. We used to think that when they occurred it was because God was punishing people, but we've learned a great deal about life since nosotros had those ideas. We've discovered for example that germs and viruses cause sickness, that's non God'south punishment. And nosotros've discovered that antibiotics and surgery cure sinners every bit well as saints. So the understanding of sickness or tragedy as sort of divine punishment, is simply not an adequate category. How do you make sense out of the death of an 8-year-old son scalding before his parents' eyes in the thermal pools of Yellowstone Park? I don't know. I do know that you can walk with people in that experience. I don't think y'all tin accept the hurting away, but you tin can take the loneliness of the pain away, and yous can surround them with the beloved of the whole Christian community, and you lot can enable their wounds to be healed inside the dear of the Christian community, and perhaps that'southward all nosotros tin can do.
JOHN CLEARY: So in that instance, God is in the customs?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: God is in the community, yep, and I remember that one of the not bad things that'south happened liturgically in the life of the church building in the concluding 100 years has been that we used to put the altar confronting the east wing of the church building and turn the back of the priest to the people and so that he could face the God who was out at that place somewhere. And at present nosotros've brought those altars out and we've turned the priest around; he now faces the congregation, or he or she now faces the congregation, because I think we've come to a new agreement that God is present in the midst of the community and the life of the customs. And that's a make new and wondrous insight.
I've also y'all know, lived through some personal things. Not simply did I have an alcoholic father who was abusive and who died when I was twelve, leaving united states in the midst of apple-polishing poverty, but I also had a mentally ill married woman and I've had other members of my family who accept had to cope with dreadful sicknesses in which all of the values of their lives seem to be sacrificed to the sickness. Now how do you lot bargain with that? I think you go along to walk into the future. You lot encounter my sense is that God doesn't hope to requite usa security, that what God promises is that God volition be present in the midst of the radical insecurity of life, and that'south really all I desire to deal with. If religion gives y'all security, I recollect information technology's taken away your humanity. If religion gives you the courage to embrace the fact that life is painful, that life is radically insecure, and that it gives y'all the courage not to fall apart in the face of the tragedies that you lot face, and then I think there's something powerful and expert.
And I practise believe that community is necessary to healing, of people who are in all sorts of human dilemmas. So that if we can bring the life of the Christian community, whether it's in the form of the relationship of the pastor to the person, or whether it's in the class of the whole community reaching out, and sort of helping people over the difficult times of life, that that's one of the great vocations of the Christian church, and one of the things that I think we need to turn our conscious attending to.
JOHN CLEARY: How then is this God realised for people? We may 'see through a glass darkly', and it may exist that God is beyond apprehension and needs to be across the sort of apprehension that requires to pin him downwardly with definitions or to pivot her downwards with definitions, merely is there something of substance, is there a reality beyond these apprehensions, that these apprehensions insinuate to, if you similar?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well I am absolutely convinced that there is, and that's why I alive my life the way I do. St Paul is said to have preached a sermon in the Book of Acts in which he talked near the God in whom he lived and moved and had his existence. That'south the kind of God I experience. John, I cannot tell y'all or anyone else what God is like or who God is like. I can only tell you how I experience God, and I wish the Christian church building and all Christian people would realise that unproblematic distinction. None of the states can tell any other person who God is, we can but tell that other person how we accept experienced God.
And so when I describe God, I am not trying to describe what God is, I'thousand only trying to describe my experience. And to get back to my trilogy: I experience God as life, as love, and as beingness. I meet that God in Jesus of Nazareth, and that God calls me into living and loving and being. So every bit I worship this God, I become more than fully human being. At present does this mean God is a person? I don't know that, I only know I experience God in the depths of my personhood. I said in Perth last Lord's day that though I am a Trinitarian, I could never say that God is a Trinity because I don't retrieve a human being can e'er tell anybody what God is like. But I experience God.
JOHN CLEARY: Just do you think the Trinity is an endeavor to express an experience?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: That's right. The Trinity is an attempt to explicate my experience. I experience God as across anything I tin imagine, otherness, transcendence, that's what the symbol, rather patriarchal symbol, only the symbol Begetter means. I experience God every bit a depth within myself, deeper than my own jiff, and that'due south what spirit means. And I experience God every bit incarnate in the lives of other people, and incarnate particularly for me in the defining life of Jesus of Nazareth. But incarnate in all people. And since I think God is only 1 God, and then my feel has to sort of find a way to put these different elements together, and that's where the Trinity comes from. It'southward non what God is, it'due south what my experience of God is.
JOHN CLEARY: And then this is more than than simply ideal idealism dressed upwardly with theology?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Well I promise so. You know, I alive my life self-consciously and deeply inside the Christian organized religion. People are very surprised, you lot know, they hear me only as a sort of controversial person raising questions about the traditional way that Christianity is understood, but that's non who I am. Who I am is a person that is almost God intoxicated. I spend part of every twenty-four hour period of my life in prayer and in Bible written report, helping me to try to understand the depths of this experience so that I can life this experience in my relationships. My action on behalf of people of colour and women and gay and lesbian people, is not marching to the latest Liberal drumbeat for civil right. My crusade for those people is because to deny anybody admission to the beloved of God is to aim a dagger at the very center of the Gospel, and I don't want to be a office of a Christian community that's nevertheless tied upwardly inside its prejudices and particularly tied up inside prejudices that nosotros seek to justify by quoting the Bible in order to maintain those prejudices in our heart of hearts.
JOHN CLEARY: There'southward been some news in the printing in Australia over the last week or so of the ballot of Peter Jensen as Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. Now over the period of your date with Commonwealth of australia, the Sydney Diocese and what it represents in Anglicanism is at somewhat of a pole to what y'all've come to represent in Anglicanism. Simply at that place may be some things you have in common. Peter Jensen the other day, spoke about the Prime Minister'southward need to actually alter his attitude on reconciliation with Aborigines, to alter his attitude on the treatment of refugees, existence the strangers within our midst. Now it seems to me you lot both there are highly-seasoned to something which could exist called a universal principle. Are there universals embodies in God?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Aye there are, but I call up that human beings get on very unsafe basis when nosotros recollect we tin articulate those things. I think that God is real, but I don't think any of my descriptions of God are real. I call back they tin only betoken to God. I think that there is such a thing as ultimate truth, but I don't think I tin can ever claim that I possess it.
JOHN CLEARY: Only you practice stand confronting racism, for example. Peter Jensen stands against it. And so do y'all share some sort of appeal to a set of universals? I take it you'd support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Yes. I don't want to exist either commenting on internal diplomacy in the Anglican church building in Australia or political affairs; I'one thousand merely not conversant plenty, merely permit me say that for me the ultimate basis for Christian ethics and it comes out of the fact that we feel God in the homo class in Jesus of Nazareth, then the ultimate footing for Christian ethics for me is, does this action heighten life, make information technology more possible for people to love and increase their being? Or does this action diminish life, make people less capable of loving and diminish their sense of their worth and their being? So that if life and beloved and beingness are the way I understand God, then anything that diminishes the life or the ability to love or the chapters to be for any other human being, is evil. So I would say that to treat the Ancient people as if they are holy people to God and to exercise whatever you can to enhance their being, and to call them into a deeper sense of self worth, is a positive affair. I remember that the feminist movement is of God, because information technology says that you are diminishing half of the human race by acting a if women are not equal to men in whatsoever area of life. I would say that the gay rights move is of God, and the homophobic opposition to the gay rights movement which is and then often masked in quotations from Leviticus, is not of God, it is of the negativity towards human life, because the gay movement is an attempt to say Yes, that percentage of the population who happens to be gay or lesbian is also holy, and nosotros want to call them into living fully and loving wastefully, and being all that they tin can peradventure be.
Remember 100 years agone nosotros persecuted left-handed people because we idea they were abnormal, and we tied their left hands behind their backs in our ignorance, and tried to make them into normal right-handed people. I remember we're in the danger of trying to do the same affair to the gay and lesbian population. I think we need to go to the identify where we accept the words of that hymn,
Only as I am without one plea, Oh lamb of God I come.
And the church must exist a community that welcomes people who come as they are and so calls them in the particularity of their creation into being all that they tin can exist. I can never be anything unlike from Jack Spong, merely I hope I tin be all that Jack Spong can be. That'southward the difference.
JOHN CLEARY: What I'm trying to get at there is that you are able to stand in that position because you lot have come to understand sure things about the nature of God for yourself. Now are we saying so there are things we can understand about God, and these things are universals, that is, there are moral absolutes in the globe, certainly in that location is relativism in the mode it may exist interpreted, but ultimately at that place are foundational understandings, that in a sense God is truth.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Yep. I would say that. And I have no difficulty with that. The difficulty comes when I begin to say that my understanding of God is the truth of God. That'due south when I begin to persecute people who take different understanding from mine.
JOHN CLEARY: That's where you differ with Peter Jensen.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Then I would never say that you lot and God take got to gather, because I would be imposing my idea of God on that state of affairs. Now I think I've got a responsibleness personally, to seek to bring my understanding of God and my value organization in my life together, and I volition show to that in any fashion I can. But I don't think it's up to me to tell anybody else how God is operating in their life, at least in a specific style. I'll certainly exist willing to say that in a principle way. I believe that there is truth, ultimate truth, but I don't believe that anybody captures it. And what we've washed as a church throughout history is to identify our fractional truths with the ultimate truths of God, and the test that we know that that's wrong is that when we exercise that, we wind up rejecting and hating and killing and persecuting anybody that disagrees with u.s.a.. That cannot be a manifestation of the ultimate truth of God.
JOHN CLEARY: Jack Spong, it's been terrific to talk to y'all again.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: John, it'south always fun to visit with yous on whatsoever occasion. You always bring out some of the very best that I recollect at that place is in journalism, and I'm grateful for that.
JOHN CLEARY: Great to talk to yous on Sunday Night. We wish you well for your visit, and come back again soon.
JOHN SHELBY SPONG: Cheers.
Technical Product: Susan Clarke
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s1238959.htm
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