Was Jesus gay?
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Investigation of Jesus' libido: Radical bottom, married with children or eunuch?

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Terrible swift sword
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(12/24/97)

The year in books
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Save these books!
By Dwight Garner
(12/04/97)

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________O ^{ld wine in new bottles}

________THE CHURCH DOESN'T HAVE TO REJECT

________ITS PAST TO EMBRACE ITS FUTURE

BY MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS | For John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop of Newark, every week is Holy Week. Spong says he lives in "constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence," and he believes his vocation is to exhume and resurrect the spiritual content of Christianity from its worldly internment in the Christian church. That's the stated goal of his new book, "Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile." But the title is false advertising, and maybe even false witness, because the presumption of this book is that Christianity is already dead.

Contemporary Christians, according to Spong, have entered a period of religious disorientation on par with the Jews' Babylonian exile, when everything that had given meaning to their religion was destroyed. In the same way, Christians today "are exiled from the worldview in which [their] creed was formed." We cannot repeat the Apostles' Creed with integrity because it's flush with misnomers such as "Father Almighty." "Father" won't fly because it's "filled with limiting cultural definitions" that have been used to justify the oppression of women; and if God were truly "almighty," he would cure leukemia upon request.

Evidently, Spong believes this crisis of confidence is widely shared: "Many of us can continue to be believers only if we are able to be honest believers," Spong writes. "We wonder if it is still possible to be a believer and a citizen of our century at the same time." It's worth taking a minute to wonder, who exactly is "we"?

By most accounts, church attendance is thriving (especially in conservative and fundamentalist congregations), and the political clout of the Christian Right is still strong enough to drain some plausibility from Spong's argument that Christianity is dead, at least as a spiritual or social force. However, Spong's book engages conservative Christians only to dismiss the validity of their faith, which he does most forcefully by asserting that modern science is the foundation of any honest contemporary worldview. An early chapter of the book uses Galileo, Darwin, Freud and (believe it or not) Carl Sagan to argue that theism -- any definition of God as "external, supernatural, and invasive" -- is intellectually untenable because its literal interpretation cannot be proven by natural science.

Most of Spong's book describes how Christianity might be re-invented in light of modern science and psychology, but most of his prescriptions float high above the reality of most Christians' lives. He calls Jesus a "spirit person," a being whose physical resurrection is pure fiction, but whose spiritual vitality is "discovered over and over in each of us as we open ourselves daily to new human heights." His proposal for a new creed begins this way: "I believe that there is a transcending reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all of our fearful and fragile human limits."

Spong advocates trashing many of the richest assets of the Christian tradition. He wants to declare a moratorium on use of the word "God" ("Modern men and women have no working concept today of God as a supernatural heavenly being"). He wants to forget Eden, the fall and all notions of sin ("There is no such thing as a perfect creation. Thus, there was no fall into sin") and therefore to shelve the idea that the events of Good Friday are in any sense redemptive ("pre-Darwinian superstition and post-Darwinian nonsense"). And he wants to banish liturgical practices such as the Communion Service ("caught up in the magical, supernatural power of the ages").

Yet, abolishing so much of the imagery, stories and devotional practices of Christian tradition, as Spong proposes, would not liberate preachers to deliver the self-actualizing new message that Jesus is a "spirit person." Instead, it would banish believers to a spiritually and imaginatively impoverished place, where we would have fewer resources for understanding how the God of the Bible is revealed in contemporary life.

If Spong were gay, he'd be one of the drag queens who screech that traditionally masculine gay men are wracked with "internalized homophobia," and that all homosexuals should follow them in abandoning social norms. Only drag queens and ivory-tower intellectuals have time for the radical forms of self- and world-invention described by Spong's book. Most gay men are perfectly happy wearing trousers; and most marginalized Christians actually love the Eucharist.

N E X T+P A G E+| Why the church must be reformed -- not thrown out

ILLUSTRATION BY HUNGRY DOG STUDIO