Thoughts on the life of Bishop John Shelby Spong

In theological college in the late 1990s, you could have divided the student body into three groupings: those of us who looked to Rowan Williams, those who looked to John Stott, and those (a minority) who looked to Bishop John Shelby Spong. For those of who did not look to Spong, his writings and pronouncements exercised a not insignificant influence, for we often defined ourselves against his views.

His recent death, therefore, brought to my mind the debates of theological college in those years, the times since then when I have invoked his name to represent a stream of theology with which I deeply disagree, and the passage of the years. The thoughts below are not intended in any way to represent a meaningful assessment of the works and thought of Bishop Spong.  They are, rather, a means of assisting me to organise my thoughts on how a Bishop and theologian with whom I profoundly disagreed, particularly on Creedal matters, helped to shape my thinking. And, now in my early 50s, there is perhaps also something of a memento mori character to these thoughts.

1. In the mid- and late-1990s, while preparing for and then studying in theological college, I read 4 books by Bishop John Shelby Spong: Beyond Moralism: A Contemporary View of the Ten Commandments (1986), Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality (1988), Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (1992), and Resurrection: Myth or Reality? A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity (1994).  I look back with gratitude for these books. They showed me how those shaped by a progressive theology read Scripture and Creeds.  They continue to offer an insight into the convictions of some of my clergy colleagues and - importantly - of some laity in the congregation amongst whom I now serve. 

The book on the Commandments was the most positive, a serious attempt to engage with a text crucial to the Christian moral vision.  Living in Sin? posed questions around human sexuality and the weaknesses in traditional teaching that needed to be heard, even if the arguments were often not convincing. The other two books have confirmed me in my faith, the faith of the Church, that the Incarnate Word was born of the Virgin, that the tomb on Easter Day was empty.  I was deeply struck by the failure of both Born of a Woman and Resurrection: Myth or Reality? to touch me in heart, mind, and soul, leaving me utterly unmoved.  Words of C.S. Lewis come to mind:

Perfect Myth and Perfect: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

Bishop Spong, in other words, pointed me to the reality of Virgin birth and empty Tomb.

2. Rowan Williams' critique of Spong's Theses for a 'new Reformation' was, to say the least, robust:

these theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find astonishing ... 

The implication of the theses is that the sort of questions that might be asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila. The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in ...

Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong’s account of classical Christian faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely reflect his own knowledge of it.

This, however, did not prevent Williams from being grateful for Spong:

I believe Bishop Spong has, in these and other matters, done an indispensable task in focusing our attention on questions under-examined and poorly thought through ... He has rightly urged the Church to think more clearly in many respects about issues of sex and gender.

Something of a similar tone can be detected in the far from uncritical obituary in the conservative Daily Telegraph:

He was also a man of extraordinary energy and generous impulses. who took a firm stand on civil rights at a crucial period of American history, and who conducted himself with dignity and fortitude in the face of tragedy in his personal life.

Some of us - and here I think first of myself and my moderate Burkean conservatism with its belief in incremental change - too easily forget the deeply ingrained racism which sustained segregation, the entrenched sexism of the 1970s, the homophobia evident in the response to Aids.  John Shelby Spong was challenging racism, sexism, and homophobia: people like me were not. 

He declared in a 2007 interview that he was a "Christian humanist".  Many of us would question if his theology provided a meaningful, convincing, coherent basis for a Christian humanist vision. The challenge he gave to racism, sexism, and homophobia, however, offered a rather more significant example of Christian humanism than I can point to in my own life.

3. As I had recently been reading the Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, one of the 'Yale Apostates', an extract from his diary came to mind when I first read of Bishop Spong's death: 

This day (being Sunday) we were all day at St James's Church, where in the morning Dr. Samuel Clark preached from Heb. xii. 16, 17 - 24th March 1723.

Clarke, not least due to his controversial The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), was the Spong of his age, an ecclesiastical and cultural celebrity, fêted by some, hated by others. Yet here was Johnson and his associates - who had very publicly abandoned the Congregationalism of New England because they had been convinced by their reading of patristic sources to seek episcopal ordination - attending Clarke's church to listen to him preaching.

As Clarke's great orthodox opponent Daniel Waterland would no doubt point out, the theological radicalism of Spong was nothing new.  In a context shaped by Enlightened philosophies, new scientific accounts, and a changed social context brought about by the Toleration Act, the controversy between Clarke and Waterland was part of the process by which Anglicanism sought to respond to the new intellectual and cultural landscape.

Perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that the example of Samuel Clarke - who lived and died in the communion of the Church of England, ministering as a priest until his death - urges us not to attribute too great a significance to heterodox teaching.  It comes, it is debated, and (more often than not) it goes.  Clark's anti-Trinitarian teaching did not take root in the 18th century Church of England and, in fact, helped to refine Trinitarian teaching and thought.  We might say the same about Spong's teaching on the Incarnation and the Resurrection and its already waning influence in The Episcopal Church: it contributed to a rediscovery of a generous orthodoxy.  From what I, on this side of the Atlantic, can see of TEC - across the theological and political spectrum - Rowan Williams' "I say the Nicene Creed every Sunday without my fingers crossed" is now more representative than Spong's works. Heterodox teaching happens: the best response is not an ecclesiastical police action but a joyful, thoughtful articulation of orthodoxy.

4. Finally, there are the words which I now ponder regularly when I hear of a person's death:

And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom: Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate.

It is an expression of the pastoral grace which lies close to the heart of the Anglican experience: "for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear".  Not those I have agreed with, not those whose works I approve of, not those who share my theological and political outlooks.  Rather, "all thy servants".  Then we give thanks for "their good examples", for what was good in their earthly pilgrimage came from the God "from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed".  We ask that "with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom".  How can we not? "For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved." Finally, "for Jesus Christ's sake".  If grace in Christ can embrace me, a sinner, and grant me mercy "in the day of judgement" (as we pray in the Litany), it can also certainly embrace Bishop John Shelby Spong.

So, yes, when, in the days following the announcement of his death, I administered the Eucharist and was praying these words, I was thinking of Bishop John Shelby Spong, as I hope those who disagree with me, reject my views, and regard me as hopelessly conservative, will do so at my death.