The Religious Wisdom Of Retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong

This video transcript of John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop from Newark, N.J., is part of an interview by Keith Morrison for Dateline, NBC, Aug. 13, 2006, provides tremendous food for thought.

Spong: I don’t think Hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death, but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business, and that’s something people don’t really understand. It’s in a guilt-producing control business. And if you have Heaven as a place where you’re rewarded for you goodness, and Hell is a place where you’re punished for your evil, then you sort of have control of the population. And so they create this fiery place which has quite literally scared the Hell out of a lot of people, throughout Christian history. And it’s part of a control tactic.

Morrison: But wait a minute. You’re saying that Hell, the idea of a place under the earth or somewhere you’re tormented for an eternity – is actually an invention of the church?

Spong: I think the church fired its furnaces hotter than anybody else. But I think there’s a sense in most religious life of reward and punishment in some form. The church doesn’t like for people to grow up, because you can’t control grown-ups. That’s why we talk about being born again. When you’re born again, you’re still a child. People don’t need to be born again. They need to grow up. They need to accept their responsibility for themselves and the world.

Morrison: What do you make of the theology which is pretty quite prominent these days in America, which is there is one guaranteed way not to go to hell; And that is to accept Jesus as your personal savior.

Spong: Yeah, I grew up in that tradition. Every church I know claims that ‘we are the true church’  – that they have some ultimate authority, ‘We have the infallible Pope,’ We have the Bible.’… The idea that the truth of God can be bound in any human system, by any human creed, by any human book, is almost beyond imagination for me.

I mean, God is not a Christian. God is not a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindi or Buddhist. All of those are human systems, which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition. I walk through my tradition. But I don’t think my tradition defines God. It only points me to God.

Spong (preaching from a church pulpit): You and I are emerging people, not fallen people. Our problem is not that we are born in sin, our problem is that we don’t know how to yet achieve being fully human.The function of The Christ is not to rescue the sinners, but to empower you and call you to be more deeply and fully human than you’ve ever realized there was the potential within you to be. Maybe salvation needs to be conveyed in terms of enhancing your humanity, rather than rescuing you from it.

Spong: Life is a startling and wondrous experience, and eventually I think we’re going to discover that God is unfolding through the life of our consciousness, in our self-consciousness. There’s not a parent figure up in the sky.

The now retired Episcopalian bishop Spong delivers over 200 public lectures each year to standing-room-only crowds. Here is his upcoming schedule.

America’s Four Gods

If you’ve read the book America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God — And What That Says About Us, based on research out of Waco, Texas Baylor University, you will learn that although about 9 out of 10 Americans believe in God, the concept of God takes on several faces.

USA Today provided in 2010 this excellent overview of four distinct visions of God and how they affect politics. The four visions of God include: The Authoritative God; The Benevolent God; The Critical God; The Distant God.

John Shelby Spong’s comments about religion and control are reflected in the significant gender divide in the four visions of God. About half of American men believe in God #4, The Distant God as reflected in these comments. I was very stunned to take the online survey after reading the book and learn that the 27% or so of Americans who believe in The Distant God are almost universally male.

Although about half of American men believe that God is genderless and an abstract spiritual force not fully understood by humans, the vast majority of American women believe that God is a He and is watching our every move. How’s that for a gender-based, guilt-ridden spiritual twist! ~ Anne