It is easy for believers in historic Christianity to be angry with John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop for the Diocese of Newark. His publisher’s press releases proudly trumpet that his “name is virtually synonymous with the word controversy.” He has publicly argued for the permissibility of sexual relations outside of marriage for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, maintaining that “sex outside of marriage can be holy and lifegiving in some circumstances.” He has written a book that denies that Jesus was born of a virgin and another that denies that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead. He has campaigned semi-successfully for the ordination of practicing homosexuals. He has lobbied hard for abortion rights on the grounds that abortion restrictions are oppressive to women.
Spong not only holds many positions that I find deeply mistaken and disturbing; he defends those positions in a grandstanding manner that produces understandable anger among his critics. Nevertheless, when I recently had a chance for public dialogue with the bishop, I found I could not summon up much righteous indignation. The overwhelming emotion I felt was compassion. I came to see Bishop Spong as a victim.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am no fan of the way people compete for the status of “victim” in our society so as to evade responsibility for their actions and even to demand special status and compensation for past wrongs. I am no friend of the kind of pop psychology that eliminates personal responsibility.
I don’t doubt that the bishop–like myself–has much to answer for. However, even while holding out for personal responsibility, there is a place for compassion and understanding.
Bishop Spong and I appeared jointly on a radio call-in talk show that emanates from Chicago, called The Dick Staub Show. (A rather interesting show, by the way; quite different from most of what passes for intelligent conversation on the radio.) We were there to publicize recent books each of us had authored on the problem of the historical reliability of the Gospels.
Even before the show, I began to feel some pity for Spong. The book Spong was pushing comes near to winning the prize this year for “most skeptical book on the historical Jesus,” a hotly contested honor in these days of the Jesus Seminar. In it he claims that all we can really know about the historical Jesus is that he was born, lived, and died, and evidently had some kind of profound influence on his followers. The argument of the book is so weak that I don’t think I could repeat it without appearing to caricature it. So I initially felt some sympathy for Spong’s plight as the author of a half-baked piece of scholarship, stuck defending it on a multicity publicity tour. I certainly would not have wanted to be in his shoes.
However, as we talked I came to feel sorry for him in a deeper way. I discovered that Bishop Spong and I actually had a lot in common. We both grew up in Southern fundamentalist homes. As I listened to him talk about his background, the old comment about the man walking to the gallows flashed through my mind: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
I see Spong as a double victim. As he tells the tale, the church in which he grew up was harsh and racist. He says, for example, that he was not taught that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish, with the exception of Judas. The Bible was read in a specially literal and unthinking manner, and Christianity was presented to him as containing a nest of doctrines that contradicted what any person with a reasonable scientific education knew to be true about the world.
I have friends who grew up in worlds not so different from the one the bishop describes. I know what a battle they have had separating out such fundamentalist chaff from the wheat of historic Christian faith. I am grateful that I had Christian teachers and older adults who told me that segregation was wrong and that racism was evil, who listened to my questions about science and the Bible. Spong evidently had no such advantages as a young person. It is hard not to feel sorry for a man who has spent his whole life ferociously fighting his childhood beliefs.
Still, Spong at least escaped the clutches of fundamentalism. But then he was victimized a second time. Out of the frying pan, into the fire; he evaded Syclla only to barrel straight into Charybdis. Somewhere along the way, most likely in college and seminary, he evidently encountered some muddled philosophy and theology. Somehow Spong picked up the amazing idea that the orderly world of natural laws that modern science describes is incompatible with belief in a God who created that world and is capable of acting in it. As Spong sees things, the biblical view of God presupposes a “worldview that Copernicus and Galileo had rendered all but meaningless.” “When Newton completed his work, the realm in which miracle and magic had once been thought to operate had all but vanished from our sight.”
This would have come as a great shock to Newton, who wrote more about theology than science. And it would be surprising news in many science departments, since sociologists consistently report that the incidence of religious faith among academics is highest among natural scientists. The tragedy is that however intellectually flimsy Spong’s ideas are, they are hardly unusual. Spong brings to mind theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s infamous (and ridiculous) claim that it is impossible to believe in miracles and at the same time use electrical lights. Such sentiments are so widespread it is hard to know where Spong picked them up. If Spong is a victim, it is hard to know in this case who the victimizer is, unless one can be victimized by groundless but nevertheless widely held philosophical and theological opinions.
In any case, Spong’s misguided views on science and religion kindled once more in me a strong sense of “. . . but for the grace of God.” I am grateful that as a teenager I stumbled onto the writings of people such as C. S. Lewis, and that as a college student I had orthodox Christian philosophers as guides and mentors. The good bishop gives no indication of having enjoyed any such advantages.
A few years back, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings sang a mournful ballad about “Pancho and Lefty.” Pancho was a “bandit boy” from Mexico, killed by the Mexican federales. The song implies that Pancho was betrayed by his partner, Lefty, who “split for Ohio” the day poor Pancho met his fate. Nelson tells us that “Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true; but save a few for Lefty too.” Lefty “only did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.” I do not claim that Bishop Spong did only what he had to do; in any case, none of us can know for sure what is possible and what is impossible for us. We should nevertheless recognize that we have been dealt different hands, and the cards have not been distributed evenly. To paraphrase Willie Nelson, the bishop needs your prayers, it’s true. But maybe he deserves a little sympathy as well.
-C. Stephen Evans is William Spoelhof Scholar and professor of philosophy at Calvin College. He is the author of The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford University Press).
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Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
