Culture

Author: John Shelby Spong
Publisher: HarperCollins
(0/5)

Bishop John Spong is Christianity’s version of the Dalai Lama: a purveyor of an earnestly inoffensive spirituality, which possesses all the substance and fibre of lukewarm parsnip juice.
Spong dismisses fundamentalist versions of Christianity throughout his book, repudiating the Bible as error-ridden and mythical, rejecting much of traditional Christian ethics as abhorrent and perverse, and championing the scientific worldview over such obsolete dogmas as Creation, Paradise, Original Sin, and Salvation. But, having dismissed all of Christianity’s usual content, oddly enough, Spong continues to call himself a Christian. He manages this manoeuvre by giving Christianity the equivalent of a colonic irrigation, washing out the “religious barnacles” of “the old concepts” and thereby producing a warm and comforting ooze of amorphous spirituality in which he proceeds to wallow for most of the book. In the words of John Updike’s fictional Reverend Thomas Marshfield, Spong’s resulting theology is “a perfectly custardly confection of Jungian-Reichian soma mysticism swimming in a soupy caramel of Tillichic, Jasperian, Bultmannish blather, all served up in a dime-store dish of his gutless generation’s give-away Gemütlichkeit.”
While ultimately affirming eternal life, Spong necessarily engages in some agile mental gymnastics in order to do so. As a result, this book seriously rivals the vacuous, feel-good, pseudo-sapiential babblings regularly produced by the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Spong declares all of the traditional Christian language concerning eternal life, heaven and hell, bodily resurrection, and reward and punishment, to be “symbolic.” But in an offence against semantics, it is not symbolic of anything, but simply “symbolic” – as though the mere mention of the word somehow frees Spong from the usual linguistic requirement of having to make sense.
The most interesting aspect of this book is not its content, but the realisation that Spong appeals to a substantial proportion of self-confessed Christians (well, to be accurate, Anglicans), as well of those of unspecified ‘spirituality’ who have recognised the shortcomings of their faith but desperately attempt to cling to some form of it.