A Call for a New Reformation?

On this day, 488 years ago, the young Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. This, of course, was not the first time the Church had been invited to openly discuss important issues, but this was the beginning of a much larger and much more violent exchange involving almost the entire Body of Christ in Europe. As the Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, points out:

Despite the hostile appellations of "heretic" hurled at Protestants and "anti-Christ" hurled at Catholics, anyone viewing this debate from the vantage point of this century would see that, while an acrimonious and unpleasant fight, it was nonetheless a fight that pitted Christian believers against Christian believers. The Reformation was not an attempt to reformulate the Christian faith for a new era. It was rather a battle over issues of Church order. The time had not arrived in which Christians would be required to rethink the basic and identifying marks of Christianity itself.

Now, he claims, is the time to face more fundamental issues.

It should be noted that I find Spong remarkably unprofessional and consistently un-philosophical. Not because he brings up probing questions (questions I myself continue to struggle with), or even coming up with answers that I disagree with (some of which I agree with, but only by degree). Spong repeatedly misinterprets facts to fit his own view of God, the Bible, Christianity and, his favorite bugaboo, "Fundamentalists". Spong has the flair for the dramatic, floating deeply idiosyncratic speculation as if it were solid "scholarship". His worst sin, in my book, is his habit of poisoning the well, labeling his opponents and assuming the worst when he finds something disagreeable. Unfortunately, Spong has a very wide and loyal audience; where other more reasonable liberal theologians get ignored, Spong has a way of hogging the spotlight.

That said, I can respect anyone who seeks the truth. While sometimes I feel Spong is a bit disingenuous about that task, I find his questions extremely worthy of investigation. Some time ago, Reverend Spong posted a list of twelve challenges. I plan to address each, in turn, over the next month. I will attempt to deal with these statements as discreet assertions, working through each on their own merits as philosophical postulates. That is to say, I plan on dealing with each thesis as a texually and philosophically as possible.

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.