Spong's Second Thesis

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.

Assuming the first thesis is valid, this second would follow nicely. When I was an atheist, I could agree with Spong on this. The idea of God was simply a human invention used to control and give superficial meaning to lives. Therefore the stories set down in the Bible concerning Jesus as the "Son of God" was pure propaganda. This became my first concern: was Jesus who the Bible said he was?

For my part, it seemed rather elementary; either I accepted what the New Testament had to say about Jesus or I reject, in its entirety, the whole "story". Everything found in the last 27 books of the Bible is predicated on the idea that Jesus was somehow simultaneously a mere man AND God, from its basic intent to its historicism, especially its metaphysics and ethics. While the Bible MAY contain some good and helpful advice, its underlying view of the world is warped and suspect, if there was no incarnation. Essentially, Spong is correct: IF the Bible is wrong about God, it is also wrong about Jesus as well.

On to the real issue at hand. Is Jesus God incarnate? Spong thinks that this is an impossibility, or, more to the point, nonsense. Spong sees Christ as the "hero of a thousand faces" and no one can make a concrete claim about who or what exactly Jesus was (except Spong, of course). Jesus was whatever your influences indicate he was. Whatever the case, Jesus was "love"--From which Spong can make the claim that Jesus could not endorse such notions as hell, guilt of sin and Judgment. While I cannot formulate an iron-clad argument for Christ's divinity, neither can Spong refute such a claim, except through recourse to a particular view of materialism and advanced physics--even these raise as many questions as they do answers. In the end, this may simply be a matter of belief, of faith, one way or another. I can live it as such; Spong seems to be unable to do so.

Unfortunately for Spong, while conceiving of God and Jesus in theistic terms does not make it true, there are still many people, myself included, who can quite easily conceive of God in theistic terms. I wouldn't go so far as to accuse Spong of lying, as some have, on this point, but I will say, he's being very loose with his language. Again, if Spong can no longer conceive of a theistic God, then that is a failing on his part. (Note that the standard he sets here is only having a conception of a certain kind of deity.)

"That's not racial."

You know things are bad when Black Democrats start calling Black Republicans "Sambo". Apparently, it's OK to point out "the obvious" fact that conservative Republican Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, is an "Uncle Tom".

Pardon me while I pick my lower jaw up off the floor.

Spong's First Thesis

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.

Spong is deeply aware of the "gallingly apparent" inadequacy of human language to fully capture what God is. "The God I know is not concrete or specific;" Spong tells us, "this God can never be enclosed by propositional statements" (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 4). God, for Spong, "might not be separate from us but rather deep within us" and God is everything there is plus "something more"(Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p. 33). God is a what rather than a who (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 60).

OK, fine and good. I think I understand Spong's distinction between "theism" and his view of God. That is, God is an awesome, irreducible reality, while theism is the vain attempt to define God through language. Theism, for Spong, seems to be a caricature of the "Man upstairs", a Freudian delusion invented to satisfy an unthinking population, a human father figure endowed with fantastic powers and abilities, an opiate. Perhaps, he's a hunched old man with a white beard down to his knobby knees. I agree with Spong on this point: these attempts to categorize God completely fail to capture the entirety of what God is. Then again, I don't know too many people who actually believe God can be packaged as simply as this. Sure, God-talk could be the expression of wishful thinking, power, or plain goofiness. But, taking a guess here, I'm sure most people who use these sorts of simple pictures to capture God are either trying to access a single aspect of God or have their tongue firmly in cheek. Serious theists do not really believe that their description, however detailed or thoughtful, contains the entire God-reality. For example, I don't believe a serious theist would actually commit to the idea that God is actually one gender or the other.

Now, we can address theism's supposed death.

What Spong fails to realize is that there is still a very sizable portion of the world that still finds theism--the belief in a person called God--quite worthy of our, ever so fallible, language. For many of us, God is a very personal, very real experience that can be approached in concrete, specific theological terms. Even if Spong cannot properly conceive of this reality, it exists for people nevertheless. If the language of theology is meaningless, it is meaningless to Spong himself not to those of us who understand God's presence in personal ways. Granted, there is a lot about our experience of God that goes beyond propositional statements. As I said before, I doubt that our language alone is up to the challenge of fully describing God. If Spong is up to the task of conveying information about his God without the use of propositional statements, I'd be deeply interested in how that might be done; frankly, I don't know how to talk about anything without the use of propositional statements.

In some ways, I agree with Spong though. So often, we gravitate toward what other people have said about God. We adopt other people's description of God and assume that we have "got it". The only way God can be real is through our own personal experience and cold hard logic. God cannot be put in a box, but we can approach God, not by dismissing the descriptors of the past rather, by embracing what He is despite the limits of human language. Theism is not dead but simplistic and naive caricatures of something completely outside of our tangible experience must be qualified. While using language to capture the infinite is not meaningless, it takes a great deal of discipline and honesty to proceed with confidence.

"Nonsense"

Before I actually begin to tackle Spong's Thesis, I must address the word "nonsense". Nonsense, as defined by Dictionary.com:

1. Words or signs having no intelligible meaning: a message that was nonsense until decoded.
   
2. Subject matter, behavior, or language that is foolish or absurd.
   
3. Extravagant foolishness or frivolity: a clown's exuberant nonsense.
   
4. Matter of little or no importance or usefulness: a chatty letter full of gossip and nonsense.
   
5. Insolent talk or behavior; impudence: wouldn't take any nonsense from the children.

Merriam-Webster defines "nonsense" as:

1 a words or language having no meaning or conveying no intelligible ideas b (1) : language, conduct, or an idea that is absurd or contrary to good sense (2) : an instance of absurd action
2 a : things of no importance or value : TRIFLES b : affected or impudent conduct

In Spong's mind, traditional Christian ideas are not even worthy of discussion because they are either unintelligible (he literally can't understand the meanings of these ideas) or are actually valueless (as in the content of the word "incarnation", "creation" and "fall" lack appreciable correspondence to anything real).

"Nonsense" for Spong is anything encumbered by meaningless code words. For example, he might read The Apostle's Creed this way:

I believe in God, the 7371 89746422,
the Creator of 41112366 and earth,
and in Jesus 33896, 131456662 only 431, our 3131677

Where the numbers represent a correspondence to some long-dead code, which has no hope of being deciphered. Furthermore, if anyone claims to understand this code, they must be mistaken, because it, indeed, is indecipherable. What Spong appears to be saying is "I personally don't get it so it must be false."