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.