© 1998 Meredith Sprunger
© 1998 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
John Shelby Spong
Harper San Francisco, 1998, 228 pp.
John Shelby Spong is the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, and author of fifteen books, including the best selling Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. He is a controversial cleric. Bishop Spong remarks that “the drumbeat of hostility from conservative, fundamentalist, and evangelical circles has been my daily bread,” (p.xiv) and he has been the recipient of sixteen death threats.
The source of this hostility is Spong’s rejection of a personal God, the divinity of Jesus, the atonement doctrine, and heaven and hell — although he believes in an ambiguous form of immortality. He calls himself “a believer in exile.” (p. xix) The linchpin of Spong’s theology is his rejection of the theistic God. “The replacement of the theistic God of the past with the inescapable God who is the Ground of Being is, in my opinion, the prerequisite to sounding forth the mighty chorus of the future.” ( $p, 70) He accepts Paul Tillich’s concept of God as indigenous to human nature, and he is very close to understanding God’s presence in human experience presented by the concept of the Thought Adjuster in The Urantia Book.
Interestingly, Bishop Spong accepts the teachings and actions of Jesus in the Gospels that relate to human ethical behavior-no matter if the portrayals are not literally accurate-but does not accept Jesus’ testimony of God. “It was the being of Jesus, the full humanity of Jesus, that ultimately revealed the meaning of God.” (p. 132) Spong’s entire theology is based on the experience of God which he points out is the same from generation to generation. The only thing that changes is the explanation of that experience. Although Bishop Spong holds a nonorthodox view of God and Jesus, he constructs a theology that has all of the practical aspects of Christianity. He redefines concepts like transcendence — the endless depths of life, and prayer-focus time. "If prayer is to continue to be a part of my life I must start in a new place that requires, first of all, a new way of envisioning God.” (p. 142)
The book ends with a view of the emerging and future church. “I suspect that both the liturgy and the structure of that emerging Church will have a very different look — so different, in fact, that I wonder if we will see continuity between the Church of yesterday and the Church of tomorrow.” (p. 183) We are, he believes, on the threshold of major changes in religion. “In less than a hundred years I am certain that the shape of religion in general and Christianity in particular will be clear.” (p. 227) And his final testimony is, “I am first, last, and always a believer.” (p.228) Bishop Spong has circulated a paper entitled “A Call for a New Reformation” dated 5/10/98 in which he lists twelve theses and says, “So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.”
Bishop Spong’s religion centers around his experience with the indwelling presence of God. In many ways its practical expression is harmonious with the teachings of the Fifth Epochal Revelation. This religious view would really soar if it had the wings of the spiritual cosmology and vision of Deity and Reality in The Urantia Book,
“The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity — the real life and teachings of Jesus.” (UB 195:9.5)