Eternal Life: A New Vision by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554689286
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE SHIFT OF THE RELIGIOUS PARADIGM

Envoi

God within me, God without,

How shall I ever be in doubt?

There is no place where I may go

And not there see God’s face, not know

I am God’s vision and God’s ears

So through the harvest of my years

I am the Sower and the Sown

God’s self unfolding and God’s own.

From a tenth-century gravestone, St. Lars Church, Linköping, Sweden1

Enabling people to turn around in the way they think about and conceptualize God in order to embrace new possibilities is not unlike trying to turn the great ship Titanic around in a small pond. It is not impossible, but it feels that way. There are many who say it cannot be done. Perhaps there are many more who do not want it to be done. Yet turn we must.

My personal journey has carried me through the arena of religion to what I now see as its bankruptcy. The human journey into God has reached a similar destination. God-talk still fills the world, but it is no longer believable in the way that it once was. Secularism is on the rise everywhere—perhaps more obviously in the West than in the rest of the world, but that is not because the West is decadent, as our critics in the Third World like to say, but because the West has engaged the intellectual revolution more deeply than any other part of the world. There will be no turning back on the insights of Galileo, Newton and Darwin, at which we have looked far too briefly in these pages. The old verities simply are not holding, nor will they, no matter how desperately we wish for them to do so. No one today really thinks that the religions of miracle and magic and of supernatural beings who manipulate the world of cause and effect for some ulterior purpose will long enjoy the confidence of the people of the present and coming generations. There is little remaining trust in such a deity. We continue to talk about this God, but there is no conviction in the way we live that there is an external supernatural deity who stands ready to intervene, to provide purpose or to guarantee eternity. Human life is in the process of adjusting to the death of this God.

It is not as if we have not had time to adjust. This God’s demise was first announced in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche in a book entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra.2 It was not an announcement that was welcome. The response of the generally religious population of the Western world was predictable. First Nietzsche was attacked as mentally ill and called a madman, and when that failed he was subjected to biting ridicule and was dismissed with “cuteness.” A popular quotation, used so often that its original author has been lost in the shadows of time, reads:

God is dead!—Nietzsche

Nietzsche is dead!—God

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