TOWARDS THE ECCLESIA OF THE FUTURE! I live at this moment inside a powerful experience of the divine, the holy. I call the content of that experience God. I trust its reality. The God that my life has encountered and engaged is most profoundly present for me in the portrait painted by the early church of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is thus for me the doorway into this God. His life reflects the life that I call God. His love reflects the love that I call God. His being reflects the Ground of Being that I call God. The God that I have met in Jesus calls me to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that I can be. When I do all these things, I believe that I make God visible and real to others. The church to me is a community of people bound together by their willingness to journey into the meaning and the mystery of this God. That journey must take us away from that place where the preservation of the institution determines our ultimate values and witness, and we assert that we either have defined or could define God in our ecclesiastical or doctrinal words. We have lived in that place so long that we do not recognise that even our groundwater has now been polluted by the rising tides of negativity, sterility, ignorance, and oppression. We are not able to discern that the religious place in which our lives are grounded is no longer a liveable place; it has become a place where to remain is to die. I must leave the mentality that encourages anyone to think that our doctrines are unchangeable or our sacred texts are without error. I must leave the God of miracle and magic, the God of supernatural, invasive power. I must leave the promises of certainty, the illusion of possessing the true faith, the excessive claims of being the recipient of unchallengeable revelation, and even the neurotic religious desire to know that I AM RIGHT! But I can never leave the God-experience, nor can I ever walk away from that doorway into the divine that I believe I have found in the one I call the Christ and acknowledge as my Lord. I will never again assert that my Christ is the only way to God, for that is an ultimate act of human folly. I will say, however, that Christ is the only way FOR ME, for that is MY experience. I will never again feed my ego with the familiar Christian claim that every other pathway to God, such as the paths that wind through Hindu India, Buddhist Cambodia, Thailand, China, Tibet, Burma, the Islamic Middle East, to the Jewish state of Israel, on which millions of human lives have walked with integrity in their search for the holy, is inadequate, or even second-rate. I will certainly never call these pathways false. I have walked beyond theism, but not beyond God. I have allowed theism to die, recognising it for what it is - A HUMAN EXPLANATION OF THE GOD EXPERIENCE - not a description of who or what God actually is. The old debate between theism and atheism becomes, for me, not wrong but sterile, vapid, and inept. So, I walk deliberately beyond it. I transcend it; and when I do, I begin a new search for the words that will enable me to talk of a post-theistic God, the God who is not a person but the source of that power that nurtures person-wood, not a being but the Ground of Being, the source from which all being flows. God is not a person. God is not a being. God is not even the Father of Life. God is Life itself. God is BEING itself. THEISM is not a name for God or even a name for one who believes in God. Theism is the name of a human definition of God that is no longer believable. ATHEISM does not mean that there is no God. Atheism means that the theistic understanding of God no longer translates into the world of our experience. OUR RADICAL NEW UNDERSTANDING OF GOD! When we move into that radical, but not new, understanding of God, all else changes, and it changes dramatically. Indeed, for some people it changes violently. If God is NOT a being, supernatural in power, then Jesus cannot be the incarnation of that being. So, Jesus must now be defined as differing from you and me in degree but not in kind. In that assertion most of the Christology of the ages collapses. If God is not a being, then no human hierarchy can claim to be chosen receptors for this beings revelation, the guardian of this beings truth, or the dispenser of beings grace. In this assertion, all ecclesiastical power claims disappear, feeding religious insecurity. The Pope, Priests, Pastors, Cardinals, Bishops, and all those who have pretended to be divinely commissioned, become unemployed. We are soon to learn that we are not vicars of the incarnate Christ on earth. Those people who have placed their confidence in such things will become islands of insecurity. When our understanding of God shifts, so will the moral ground underneath our feet. The traditional basis for ethics disappear. For, if there is no theistic God who rules the universe, then there is no law giver, no dispenser of eternal ethical principles, no fiery finger that inscribed the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone or wrote unchanging laws into the texts of holy scripture. So, all those claims must be abandoned. Those who have simply quoted the Bible to solve ethical problems will discover that their moral compass is askew, and rampant anxiety will result. Many people will be gripped by the fear of moral anarchy as we shift to a new view of God. We know that the moral claims of the past no longer work. There is no theistic deity whose will we must seek to obey in order to gain divine protection. In this new understanding of God toward which the death of theism directs us, churches will cease to be behaviour controlling institutions and become institutions dedicated to the empowerment and expansion of life. Worship will become the celebration of the power of God, who is present in the heart of life. Christian education will become the search for truth rather than the indoctrination of the faithful with a particular form of religious propaganda. THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY! Thus, Christianity will become not something to be BELIEVED but a faith we must LIVE, a vision that stands before us, inviting us to enter. I proclaim a God beyond creeds, a Christ beyond incarnation, a way of life that dares us to grasp the insecurities of our being and move beyond the boxes created by the security producing churches of yesterday. The ecclesia of the future will be open to truth no matter what. This ecclesia will be open to a rich diversity of human life. We will know that, in the God who is the Ground of Being, and in the Christ who manifested that gift of being, there is neither east nor west, tribe nor ethnicity, male nor female, gay nor straight, true believer nor heretic, Christian nor Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. There is only a God-filled humanity, wonderfully diverse, yearning to live, eager to love, daring to be, and wanting to journey in community into the wonder and mystery of the God who is Being itself. The new ecclesia will emerge inside our existing structures. The will ultimately separate themselves from the pack. They will flow freely, taking a wide variety of forms. They will attract the restless, the hungry, the alienated, the marginalised, the open, the honest, the doubters, the seekers. The resulting ecclesia will be based on the experience of the people, not on the desires of the hierarchy. The ecclesia will cross all denominational lines and all faith lines. A thousand years from now, people will make a judgment as to whether or not the community that this New Reformation has built in the new millennium is the decedent of the Christian church that is dying in our generation. I invite you to move with me, to enter the exile of believers, to enable a radical Reformation of the Christian church to occur, and to find a new place where faith can live and where God can be experienced. I welcome the New Reformation. I hope that I have been one of its enablers. I yearn for it to succeed so that my grandchildren can say: GOD IS REAL TO ME, AND JESUS IS MY DOORWAY INTO THIS REALITY. ~ ~ ~Bishop John Shelby Spong From the Book: A NEW CHRISTIANITY FOR A NEW WORLD (Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How A new Faith is Being Born) ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Shelby Spong, whose books have sold more than a million copies, was bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years before his retirement in 2001. His admirers acclaim him as a teaching bishop who makes contemporary theology accessible to the ordinary layperson — he’s considered the champion of an inclusive faith by many, both inside and outside the Christian church. This visionary thinker seeks to introduce readers to a proper way to engage the holy book of the Judeo-Christian tradition.A committed Christian who has spent a lifetime studying the Bible and whose life has been deeply shaped by it, Bishop Spong says he was not interested in Bible bashing. “I come to this interpretive task not as an enemy of Christianity,” he says. “I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, I am a believer who knows and loves the Bible deeply. But I also recognize that parts of it have been used to undergird prejudices and to mask violence.”
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:01:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015