Religion is Always in the Control Business

Former Anglican Bishop of Newark, USA, John Shelby Spong is a very courageous and outspoken man with an immensely liberated take on religion. He has written more than 20 books and is the recipient of many awards, including 1999 Humanist of the Year. He lectures around the world and is often a guest on TV broadcasts, such as The Today Show, Dateline, 60 Minutes and Larry King Live.

His views have put conservative theologians and priests in a spin as he questions the virgin birth tale and Jesus’ resurrection as it has been told over and over again throughout the last two thousand years. He also supports equal rights for women and same sex marriages, and with regard to homosexuality, he points directly to the church for being responsible through their tenet that priests must be celibate.

In this short excerpt, he affably takes on the concept of hell, created and propagated by the churches, and calls upon people to think critically about religious rules and domination.

He has published the following twelve points for reform:

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.
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.
3. The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination. Spong has published twelve “issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate.”