It was at a public lecture in the Religious Studies Department at Victoria University, Wellington, in 1997, that I first met the Episcopalian Bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong. An articulate speaker, strong on rhetoric and full of ingratiating charm, he cuts an imposing figure at the lecture podium bedecked in ministerial attire. Not one to mince words, he has little time for those who seek to uphold the orthodox beliefs of the Christian faith. He always generates sufficient controversy wherever he goes to ensure that the doting secular press effectively markets the growing list of books he has authored and his public lectures.
As he is one who revels in controversy and appears flattered by any form of publicity he receives, whether good or bad, I had assumed that he would have been delighted to engage in dialogue over his theological position. However, this proved not to be the case, at least when it came to the questions I put to him publicly. Having called for "dialogue" at the commencement of the lecture he seemed quite affronted that I dared to disagree with his views and question his authority. He made a beeline for me outside the lecture room and seemed intent on settling the score. With the solemnity of a funeral cortege and his long arm outstretched towards me, he declared "I'm John Spong, who are you?" Having determined my name, he turned disconcertingly hostile, charging me, in front of witnesses, of being "full of evangelical rubbish". His hectoring tone and pugnacious body language sent a clear message - I was not welcome at any more of his public lectures - and he strode off looking quite sullen.
Notwithstanding, I followed him at a distance, and joined a small tutorial group to listen to his second presentation to students. Sitting within arm's reach of him, I was determined to get the inside running on this ecclesiastical celebrity and discover the secret to his effective communication. "I live and walk in the divine mystery, the essence of holiness, which is beyond all traditions of worship", he declared.
"We need to learn to love wastefully" was his constant catch cry. He certainly hadn't wasted too much charity heaping his opprobrium on one evangelical who had challenged him earlier.
When asked by an earnest honours student what he understood the death of Jesus to mean or signify in spiritual terms, he was unable to give any guidance. "I'm working on that one" was his enigmatic answer. Beguiled perhaps by his own rhetoric, he seemed genuinely alarmed that a student had exposed the shallowness of his own facile thinking on such a fundamental aspect of the faith
"My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality", the subtitle of his recent autobiography, has a hollow ring to it when I reflect upon what I witnessed of his personal style. Perhaps it could be argued that these are only minor faults, hardly reflective of his overall ministry. However, the rancour and dissention he has generated in the 70-million strong Anglican Communion and beyond fits the same pattern I have regularly observed on his visits to New Zealand. Those who disagree with him are labelled "ignorant fundamentalists", "lacking integrity", "dishonest", "homophobic", "bigoted", or "full of evangelical rubbish".
My most recent encounter with John Spong was on his last visit to New Zealand in 2000 when I took the opportunity to give him a copy of a major publication "Focus on John Shelby Spong" which I edited and contributed a number of articles to. It is only the second major critique to be published in the world on his writings and was published by the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society Inc. in 2000 (available through www.christian-apologetics.org)
It is with great pleasure that I introduce the book review by Spencer Gear on John Spong's latest book "A New Christianity for a New World". Mr Gear provides an insightful critique and concludes that evangelicals should familiarise themselves with his views so that they can be more effective Christian apologists. The doting media give such prominence to Spong's work that his distortions of traditional Christianity have been widely disseminated. "Spongism" as Mr Gear points out is `Christianity' with a killer instinct. Spong's message leads to spiritual death. While he does have an appeal as a communicator, it is mainly to those who have jettisoned Christian belief and to the secular humanists, who wish to cling to a threadbare vestige of Christianity, while denying its supernatural component.
Christian apologetics, while directed at seeking to give a rigorous defence of "the faith once delivered", must combat error as well as holding up the truth in a positive (rather than a solely defensive) manner. We are exhorted to "judge righteously", to "discern the truth", and to "expose unrighteousness and error". While John Spong is entitled to his opinion, he cannot expect to go unchallenged when he knowingly or unknowingly misrepresents and distorts Christian teaching. Mr Gear's review helps to correct some of these distortions and provides some very helpful responses to this work that Church leaders should consider seriously.

David H. Lane
Editor and contributor
Focus on John Shelby Spong: the Man and his Message
(Wellington Christian Apologetics Society Inc., 2000)

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Review & Analysis

John Shelby Spong,
A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born.
San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001

By SPENCER GEAR

This a shocker! It is vintage Spong --- extremely readable but heretical at its heart! He throws out core Christian beliefs such as the atonement (an "offensive idea", p. 10) and the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, yet still wants to say: "I am a Christian. I believe that God is real. I call Jesus my Lord. Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being. I believe passionately in God. This God is not identified with doctrines, creeds, and traditions" (pp. 3, 64, 74).
He rejoices that "the blinding idolatry of traditional theism [read, supernatural Christianity] has finally departed from my life" (p. 74). More than that, he proclaims, "Theism is dead, I joyfully proclaim, but God is real" (p.77).

Spong's version of God

But what kind of God is he or it? He admits that his God-experience is a "God-concept that I grope to find words to convey" (p. 76). He's not the only one groping. He claims that his readers have raised "unanswered questions" that he planned to answer in the book — questions such as, "What does God look like beyond a dying theism? Does such a God matter?" (p. xix). He issues an invitation to travel on a new road to meet this "God beyond theism and hear the voice of Christ speaking in the vocabulary of a post-Christian world" (p. xxii).
Throughout the book's 276 pages, I tried to understand the nature of Spong's God beyond theism but his explanations were hazy and confusing. He does "not see God as a being" (p. 4) and yet states that "the word, God stands for and points to something that is real" (p. 19). "The Holy Trinity is not now and never has been a description of the being of God. It is rather the attempt to define our human experience of God" (p. 61). Through questions, he strives to build a composite of his view of God: "Are human beings really made in God's image, as the ancient wisdom has attested, or have we deluded ourselves into thinking such a thing to justify the obvious — namely, that the theistic God of the past was created by us and in our own image?" (p. 61). Then he offers the crass analogy that "if horses had gods would they not look like horses?" (p. 61).
He fails to define the nature of God. The God-experience he describes is not comprehensible, meaningful or helpful.
For prayer, he proposes "substitute words" that have been identified down through the centuries "with the mystical disciplines of spiritual development—words such as meditation and contemplation" that will include "centring prayer" and breathing exercises (p. 193). While meditation and contemplation have been traditionally understood as important aspects of prayer, Spong's view of "centring prayer" is not new. He uses it in the new age sense of Hinduism.
He is against evangelism and missionary enterprises, the latter being "base-born, rejecting, negative, and yes, I would even say evil" (p. 178). This shocking redefinition of missions as "evil" is associated with his universalism and epistemology that "we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth" (p. 179). By "base-born," I presume Spong means that evangelism and missions are born out of base motives that are morally low, mean-spirited and selfish.*1

Beginning at the conclusion

What would cause him to come to conclusions that are so contrary to classical Christianity? He is all for life and love because he claims that they "transcend all boundaries" while "exclusive religious propaganda can no longer be sustained.
The idea that Jesus is the only way to God or that only those who have been washed in the blood of Christ are ever to be listed among the saved, has become anathema [a curse] and even dangerous in our shrinking world" (p. 179).
Spong's "beginnings" (presuppositions) are driving his agenda and they are radically different to biblical Christianity. He brings to his analysis presuppositions that are neither Christian nor philosophically sound, based on bankrupt logical positivism of a previous era. This philosophical school holds that metaphysical and theological statements are meaningless unless they have empirical verification.
When we discard the Scriptures as the standard for theology, where do we go for answers? Spong has shown us the answer. Here we have a new kind of religion, out of the minds of Spong himself and his friends. Their goal is to try to tell the world through the mass media and extensive publications that conservative, Bible-believing ("fundamentalist" is his term) Christians are too out of touch with the postmodern, scientific world to offer anything meaningful to secular people.
Spong claims that theism is dead. Is this true? He has not provided concrete evidence that churches supporting supernatural Christianity are dying and his breed are growing. As we shall see, the facts do not support the death of theism. It's the other way round. Spongism is killing faith and churches.
Spong's first chapter is titled, "A Place to Begin", but he begins with his conclusions. That's cheating! His assumptions are: God is not a being; there is no literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead or a literal star or virgin birth — that's mythology! There's no ascension of Jesus Christ and Christ did not found a church. We are not born sinful. The fall into sin by Adam and Eve is mythical. Women are not less human and less holy than men (I agree!). The Bible is not the literal Word of God and certainly is not divinely inspired. Forget about absolute Christian ethics because "time makes ancient good uncouth" (p. 6). The colour of one's skin or ethnic background does not constitute grounds for making one superior or inferior (I agree!). This kind of teaching amounts to Spong's conclusions, but he claims it is where he begins.
In other words, he treats these moral and theological perspectives as presuppositions and most of them cannot be. He then uses a circular argument where he claims that these conclusions are based on careful scholarly analysis of the text. I call Spong to account for his use of this logical fallacy of begging the question.
The heresy continues with his repudiation of baptism and the commemoration of the Lord's Supper. "Since the diagnosis (sinful human nature) was wrong, the prescribed cure (atonement) cannot be right." Since the fall into sin is a wrong diagnosis, baptism "to wash away the effects of a fall into sin that never occurred is inappropriate." As for the Eucharist, this "re-enactment of a sacrifice . . . becomes theological nonsense" (p. 124).
If he is repudiating the Roman Catholic "re-enactment of sacrifice," Protestants agree. The commemoration of the Lord's Supper is a memorial feast, remembering Christ's death (see 1 Cor. 11:24-25). Spong is objecting to the Eucharistic view that this "re-enactment of a sacrifice" is itself "designed to restore human life to something we have never been" (p. 124). I agree with him on this latter point.

Jesus redefined

Spong's primary question he sets about to answer in this book is: "Can a person claim with integrity to be a Christian and at the same time dismiss, as I have done, so much of what has traditionally defined the content of the Christian faith?" (p. 7) He sees his "task of seeking to redefine Jesus" as something that he does not take "easily or lightly" (p. 130).
Spong raises the question of whether he can be a person of integrity in his answer to Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God" (Matt. 16:15-16).
Spong answers with further questions, "Is it still possible for me to use these same words? How flexible are they? How open to new meanings? . . . Is it honest to wrench these words out of that past and to open them to new meanings?" His reply is, "I believe that it is. Words change" (p. 130). But he also is aware that he might be open to the charge that the "genuine reformation of Christianity" that he is seeking is promoted because he is "deluded and in [his] suppressed fear [is] attempting to hide from or to cover up the death of Christianity" (p. 130).
In the early history of the Church when it was fighting for doctrinal survival and the promotion of orthodoxy, it took a hard line on false doctrine. If Spong had been Arius, Apollinarius, Eutyches or Nestorius in the early centuries of the Christian church, his views on the nature of Christ and other doctrines, would have been condemned at a General Council of the Church such as at Nicea, Ephesus, Constantinople or Chalcedon.
But not so with Spong! Even though the Episcopal Church USA did not denounce his views as heretical, the former Archbishop of Brisbane, Rev. Dr. Peter Hollingworth (now Governor General of Australia), prevented his preaching in Brisbane Anglican churches on his last visit to Australia. Instead, he spoke in Uniting Churches.
What is one of Spong's biggest complaints against the church? "[His] problem has never been [his] faith. It has always been the literal way that human beings have chosen to articulate that faith" (p. 7). Instead, he writes that he wants to continue as part of the church as "I seek the God-experience" (p. 8). Pity help anyone who reads his book with the same disdain for literal interpretation as he treats the Bible.
Why would Spong believe that theism is dead? He wraps it in a package with his commitment to Darwinian evolution. The survival of the fittest means that we must move beyond supernatural Christianity to a more modern view _ his view. Spongism enlarges on the ideas of people like his mentor and theological liberal, the late John A. T. Robinson, who wrote an assault on biblical Christianity in1963, Honest to God. What was the bud in Robinson is in full bloom in Spong.
He says that it will "probably be the final theological book of [his] life and career" (p. xxi) _ his swan song at last! I shouted, "Praise the Lord" when I read this, but I know that his kind of "radically reformed Christianity" (p. 18) will continue with others and receive continuing mass media coverage.
What are the characteristics of Spong's new Christianity? The fundamentals are gone. He discards the inspired and literal Scripture, the miraculous virgin birth, Christ as the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins, the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the Second Coming of Christ (p. 2).

The church of tomorrow

What will his "ecclesia (church) of tomorrow" look like? The supernatural is gone. There will be no singing praises to a theistic deity. "I treat the language of worship like I treat the language of love. It is primitive, excessive, flowery, poetic, evocative. No one really believes it literally" (p. 204). There will be his ill-defined, mystical "God-experience". We could equally worship in a mosque, temple, synagogue, holy place, or ecclesia (his preferred word). There will be no confessing our sins to a "parental judge" (p. 206). There will be no literalised faith story. The church of tomorrow will "never claim that it already possesses truth by divine revelation" (p. 214).
The ecclesia of the future will be a place for "Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and heretic, liberal and evangelical, Jew and Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu" and where worship of this "god" will not be "bounded by our formulas, our creeds, our doctrines, our liturgies, or even our Bible, but still [be] real, infinitely real" (p. 214). God is not a personal being, not even the highest being but the one he experiences as "the Ground and Source of All Being and therefore the presence that calls me to step beyond every boundary" (pp. 59-60). This is a rejuvenated liberalism of Paul Tillich.
This new community, the ecclesia, "must be able to allow God and Satan to come together in each of us. It must allow light and darkness to be united. It must bind good and evil into one. It must unite Christ with Anti-Christ, Jesus with Judas, male with female " (p. 167).
This is a church built in cloud cuckoo land _ out of the minds of Spong and his friends! It is beyond radical. It is blasphemous!

Is theism dead?

What's the truth about the death of theism? Wherever theological liberalism has taken hold, church numbers have plummeted. Based on The Episcopal Church Annual (USA), membership fell from a high of 3.6 million baptised Episcopalians in 1965, to 2.3 million in 1997_ a loss of fully one-third of its membership.*2 The average Sunday attendance in the year 1998 was 843,213. *3 Two years later it had further declined to 839,760. *4 "Mainline [church] membership is down (by nearly 6 million members) since 1965" in the USA. *5
On the other hand, while we do not argue†success on the basis of perceived results, the Church which accepts a traditional theism is increasing world-wide, so Spong is wrong biblically as well as from a pure pragmatic stand-point. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (David Barrett), worldwide "around 17 million people become church members each year through conversion, and some 7 million leave the church." This leaves an annual net growth of approx. 10 million people. We would love to see more, but this is hard evidence against Spong's death of theism. *6
There are some other strong indicators that Jesus is alive and well and the church is growing. In the Ukraine, in the past three years, some 70 new house churches have been planted in the Crimea, most in places previously without a church. *7
In the city of Xinjiang, China, there were 20-30 small churches with about 300 believers in 1994. Through courage, vision and the Lord's direction, five couples have been used to enable rapid growth. Over a period of three years, the growth has been so strong that there are now almost 500 churches with about 100,000 members in four districts. This growth has so concerned the Government that it has infiltrated the churches, persecuted the believers, and gone on television, accusing the groups of being a cult. *8
During the last 10 years of the "Decade of Harvest" among the Nigerian Assemblies of God in Africa, there has been extraordinary growth. The church has not only gained 1.2 million new members, but also ordained 5,026 new pastors and planted 4,044 new churches in Nigeria. The emphasis on reaching previously unreached people groups led to 75 churches being planted in areas previously untouched by Christianity. *9
Worldwide, the Pentecostal movement has grown from no adherents in 1906 to approximately 500 million today. Yet Spong has the audacity to say that "Christianity as we have known it increasingly displays signs of rigor mortis [the stiffness of death]" (p. 8). There certainly are areas where the Christian church is showing significant decline, especially in the Western world. About 100 years ago, Wales experienced a heaven-sent revival. The proportion of the total Welsh population attending church has declined from 14.6% in 1982 to 8.7% in 1995.*10

Spong's dislike of evangelicals

Spong is not interested in "confronting or challenging those conservative, fundamentalist elements of Christianity that are so prevalent today." Why? He believes they will "die of their own irrelevance" as they cling "to attitudes of the past that are simply withering on the vine." (p. 12)
He goes to great lengths to despise traditional, evangelical Christianity: "I am free of the God who was deemed to be incomplete unless constantly receiving our endless praises; the God who required that we acknowledge ourselves as born in sin and therefore as helpless; the God who seemed to delight in punishing sinners; the God who, we were told, gloried in our childlike, grovelling dependency. Worshipping that theistic God did not allow us to grow into the new humanity" (p. 75).
Here, Spong creates distortions when describing Bible-based Christianity. Such Christianity does not teach that God is incomplete without the praises of believers, but that God is complete in Himself, lacking nothing in His essential being (see Acts 17:24-25). God does not need us or any part of creation for anything. Theologians call this the ipseity (self sufficiency) of God. Yet we can glorify Him and bring Him joy (Zeph. 3:17).
Biblical Christianity does not teach that God delights in punishing sinners (see Ezek. 33:11). This is another straw man created by Spong. Does the Bible confirm that God glories in our "grovelling dependency"? Not at all! This is another of Spong's unfair comparisons to denigrate fundamentalism.
Among Spong's 205 items in his bibliography, there is not one that refutes his views or presents a scholarly evangelical perspective. I looked in vain for scholars such as D. A. Carson, William Lane Craig, Ben Witherington III., N. T. Wright, J. P. Moreland, Ravi Zacharias, Paul Barnett, and other leading defenders of the evangelical faith., but they were absent. Dixon and Torrey's, The Fundamentals, is included but Spong's overall thrust is to denigrate these essentials of Bible-believing faith.
"Jesus Seminar" fellows and other theological liberals are everywhere _ John Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robert Funk, Michael Goulder, John Hick, John A. T. Robinson, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Don Cupitt. Spongism is a one-eyed religion that is intolerant of opposing views, especially those of the "fundamentalists".
Some may object that it is even considered a religion at all because his doctrine of God is unclear. Spong's view of God is fuzzy. He attempts to separate our words to define God and the actual being of God. He objects to "the claim that God and our definitions of God [are] one and the same" (p. 61). As human beings, how is it possible to communicate our understanding of God to another without words?

Spong's religion linked to death

God's church is being persecuted around the world, but is showing growth internationally. Spong's thesis is dead in the water. It is his radical theological liberalism, a la John A. T. Robinson, that kills churches.
The Episcopalians of Spong's diocese voted with their feet while he was bishop. One report said that "Spong [had] been the Episcopal Bishop of Newark [New Jersey] since 1976. He has presided over one of the most rapid witherings of any diocese in the Episcopal Church [USA]. The most charitable assessment shows that Newark's parish membership rolls have evaporated by more than 42 percent. Less charitable accounts put the rate at over 50 percent."11

What can we learn from John Shelby Spong?

Is there anything of value for evangelicals in reading Spong? I exhort leaders to be familiar with his views for several reasons:
These kinds of perspectives will continue to command mass media coverage. On his recent Australian visit, there were articles by him in The Age, Melbourne, and in The Sydney Morning Herald. There was also significant television and radio coverage. You must know the enemy.
For the sake of all Christians committed to the Gospel, but especially for the young, we need to develop a strong apologetic against his views ? from the pulpit and in other teaching ministries. Spong develops "a new portrait of Jesus" (p. 131). It's a heretical view and there are substantial answers in the God-breathed and inspired Bible to refute his claims.
The ministry of apologetics has fallen on hard times in many churches and Bible-training institutions in Australia. This must change. Throughout the history of the church, there has always been a need for apologists. This is especially so today with Spong, the Jesus Seminar fellows, and others from the liberal theological establishment, gaining considerable mass media coverage.
What's the truth? Evangelical, Bible-believing Christianity is growing throughout the world. Spong's views need to be refuted with solid evidence.
Spong has a point when he says that "most churches will die of boredom long before they die of controversy" (p. 125). Solid biblical teaching must communicate with today's generation. From my observation, I consider that some of today's preaching is boring. This is a call to vigilance in the training of pastor-teachers and the practice of preaching that connects with people.
Christ is always relevant to any person, but sometimes the dirge of the church service turns people off. I believe Spong is correct in observing, "For vast numbers of modern people, including modern religious people, the church is less and less an option" (p. 126). We must investigate why this is so, especially in the West, and begin to address it ? immediately. Boredom is as much a threat in the pew as hype and dreariness in the pulpit. Examining what we do is often difficult for the church. This must change. Does Spong have a point when he says that "pre-modern symbols do not work in a post-modern world. To do nothing is to vote for death" (p. 126)?
The time is long overdue for the church to become more proactive in addressing some of the big questions of today. Spong does this from his liberal theological view.
Some of the big questions include: Why is suicide becoming an option for more people, especially the young? Why is divorce on the rise? How can the church help with better parenting in families? Is the Bible trustworthy for a modern world? How can I be genuinely Christian in a multicultural society? What does it mean to proclaim "Jesus is Lord"? Why are evangelicals not as strong as the liberals in the areas of social responsibility? Is the CEO pastor biblical? When we gather as a church, why are most Christians mute? What can we do about teenage rebellion? Is there a biblical perspective on the use of drugs? Is the Holy Spirit too often seen as just a force to be noticed by some Christians? How can a relevant Christianity be communicated in a way that doesn't amount to froth and bubble?
Spong does not want to deal with conservative, fundamentalist Christianity, and believes that it has no application to life today. He comments that "nowhere is this better seen than when one observes how the word Christian is used in our contemporary world" (p. 12). This is the pot calling the kettle black! It is Spong who has helped demolish the Bible's definition of a Christian.
Yet he thinks his views are the future of faith, a new Christianity for a new world! Welcome to Spongism, "Christianity" with a killer instinct.