c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ For Jack Spong _ or, more formally, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of the Diocese of Newark, N.J. _ virtually everything in the Christian lexicon is up for grabs.

Spong, who has made a career of challenging conventional Christian teachings on such topics as the virgin birth and the Resurrection, the ordination of homosexuals, and the sexuality of the Apostle Paul, wants to ignite a new reformation within the church. But unlike his 16th-century predecessor Martin Luther, who nailed his theses for debate to a church door, Spong has published his manifesto in a new book,”Why Christianity Must Change or Die”(HarperSanFrancisco).”To put it in its most sort of end-of-the-world headlines, I’m calling for a reformation that I think will be so big, it will make the Reformation of the 16th century look like a Sunday School tea party,”Spong said.”What I am suggesting in this book is that, given the intellectual revolution, the whole frame of reference against which Christianity was told to us has been changed so dramatically that the way we were telling the Christian story no longer is communicating to anybody,”he added.”And we’ve got to change the very nature of the way we communicate the Christian story.”All issues are up for grabs.” And those issues include _ but are not limited to _ the questions that have preoccupied Spong, the Episcopal Church and much of Christianity for the last several decades: human sexuality and the role of women and homosexuals in church and society.

Spong’s latest _ but unlikely his last _ challenge to conventional Christian thought and practice comes as he is preparing to retire in 2000 and after a series of challenges to his fellow Anglican bishops, including a highly publicized and sometimes fiery exchange of letters with his spiritual boss, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, on the volatile issue of homosexuality.

In his new book, however, the lanky bishop goes well beyond the gay question, arguing the church’s inadequate response to gays and women is based on a faulty understanding of God.

For instance, Spong argues the”places”the church calls heaven do not exist”as humans know them.”He wants readers to abandon their ideas of God as a”being”and think of God as an”experience of otherness, transcendence, mystery, wonder and awe”and not as a God dictating all there is in the world.

The experience of God, he said, comes from prayer. Christian ethics, he added, come from deep thought about Christian convictions.”You’ve got to find a way to articulate a basis for ethics other than God dictated a book called the Bible or that God wrote the eternal laws on two tablets of stone, both of which come out of a theistic definition of God,”he said.

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Spong bases his views on the findings of scholars and scientists from Copernicus, Galileo and Newton to Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, as well as contemporaries such as Stephen W. Hawking.”And finally you have to get to the subatomic physicists where you have to deal with quantum weirdness and wild forms of inter-relatedness that we’ve never embraced before,”he said.”It’s like you split molecules and send them in millions of miles in opposite directions,”Spong added.”Then you do something to one of them and the other one reacts, despite this enormous distance, which introduces all kinds of new elements of uncertainty into the human dimension.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Spong said that”given the intellectual framework in which we do our worshipping and thinking and living and state our faith,”the time has come to”totally reformulate the Christian faith in light of the realities of post-20th-century thinking.” Spong, who wrote”Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism,”dismisses negative conservative reactions to the challenges the secular, scientific world pose for the faith as”a sort of hysterical reaction to the fact that the world no longer makes sense.”So you shout a little louder and it’s not going to ever revive things of the past, because, basically, (conservatives are) trying to articulate a faith while denying the world has changed quite so substantially.” Spong said the”vapid”message of the institutional church doesn’t stand up either. The church’s leaders and their teachings stand”for little or nothing. They may give good advice and deliver pious sermons about living properly. But, you know, the theological framework behind the mainline churches is just almost non-existent.” People faced with the reality of science are rejecting both the shouting from the right and the silence from institutional religion by giving up altogether, he said.”These people I refer to as being part of the church alumni association,”Spong said.

As for himself, and for those in his”alumni association,”Spong said he wants to fashion a”different way to explain the reality of God and the way that God somehow was in this Christ”because, while he wants to wipe away popular images of God,”the Christ experience is still real.””I think what we’ve got to do is to separate the Christ experience, which I do believe is eternal, timeless and divine, from every explanation of it in history. And then we’ve got to seek a different way to explain the reality of God and the way that God somehow was in this Christ.”

DEA END BRIGGS