c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ What a season for believers. And what an opportunity for columnists and editorial writers to shoot at the fish crowded into the barrel of religion news.

The pope decrees what Roman Catholic academics must believe about such subjects as the ordination of women (No) and has written into Canon Law”just punishment”(What?) for dissenters (Who?). This signifies a strong endorsement of the literal interpretation of doctrines whose broader understanding has absorbed the attention of Catholic theologians around the world.

Indeed, the work of theologians, it might be said, is to examine, as Jesus did, the corn yield of religious teachings, to strip away the layers of dead sheaves that guarded the early growth of its kernels and to lay them open, ripe and true, for our nourishment.

John Paul, however, wishes his legacy to be a faith without ambivalence by standing in the doorway of St. Peter’s and investing with infallibility a message to women:”This far and no farther.” The pope, in other words, wants the boundaries of Catholic teaching to resemble less those of a harvest and more those of a football field: You must play within the chalk marks and you must follow the rules or you will be thrown out of the game. Only that clarity in belief, he feels, can properly unite and identify Catholics in the oozing protoplasm of modern culture.

At the same time, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., tells believers that in the future there won’t be any field at all, no game rules, nobody punished, no score, no scorekeeper for that matter, and, in effect, no game.

His new book,”Why Christianity Must Change or Die”(HarperSanFrancisco), denies the validity of any literal religious doctrine at all. For example, faith’s future for him leaves no room for a personal God. Save time, he implies, and mail your prayers not to such an outmoded deity but directly to the Dead Letter office.

In offering his Twelve Theses of”Virtual Atheism,”Spong is not modest in ranking himself with prophets ahead of their time such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Freud.

It is easy to criticize these very different overtures, one from a great religious leader who feels that unquestionable literal doctrines alone can bind Catholics into a discernible religious community. The other is from a prominent but lesser religious leader who wants to strike off the shackles of theological literalism from church teaching even if he slays belief and the believer at the same time.

If it is fun to shoot such thrashing fish, it is better to try to tease out an understanding of these extraordinarily diverse proposals.

The most important dynamic in the pope’s pronouncement is his insistence that Catholicism must have a differentiating identity in a relativistic and standard-free world. Spong, a footnote and no more in religious history, offers a valid counterpoint in saying our understanding of faith needs re-examination, that we must, as Paul wrote, put away the things of a child if we are to be spiritual adults.

These men are, strangely enough, on the same track if at cross purposes. Their prescriptions need to be combined. For faith, as the pope says, needs content, but it also needs, as Spong perhaps unknowingly suggests, mystery as well.

Combine them, ignore the excesses that will be trimmed away from their statements anyway, and you may see Christianity’s millennial struggle: To preserve its identity while deepening its understanding of the real meaning, spiritual in nature, of teachings richer and more demanding than the literal way they are told.

To shuck off the concrete idea of God’s creating the world in six days is, after all, only to discover the stupendous religious mystery of the exploding galaxies about us. Both men, beneath the surface of their words, bid us to take a look at that from a religious viewpoint.

These are hard sayings but, in context, they lay down the challenge of the dying century: to drink deeply, or not at all, from the deep well of religious truth.

DEA END KENNEDY