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by Susan Polege
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This book was a refreshing read. I felt deeply liberated in thinking and agreeing with some of Spong's views. Spong, an Episcopal bishop famous for his controversial views, earned my respect already by page 5 when he said the words of the opening phrase of the Apostle's Creed I believe in God the Father Almighty... were deeply offensive to him. He said that Father is a culturally entrenched, patriarchal, masculine, sexist view that limits God. Almighty is also an offensive word because it unsuccessfully addresses the philosophical "problem of evil." If God is all-powerful, God either does not care about our suffering or is downright mean. Neither of those alternatives translate into a theology he wanted to subscribe to, and I definitely agree. Anyway, Spong impressed me with his liberal honesty and courage in analyzing a revered article of faith such as the Apostle's Creed to make it applicable to contemporary life.
On the other hand, I did not agree with Spong's sweeping generalizations about contemporary people and what we need. Spong seems to think that all people should agree with him. The main issue of the book that I had difficulty agreeing with was dismissing theism as a valid way of understanding God. Spong tries to release God from limited definitions by allowing God to be Ultimate Reality, and NOT a theistic, personal God, but changing that definition of God seems to me to be limiting as well. Spong says that enlightened people can no longer believe in a theistic God, because a theistic, personal God has been disproved by Science and the Enlightenment period. I disagree. I grant that it is possible to believe as Spong does and still be a healthy person, and a Christian, but I think Spong is being very arrogant in assuming he knows what other people can and cannot believe in.
The book did not address the issue of the historical Jesus scholarship as much as I had anticipated, but it did raise the question of how sacred are our historical, accepted, canon-approved ideas about Christianity? Is Christianity unable to be flexible in how the importance of Jesus is understood? Will the death of Christianity come from being too flexible (watering down the religion) or from being too rigid (leave the religion behind because it is too historically and culturally entrenched)?
The main premise of the book was actually how Christianity must change from a theistic view to a nontheistic view of God or we will suffer the death of the Christian religion. Since I didn't agree with Spong's sweeping assumptions, his conclusion that Christianity must give up theism didn't impress me. I didn't really agree with most of the book for that reason. But it definitely got me thinking and had valuable things to say about Christianity and God. I give it 3 stars :-) ***