SpongBob HereticPants

Tonight I went to hear Bishop John Shelby Spong at Trinity Church. I hadn't read any of his books, but his reputation piqued my curiosity. He turned out to be a compelling public speaker, deftly mixing Biblical history, science, and personal anecdotes.

The first two-thirds of Bishop Spong's talk was spent cataloguing the various failures of Christians throughout history. He focused in particular on the theme of religious anger -- anti-Semitism, the Crusades, Osama bin Laden, etc. He also criticized the way that conservatives peddle a form of guilt-ridden religion that demeans followers as sinful and powerless, and spoke of the importance of rejecting that kind of religion. The last third of his talk offered his proposed antidote: a religion based on love. That's it. Love. He spoke of his personal experiences of God's presence in his life, and argued that life-giving force could change the world if everyone responded to it.

The problem is that he transitioned very abruptly from his rigorously intellectual and objective debunking of traditional Christianity to a seemingly emotional and subjective defense of this other type of Christianity that he was proposing. The natural question from the first part of his presentation is, "Why bother with any form of Christianity at all?" The only thing that seemed to keep Spong from sliding into atheism altogether was his personal and subjective experience with Christ. I understand why that's enough for him. But it's asking a lot of other Christians to have faith based on Spong's emotional appeal, after they have been convinced by Spong's intellect that their traditional worldview is nothing more than a combination of myth, fear, and spittle. Perhaps he musters a more spirited defense of Christianity in one of his books, but I'm so lazy....

Bishop Spong allowed for a generous Q&A time and did something kinda cool. He started out by asking that the first question, and every other subsequent question, be asked by a female audience member to keep men from dominating the questions. (Had I attended in drag, maybe Bishop Spong would have allowed me to go first instead of making me wait.) When it was my turn, I asked something along the following lines: "You stated that you believed in evil acts, such as the Crusades or Osama bin Laden's attacks. You even stated that certain evils, like prejudice and discrimination, may stem from our evolutionary biological need to protect from out-group members. From your perspective, how is this capacity for recurring evil different from the traditional notion of sin? Is it simply how humans have used the language of sin, or do you believe that there is an actual conceptual difference?" (What I really wanted to ask was "Why do you hate Jebus?")

Somewhat surprisingly, Bishop Spong said that there was no conceptual difference for him. He simply avoided terminology like "sin," because it is so fraught for many people. He said that the concept of sin could not be "rescued," and instead needed to be "transformed." (I didn't quite get the distinction.) But if humans do sin sometimes, why is it categorically bad to feel guilty about sins? Certainly, constant guilt that is incapacitating is never a good thing. (I'm looking at you, Mikey.) But Bishop Spong seems to rule out of hand any useful purpose whatsoever for guilt, whereas I could see some situations where it may be needed to change negative behavior.