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When internationally known Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong returns to his hometown next week to speak at Myers Park Baptist Church, he'll once again prove he can make fundamentalists and atheists alike crazy.
Here's what the audience is likely to hear:
Yes, God exists, but God is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives.
Jesus' resurrection is not an historically accurate event, but a symbolic story of what it means to live a fully human life.
Eternal life is not a journey to heaven or hell, but a state which can only be glimpsed when we experience love.
Spong, retired and living in New Jersey, lays out these ideas in his new book, "Eternal Life: A New Vision." They are ideas he has discussed in more than 20 other books, so his followers already know them well. He wants to carve out a new Christianity, one that marries belief in God with sober scientific inquiry.
Spong doesn't want to address either fundamentalists or atheists; he wants to find the disaffected Christian in the middle, the person searching for a faith that embraces the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.
"Where I really spend my time is with those people who have given up Christianity and given up religion and given up any concept of life after death because the religious language no longer makes any sense to them," Spong said in a recent interview. "I want to say to them, there are some dimensions of this Christian story I think you have missed."
Apparently Charlotte has a lot of seekers.
Signups for Spong's talks are way ahead of those for previous years' speakers, says Dr. Stephen Shoemaker, senior minister at Myers Park Baptist. For 14 years, the church has invited well-known Jesus scholars, conservative to liberal, to speak in a continuing series, "Jesus the Christ in the 21st Century."
"We expect to have the largest crowds we've had for anyone," Shoemaker says. More than 150 people took part in a Spong preparation class.
Shoemaker concedes Spong's ideas may surprise some (he doesn't agree with all of them himself), but he says, "We think that the church ought to be a place where you can come and ask all the questions you need to ask for your faith to be vital to you."
Religious rabble-rouser
Spong began challenging the status quo early in his career.
After graduating from UNC Chapel Hill and Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., Spong served churches in North Carolina and Virginia, where he championed racial integration of schools, churches, and hospitals. While leading the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, N.J., for 24 years, he was among the first bishops to ordain women and homosexuals.
His outspokenness on these issues has landed him on TV news shows. Backlash has been brisk. A 1998 book, "Can a Bishop Be Wrong?" compiles essays from 10 dissenting scholars, including FitzSimons Allison, retired Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England, wrote a public letter to Spong on the issue of homosexuality: "You claim the high ground of science and reason; you argue that the view of those who disagree is 'tired and threadbare' and their leadership lacks integrity. Furthermore, you attack personally those of us who disagree with your opinion and in doing so you distort the theologies and reasons why we are led to conclude that there is no justification for sexual expression outside marriage."
Source of his conflict
Those who would like to hear a more conservative challenge to Spong also can watch him debate Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on YouTube.
Spong, 78, calls his recent book on eternal life a "spiritual autobiography" because it chronicles the development of his faith. (A previous autobiography, "Here I Stand," speaks to his career and family life.) Spong's Charlotte boyhood figures prominently in those early stirrings against fundamentalism. Here, as a child, he began to grapple with the meaning of death.
While in second grade at Dilworth Elementary, he was troubled to learn of two classmates' deaths when they were hit by a car while riding a Flexi Flyer on Euclid Avenue. Then, when he was 12, he lost his father, a man given to alcoholism, gambling, cigarette smoking and profanity. His boyhood fundamentalist church had taught him that his father's behavior was the highway to hell.
And yet, "When callers coming to our home to express their regrets now told me what a fine Christian man my father was and I should be comforted by the conviction that he was to receive his reward, the words simply did not add up."
He writes, "If religion was designed to comfort me, it failed. It brought me, rather, into intense emotional conflict."
Following his father's death, he switched to St. Peter's Episcopal Church, where he found a role model in a young rector and sang in the boy's choir. Spong describes this phase of his life as a time of unquestioning religious certainty.
But by the time he had finished seminary and begun serving his first congregation in Durham, he writes, "I knew that I could no longer play the religious game that I had once embraced so totally. No, God did not die or disappear for me in that moment, but the way I had always defined God began to do so."
Map of his path
Spong says his views now are informed by reading about 80 books a year on topics ranging from theology, physics and biology to history and astronomy. He says he has read the entire Bible multiple times.
His life has been a spiritual and intellectual journey that has led him around the world and now back to Charlotte, always asking, "What will happen if our suspicions are validated and this defense shield called religion loses its credibility? What will happen if the external supernatural God of religion dies? Can the human psyche bear the experience of self-consciousness without the narcotic of supernaturalism?"
He asks his readers and audiences the same question he has asked himself all of his life: "Is there another option?" Spong has faith there is.
