Eternal Life

Eternal Life: A New Vision
John Shelby Spong, HarperOne, 2009

Falling off the Horizon
Most of us know instinctively from an early age that death lurks around the corner for everyone. Sometimes death springs in a flash from the shrubbery at the side of the road, catching us unprepared. For some it comes early in life - and in that case is perceived almost universally as a tragedy.

For a majority the horizon beyond which death waits is not at first an important factor. For a long time it stays reassuringly distant as they sail through life. And then one day it becomes apparent that the horizon is no longer receding, that it has become an edge. One day we are all forced off that edge and into the unknown. Some of us have to be kicked over, yelling and protesting; others go over in fear and trembling; yet others take the step willingly and peacefully.

Those who have read any of Spong's previous books will perhaps have realised that he is erudite and well-read but also that his books are not strictly speaking scholarly. That is, he writes more to persuade than to convince solely by the rational power of his arguments. In this book he starts with personal experience of the death of some important people in his life. However, before the reader can engage the book intellectually, he suggests,

... its character must be understood existentially. It is such a personal story that I first need to set its subject ... into its own context.

That context is, naturally enough, his ministry as an Anglican priest and bishop. Like other such accounts, his personal experience is interesting enough. But one can't help wondering from the start how he is going to deal with a subject which, by his own admission, is beyond the limits of human experience.

His standpoint appears simple:

I can with integrity journey into whatever might be beyond this life, only by going deeply into this life, into the here and now. I cannot look at death and its meaning except from the vantage point of one who is alive. I cannot talk about the divine except from the perspective of the human.

Chance nature
As Spong begins to explore life we should not be surprised to find that he immediately bumps into the impossibly complex. Still, he does his best to summarise the natural system of which we are part. He takes his readers on a trip through natural history - the origins of the universe, our world, and human beings. For those who are already well-versed in such things, he offers little new. Having said that, there will be many for whom his summary will be enlightening.

More important than the tour's details are his conclusions from the data.

First, he firmly declares himself in a position which, were it to have been declared while he was still a serving bishop, he would have undoubtedly been roundly condemned:

... the insights of science have made it quite clear that each individual specimen of life is an unpredicted and unpredictable accident ... I am not the product of anyone's design ... I am the product of the infinite laws of probability, with no apparent or obvious purpose.

In other words, God the Creator as designer of each person must be relegated to an earlier understanding of nature, to a human need for a comfort zone in which evolutionary chance is replaced by the mighty yet personally caring hand of God.

Second, what makes us human is self-consciousness, an awareness which led naturally and perhaps inevitably to religion. Self-consciousness allows us to know what every other creature cannot know, that

... time flows only in one direction, carrying humans through life to life's end. The end of life is death, which is the inevitable destiny of every living thing ...

So because we are able to imagine ourselves forward in time we naturally find ourselves chronically anxious and constantly fearful, maintains Spong. The lure of religion is that it offers an escape from existential fear and anxiety.

Spong relates how he first became uneasy with simple religious folk tales of life after death, the sort of outlook which attempts to reassure by proclaiming that agonising loss through death is God's will and that a dead person is with the angels. He replaced that with the "deposit of faith" given him by a kindly priest, a deposit which later turned out to have as little weight for Spong as had the earlier folklore.

Down the drain
Perhaps the most important departure from traditional teachings we all must make, says Spong, is to realise that God's primary directive in nature is to survive. When we flush the spider in the bath down the drain, we will see exactly the same struggles to stay alive as we see in ourselves on a daily basis. The difference is that we know in advance that our life is potentially perilous - and we quake in our boots at that knowledge.

Religion in the modern age can no longer bear the burden it once did of giving us heavenly reassurance in our death-anxieties. Spong thinks we must step outside religion to find viable answers because no coping device can continue to work once it has been seen as such. Religion is just such a device.

The author spells out in some detail how religion presents itself in the face of death, how it tends to manipulate us as frightened human beings into its service. That conclusion is all that remains once the ancient myths and fantasies have been scraped away. Indeed, he suggests, we will be well within reason to construe church worship largely as an exercise aimed at cajoling and flattering the divine so as to escape going down the drain into eternal death.

Spong's attempt to put religious death, heaven, and hell in its contemporary place is largely successful. For those many who sense that traditional answers to going down the drain are at best shallow and at worst manipulative, his words will be a godsend.

However, it's all very well to knock down ancient walls of religious orthodoxy and let in the non-religious rabble - but what is to be put in its place? How are those who acknowledge the death of "God" in religion to put meaning back into their lives? What are we to make of death when all our traditional defenses are stripped away? What now if the ship of faith is foundering? Can we look out for another vessel - or must we swim for it?

A Jesus filter
Spong thinks that part of the answer to these difficult questions is to enable people to change the way they conceptualise God - though he admits that this is like trying to turn the Titanic around in a small pond:

The first step is to let go of the religious paradigm of yesterday and allow it to die. It will not die quietly or easily, but it will die. The rattle of rigor mortis can be heard even now.

Like his mixed metaphor, Spong's answers to the challenge seem strangely weak. He suggests, for example, that we must look inwards for ultimate meaning. When we walk into ourselves, we "walk into God". His exposition of what this means and how we do it turns out to be a strange mixture of speculation and hope-full wondering about the potentials of the human psyche. He suggests that our way into God is essentially mystical, a vision which will in turn lead us into a new way of envisioning the world around us.

As is so often the case when mystical visions of God are concerned, Spong is forced into tortuous language - using phrases like

... we are part of who God is and what God is, and ... God is part of who we are and what we are ...

to try and draw word diagrams of God as

... a source of life that flows through all living things but comes to self-consciousness in human life alone.

He acknowledges that others have been there before him. The mystical route to God is no doubt valid for those who discover the divine through it - but it is not the way for everyone. A subjective God discovered by you and me in the depths of our being is inevitably different for each of us. That may demonstrate only that the word "God" can refer to a vast range of subjective meanings, as vast as the number of humans on the planet. Whatever the case, the mystical vision cannot meet the needs of the many - even if, for the relatively few, it is full of new light and life.

To do him justice, Spong does not leave it there. For him, central to the new vision required by the death of God is the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We can never penetrate fully the curtain of mystery which hangs between us and God - but Jesus is the way ahead:

The meaning of God was forever altered because Jesus, by the sheer force of his being, has imprinted humanity onto the definition of the divine. The external God [has] been discovered at the heart of the human. God [is] now experienced "through the filter of Jesus".

Unfortunately, perhaps even tragically, Spong falls at the hurdle of explaining just how Jesus is to be a filter for the human race. He suggests that Jesus became the filter through which the first Christians interpreted their lives after the trauma of his death. The resurrection doesn't explain life after death: it explains how the disciples came to terms with the death of the man in whom they had invested great expectations.

If that's so, then how is Jesus a filter for us in the 21st century? We now know that rock-solid historical information about Jesus is somewhat sparse. We know also that the kerygma of the early Church is framed in terms which are difficult, if not impossible, for many in the secular cultures of the West nowadays to base their lives upon. What now? Spong rambles off into personal recollection - which is interesting but doesn't really tackle the problem.

These criticisms do not invalidate this book. It is an important contribution to the vital task looming before Christians today - that of working out how, in scientific and secular cultures, we can recapture a sense of the divine without at the same time negating our understanding of the world.

The task remains to be done; and it is one which is likely to challenge Christendom's best minds for many decades to come.

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