What Does It Mean To Be A Christian?

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

“Whatever you do for the least of these, that you did unto me.” Matt 25:40

What does it mean to be a Christian? The answer to this question has traditionally always been a balancing act between believing the right things and acting the right way. It is a balance between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Actually, it is not so much a balancing act but a recognition that to truly be orthodox, to truly show right belief towards and regarding God, it is necessary to show correct orthopraxy, to act justly and mercifully towards others. I think every Christian would agree this analysis. And, most Christians would probably agree on what it means to behave correctly in relation to others, showing love, compassion, and charity, even if most Christians recognize that they are not always good at following through on it. The debate comes up in the area of orthodoxy. Not all people who call themselves Christians agree on what it means to show right belief.

An interesting case study is that of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. The beliefs he holds and claims he makes are neither new nor unique. There are many people out there who hold similar beliefs. What makes the case of Bishop Spong unique is that he claims to be a Christian, and continues to hold a place of leadership in a Christian Church while holding beliefs that, while shared by many others, cause most other adherents, out of honesty with themselves, to refrain from calling themselves “Christian.” Below is his basic claim for a new “Reformation” in spirit with Martin Luther, however, as he claims, more radical than Luther.

http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/jsspong/reform.html
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium

Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. This is a bold claim and, as such, demands an explanation. In other writings, Spong claims that we need to find some place between Theism and Atheism. He is no longer capable of believing in an all-powerful and all-loving God, so he cannot hold to Theism. He does not like the meaninglessness of Atheism, either, so he is hiding out somewhere in the middle. Is it really possible to hide out in the middle? Remember, this is different than Agnosticism, the claim that one does not know or cannot know if God does not exist. This is saying that there is some sort of “God” or “God-ness” or “God-essence” that is not really real, but also isn’t completely fictional either. God is real for Spong kind of like how Santa Claus is “real” for the editor of the New York Sun who wrote that letter to Virginia. God is the best part of ourselves, or something like that.

Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. This claim works IF claim number one is true. Yet, Spong has not proven claim one. All he has done is assert a belief in it.

The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense. Yes, evolution shows us that we developed from lower life forms. We have developed intellectually and technologically. However, morally, we are no better and no worse than our predecessors. We are good sometimes, and bad sometimes, just like people in the past. We may be better as far as sexism and racism, but we kill more people in wars, and people are just as lonely as they were in the past, and, maybe even more so, being trapped in our rooms with computers, cell-phones, yet less real interaction. The biblical story does not say that the world was aesthetically perfect, it just says that God did not make us as sinners. Sin was a free choice made by us. There is evil in the world. Whose fault is it, God’s, or our own from abuse of free will? The dogma of Original Sin simply teaches that sin is our own fault, not God’s.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. What Spong is saying is that, since, biologically speaking, a person needs a male sperm and female ovum to meet to be conceived, a virgin birth (without IVF or some other form of modern technology that did not exist 2000 years ago) is not possible. True enough. However, the Christian story is not denying that sperm and egg uniting is the normal way of giving birth. The Christian story says that a miracle happened, a suspension of the laws of nature. Jesus has only one human parent because of miraculous, divine intervention. And, Spong disbelieves this because of his fifth point, which comes next.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. Spong says that we know “know” miracle cannot happen because of what we have learned from the Enlightenment and modern science. Whether or not miracles do happen is a matter of faith. But, that they can happen has not, and cannot, be disproved (or proved) by science. The rules of mathematics are absolute. 1 +1 must by definition always and everywhere equal 2 (Even if we substitute a different number or word for 2, 1+1 will always equal whatever symbol is there for 2). The laws of science, however, are dependent on where we are. We fall when we jump off a building because of how gravity affects us on earth. If we jumped in space, we would not fall; we would float. A miracle, by definition, is simply a suspension of the regular laws of science. Normally, water does not just turn into wine. But, is it impossible that it could happen? Science cannot disprove it. However, if one, like Spong, gives up belief in a Theistic God, it is understandable why he would give up belief in miracles.

The rest of my critique of Spong to come later…