The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee writes:
IT HAS been said that, if it is stuck in the mud, rocking a boat is the only way to re-float it. Bishop John Shelby Spong, who died on 22 September, in his 91st year, took this maxim very much to heart in his relentless campaign for change in the Episcopal Church in the United States.
Possessed of personal charm, generosity of spirit, and a pastoral heart, he was also drawn to controversy like a moth to a flame. He told one of his diocesan clergy that he needed, as their bishop, to position himself in a place well to the left of where the Church was at, so that the clergy would have a lot of room to exist in the space in between. Almost inevitably, clergy and laity who resisted his liberalism may not always have felt that they were given the same room to exist, but they could never doubt his pastoral commitment and integrity.
A Spong sermon, lecture, or conference address was always a bravura performance characterised by wit, pathos, and passionate intensity. A recurring target was those who abused the Bible by taking it literally. He was especially affronted by the application of first- or fourth-century world-views to contemporary debates concerning race, gender, sexuality, science, and psychology. He devoted time and energy to biblical study, particularly the four Gospels, thereby seeking to uncover the timeless meaning and message of Jesus freed from pre-modern interpretative assumptions.
Theologically, he acknowledged his debt to Paul Tillich in re-shaping, or even re-placing, the God of classical theism, leading him to conclude that “Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead.”
So begins the first of “Twelve Points” in his “A call for a New Reformation” (1998). This manifesto challenged almost all the central tenets of historic Christianity: incarnation, Virgin birth, resurrection, life after death, and so on. This elicited from Rowan Williams in the Church Times as devastating a critique as the future Archbishop could ever bring himself to deliver. Spong had God wrong in Thesis One, he argued, and the other 11 were compromised accordingly.
This contretemps coincided with the 1998 Lambeth Conference, at which both Spong and Dr Williams were conspicuously present. While Spong lacked Williams’s theological gravitas and sophistication, his impassioned, or even sometimes intemperate, advocacy of gender equality and LGTB rights in Church and society made a lasting impression.
John Shelby Spong was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1931. Like many other prominent advocates of liberal Christianity, in his early years he worshipped in conservative Evangelical churches. His father died when he was 12, and, at about that time, he was strongly influenced by an Episcopalian priest who encouraged him to broaden his theological horizon, and eventually to attend Virginia Theological Seminary.
Ordained in 1955, he held a series of rectorial posts in North Carolina and Virginia. He excelled as a pastor and teacher with a gift for communicating his expansive faith in both words that inspired, and actions that commanded affection and respect. This period in his ministry was marked by his active opposition to white supremacist movements — he proudly claimed to be the Ku Klux Klan’s No. 1 enemy.
The publication of J. A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963 marked an important stage in his theological, ecclesiastical, and ethical development. He described Robinson as his mentor, whose influence at a time of great social and political turbulence put so many received attitudes and assumptions to the test.
In 1976, he was elected coadjutor Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, succeeding George Rath as Bishop of the diocese in 1979. His episcopal ministry was controversial from the start. He faced opposition to his support for the ordination of women, and even more when he ordained the first openly gay male priest in the Episcopal Church — the first of more than 30 such priests in Newark diocese by the time he retired in 2000.
Although his liberalism was welcomed by many, and he attracted talented clergy to the diocese because of it, there was also an above-average decline in the numbers attending Episcopal churches, due in some measure, but not entirely, to his uncompromising convictions.
He was a prolific author with two dozen or so books published between 1973 and 2018. As a member of the radical Jesus Seminar, he addressed the use and abuse of scripture in Christian preaching and teaching with exegesis and commentary invariably provocative and sometimes almost gratuitously tendentious. Testing to its limits biblical testimony to, for example, the virgin birth and Jesus’s bodily resurrection was one thing, but denying the very existence of Judas Iscariot and making authoritative claims for St Paul’s homosexuality were something else.
Reputable biblical scholars queued up to challenge and even pour scorn on his status as one of their number. That said, he did have the grit-in-the-oyster effect of causing students of scripture in both Church and academy to revisit established interpretations, if only to try and prove him wrong.
His marriage to Joan in 1952 ended with her death in 1988. He is survived by his three daughters, and Christine, whom he married in 1990, and who was his constant companion on extensive preaching and teaching tours after his retirement.
If a more diverse, inclusive, self-critical, and humanitarian Church is what floats your boat, then, by rocking it, John Shelby Spong will have helped to float it — but the question whether he did so at the expense of holing it beneath the theological waterline will continue to divide opinion.
