Bishop Spong was a big inspiration to me in college, when I was seeking, questioning and evaluating my religious believes – attempting to reconcile my scientific inculcation with my spiritual sentiment.
At the time I was trying to fathom the mystery of the divine-human interaction.
In his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong asked questions that stuck with me: Do we cling to our childish fantasies of a supreme being because they are the last such fantasies it’s ok to keep? Were these theistic images of God the Father, Protector or Punisher so imbued in us since childhood that we are hesitant to challenge them because we fear we might get punished?
An atheist leaning would postulate that if this is the case then the center of religion is the power of human reason. I’m not certain I’m willing to go that far. So in conclusion I figured the childhood lessons were too imbued in me to contemplate otherwise or I want to believe in an all powerful being that is in control when I am not. Like a year round Santa – dishing out gifts for good behavior.
Still I question the literal acceptance of the biblical tales I grew up learning and regurgitating. I’ve often wondered if Jesus had really ascended into heaven, wouldn’t he still be out there, in the galaxy, moving at a meteoric speed somewhere past the milkyway? At the time the story was told people believed the earth was flat. Now we know it’s a round infinitely small aspect of the universe.
Yet I want to be good, serve my sister, care about my neighbor. I want to believe that I am accountable to something or someone for the way I choose to live my life. I want to have a moral compass and the one I know or understand is the Christian one.
So today I am a Christian because to me being a disciple of Jesus does not require me to make a literalized credal affirmation of a theistic God who supposedly invaded our world and lived among us for a time in the person of Jesus. It only requires me to be empowered by him to initiate the presence of God in him by living fully, loving wastefully and by having the courage to be all that God created me to be. It means that I will commune with God only to the degree that I can give my life, my love and my being away to others without fear of losing myself.
