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A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How a New Faith is Being Born
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Average Rating:  out of 108 Reviews
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Price: $14.95
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Sale: $4.50
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060670634
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: John Shelby Spong
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Publisher: HarperOne
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Dewey Decimal Number: 230
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Publication Date: 2002-09-01
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Reading Level: 304
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Description: Christianity will not be a viable belief system for honest people in the contemporary world, writes John Shelby Spong, until it drops a few outmoded ideas--for instance, belief in a supernatural God who reveals Himself from outside creation. A New Christianity for a New World continues the work begun in Spong's bestselling Why Christianity Must Change or Die, in which the former Episcopalian bishop diagnosed Christianity's major problems. Here, he offers a vision of what authentic Christian belief might look like today, stripped of theism and all its corollaries (doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Atonement). Christians may come to believe that "God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God and Jesus is my way into God." Readers inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's tantalizing writings on "religionless Christianity" in Letters and Papers from Prison and by John A.T. Robinson's Honest to God will find much challenge and comfort in Spong's New Christianity, his most mature and most radical book. --Michael Joseph Gross
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Stuck |
Date: 2008-02-19 |
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Details: Writing 2 years after exploring a non-theistic Christianity in Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, Bishop Spong seems to have little to add to that work. An opportunity, perhaps, to re-state where he had come to in his thinking. A good chapter on the role theism had played historically in helping humankind deal with the trauma of self-consciousness and a challenge to any emergent Christianity that it be able to help us counter the hysteria that seems to be emerging due to the dying of theism. But little theological advance in this book and one wonders if one would do better to turn to Tillich, however less accessible he might be, or to Bonhoeffer. Is knowing God as "the Ground of All Being" adequate to sustain one? Is meeting Jesus as the Gospel writers presented him adequate to inspire? Spong seems unsure just what form any "New Christianity" will take although he seems to know what forms it should not take. Although committed still to his image of Jesus, he does not even seem certain whether Christianity will survive as a viable religion for those believers in exile he has sought to reach. Given that, it seem s surprising that he has not ventured away even a little from Jesus. He does speak of conversations with Buddhists and others, but he seems unwilling to let go of Christianity for a while and try Buddhism or any other faith. Were he, for example, to at least study and practice some form of Buddhism, say Chan Buddhism, he might see how that religion evolved so as to let go almost entirely of the historical Buddha, instead turning to creating legends of new Chinese Buddhas based on such Chan Buddhist masters as Hui-Neng and Lin-Chi.
Spong's attachment to his image of Jesus may be preventing his spiritual growth. Not that the life and death of Jesus and the stories that emerged of it are not important but that Spong may not be able to really see Christianity until he lets go of all of it. As it is, he seems to be desperately holding fast to his image of Jesus and unable to see how Christianity over the centuries may be something much more than Jesus.
Certainly a pearl may start in response to a grain of sand but it is the pearl that is beautiful and not the no longer seen grain of sand. Why try so hard to speculate on who Jesus was, even after abandoning the bodily resurrection and even the theistic conception of God? Spong may do well to turn his attention more thoroughly to Paul and the implications of his Christ experience as presented in his own letters. Spong's Jesus may be too much a matter of speculation and the next to be rejected by those very believers in exile to whom Spong appeals. If not a literal resurrection and not a literal God, why then such a literalized Jesus?
How selective has Spong been in forming the Jesus he presents? Perhaps Spong should focus on how he is able to respond to God and live more fully rather than keep trying to interpret the New Testament in a way that suits him better when he seems unsure himself what that way would be. Is Spong ready to advise others or is he struggling to work out a path for himself, a path that may lead him, despite his protestations to the contrary, beyond Jesus and beyond Christ? One might do well to read Thomas Altizer's much bolder forays in The New Gospel of Christian Atheism and Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir. Spong needs to be bolder or many "believers in exile" will find guidance in others leaving only the timid to read Spong and believe they are being progressive by doing so: : at least for the latter it may be a start.
Note well: since writing the above review, I have read Spong's more recent book:
Jesus for the Non-Religious
in which he has pulled together and further advances many of the insights from his previous books: I recommend it.
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Review Summary: Not quite |
Date: 2008-02-17 |
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Details: A decent book if you havn't read spong before its a good overall summary.
Unfortunatly if you have its all the same arguments but in less detail. You'd be better off with with Resucueing the bible from fundementalists if you want to read Spongs arguements against literalism.
There are some good things about this book. Like Spongs idea about how to see the concept of Original sin, rather as incompletness than imperfection. Also his complete materialist viewpoint is much more solid than say Borg's. He doesn't have a superstitous bone in his body. You won't walk away with a new Christianity though.
Read marcus Borg's Heart of Christianity Instead if that's what you want.
Sadly I don't think the mainline church has much of a liberal future. It seems destined to become evangelical. |
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Review Summary: Spong's final book fails to define the "new Christianity" |
Date: 2007-12-09 |
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Details: As a former Episcopalian who has lapsed into a uncomfortable Atheism, I hoped that this last book by Bishop Spong would give some indication as to what a new Christianity might look like once most of the 39 Articles of Religion have been eliminated. Regretably, although Spong tells the reader, once again, why he has rejected such things as the resurrection, the virgin birth and the inerrancy of the bible, he concludes that the form and nature of the future church must be left to others. With all due respect to Bishop Spong, there is really no need to read this book unless you are unfamiliar with the Bishop's previous work, in which case "A New Christianity" provides a nice summary of his theology. |
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Review Summary: Bad Medicine For the Church |
Date: 2007-12-04 |
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Details: Spong says Christianity is sick and he proposes a cure in his book A New Christianity for a New World. Unfortunately, and by his own admission, his "solution to Christianity's sickness" may prove to be a fatal cure (p.18). But, oh well, he irrationally hopes the church will sign on to his treatment program anyway!
What is this so-called sickness, and what is Spong's proposed fix for it? Spong believes Christianity has become outdated and is not believable in what he calls our "post-theistic" world. He personally does not believe that God exists, or that Jesus is God-incarnate, the Savior, was resurrected from the dead, or that humans need a Savior since he denies there is such a thing as human sin, and so on. Since these beliefs are central to Christianity, Spong insists that our "only option" is to gut Christianity of its historical teachings and practices and replace them with new ideas that will help us moderns to "touch" and "appropriate" a "God-experience" and a "Christ-experience"...to "seek a new way...to tell the Christ-story." Oh, and besides all this, Spong claims to be a Christian! He denies being a humanist. However, by his own account his new religion would exclude singing or praying praises to any theistic deity, exclude prayers of petition, exclude Christian baptism or the Lord's Supper. It would however include celebrating "what it means to be human," and worshipping "the gift of self-consciousness."(p206-207) "This worship must go through the development of a fuller humanity" he says. (p208) He can protest, but his beliefs are those of a humanist and not of a Christian.
Factual and anti-rational problems abound throughout the book. He bases his disbelief in the existence of God (he refuses to call it "atheism") on his belief in evolution. He doesn't touch on the metaphysical implications of the universally accepted Theory of Relativity which calls for a Beginner. Instead he relegates any notion of a God as Creator to the "Christian myth" category. He brushes over the problem that human consciousness poses for evolutionists claiming that it emerged by material means. Still, against reason he claims that our consciousness is eternal. He can't have it both ways! If we are products of material causes and our consciousnesses are material, they are finite, not eternal. And if they are material/finite, they die when we die. But this concept of an "eternal" consciousness is central to his belief system, since he has deified human consciousness and made it the only suitable object of worship.
What then does Spong do with the traditional object of Christian worship, Jesus Christ? He believes he has stripped Jesus of His deity by denying the existence of God (no God so no God Incarnate). But he must still deal with the Bible's record of the miracles of Jesus and in particular His resurrection, since they are presented as a historical record of real acts of a God Spong says does not exist. He does this in two ways. First, he a priori discounts any supernatural event as a myth, so he doesn't have to even consider the historical evidence for the event. Next, since he assumes all the New Testament miracle accounts are fabricated he himself fabricates reasons why the Gospel writers did that. So, for example, when Matthew reports that the women actually grabbed the risen Jesus by the feet, Spong rejects it as an inauthentic story because he doesn't believe in God or the resurrection. Instead he claims that the writers of the New Testament added a "theistic overlay of supernaturalism on Jesus" that was "not original." (p102) He means that the church made up stories about Jesus and His death until they had produced a miracle-working physically-resurrected Jesus story by some fifty years after the event. To bolster this claim Spong significantly mishandles Paul's account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ in 1Corinthians 15. Historians and theologians agree that this is a key passage on the resurrection because it contains a creedal statement about Jesus' resurrection that was in use by the church within 2 years of His resurrection. So, despite Spong's protest to the contrary, it was the very early belief by the church in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that "propelled the Christian church into existence." (p102) Spong further tries to weaken the effect of this important passage by claiming it shows Paul did not believe Jesus' resurrection was a literal, bodily resurrection. The Biblical text simply does not support Spong's claim and makes his thesis unconvincing. Also, other theologians who are experts on the resurrection discuss this same passage and conclude that Paul believed in and was definitely referring to a literal physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. (See for instance N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, pg 317- 329; and Gary R. Habermas, The Risen Jesus & Future Hope. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pg 156-157.The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God)The Risen Jesus and Future Hope)
Though Spong claims he loves the Christian church, his book did not convince me that he has her best interest at heart. He is offering the church some very bad medicine.
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Review Summary: Not just Christianity |
Date: 2007-05-13 |
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Details: This book should have been titled " a new religion for a new world", it is not why Just Christianity, it is all world religions must change or die. I recommend all world religious leaders read this book. |
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