In this last of our series on John Spong’s critique of credal Christianity we are taking up thesis number 5 and thesis number 7 in the Spong manifesto. Thesis 5 is: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. Thesis 7 is: 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.

Spong’s rejection of miracles is implicit in his rejection of Theism. Miracles are signs which are the revelation of a personal, loving God. Miracles reveal God’s nature and purpose to humankind. I have argued earlier in this series that Spong so completely identifies God with the world and natural processes that it is impossible to speak of revelation in any meaningful way. He wants Jesus to reveal “the God presence” and the nature of “the Ground of Being.” But this is a far cry from the loving self-disclosure of the God who our Lord calls Abba, Father. Revelation and miracle both imply a personal will and intention. A miracle is a special instance of God’s self-revelation. It is of necessity an act of the divine will. Spong does not want the Ground of Being to have personal characteristics such as will. A definitive self-revelation, especially a miraculous revelation is excluded from the beginning. In Spong’s system miracles cannot exist.

Spong thinks that reports of miracles are simply benighted first century people trying to express their Jesus experience in categories that are familiar to them. The reports of the Resurrection are a special example of this general process. For Spong, Jesus was an extremely intense locus of the “God presence.” Jesus was a “spirit person” who intensely manifested the spirit present at the heart of life. When his life was ended people realized that the spirit, “the God presence” could not be killed and this presence could now be found in them. They used language of resurrection for this because it was near to hand. It was the best way they had to express the unquenchable vitality of the “Jesus experience.” According to Spong the reports of the empty tomb and appearances of the Risen Lord are later elaborations of the experience of the discovery by the disciples that after the Resurrection the spirit that was in Jesus was in them.

To this writer, Spong engages in numerous self-contradictions. It is the overriding principle of his system that we are not allowed to think of a God who”intervenes.” But now we are told that Resurrection is an action of God. I do not see how Spong has made out a case that the “Ground of Being” is capable of action in any meaningful sense. It appears that denying the existence of a personal, active God has been the point of his manifesto up until now. As for the Resurrection of the Lord being a physical resuscitation, this appears a very gross instance of misinterpretation of the biblical record. It is clear in the Bible that the Resurrection of the Lord is of an entirely different sort than the resuscitation of Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. Spong seems to me to be often knocking down straw men that have never been serious Christian teaching. It has never been serious Christian teaching that the Resurrection was a resuscitation. It is presented clearly as a complete transformation, a totally unprecedented and unique event. The Resurrection is not a return to the old life but the appearance of a new life that includes the transformation of the body. The phrase “inside human history” is likewise cryptic. I take it to mean this distinction that Spong has made much of to this point, i.e. that God does not really intervene and act in history and that claims that God has done so are imperfect attempts to express the “God experience.” Perhaps Spong means the Resurrection is something which is manifested in a non-historical realm of meaning and significance. We are given to understand that God acts but not in history. One wonders about this place inside human experience but outside human history. That he cannot maintain the consistency of his approach in the writing of his own theses is a very telling argument against his proposal.

The Anglican tradition is blessed with a history of profound teaching on the Resurrection. One of the great teachers of the end of the last century and the beginning of this one was Bishop B.F. Westcott. Bishop Westcott was sometime Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and was responsible for the definitive Greek Text of the New Testament in use at that time. In order to respond to Bishop Spong I have consulted a book that Bishop Westcott wrote in 1866. I believe that all the fast balls that Spong has been pitching as the latest thing were hit solidly out of the park by Bishop Westcott more than a hundred years ago.

To the conviction of Spong that Newtonian “laws” of nature make belief in miracles impossible, Westcott replies that the so called laws of nature are summary and retrospective. The so called “laws” tell us that based on our observation to date there are forces in the universe that work in the same manner under the same conditions. They do not tell us beforehand(Westcott uses the term antecedently) what may happen when either the force applied or the circumstances change. Wescott says

“There is then nothing absolute in laws of nature. They are relative to man, and do not explain either the origin or the preservation of things. It is quite possible for us to conceive that the unknown power through which phenomena are produced according to an observed way might have caused them to have been produced in another way wholly different. The belief in the immutability of the observed law springs wholly from ourselves and is simply a special expression of the axiom that the same power will produce the same results under the same circumstances. But we have no right to assume that the circumstances will always be the same.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.23-24)

Spong does not have an adequate understanding of the nature of scientific law. If you read the entirety of Bishop Wescott’s treatment of the relation between science and religion you will find a thinker with a more profound insight into both topics. It is not the laws of nature which cause Spong to reject miracles but the rejection of a personal God. As we have noted before. No God who is separate from the creation=no intervention by God =no revelation, including no miracles a priori. This is just an axiom of Spong’s system not any kind of necessary conclusion from science. Spong’s denial of special revelation and miracles finally makes his whole system incoherent as Westcott recognized of similar criticisms of miracle being made in the heyday of 19th century scientism. A God who cannot intervene in history and nature cannot be shown to affect humanity in any way.

“To affirm that miracles are unnatural is to constitute general laws of observation into a fate superior to God, or to deny His personal action. And it must be observed that the denial of His personal action in the physical world involves the denial of His action on the hearts of men; for there is not the least reason to suppose that what is seen is less immediately dependent upon Him than what is unseen, or that it can be affirmed beforehand that He is more likely to act on one part of that which He has created than on another. In other words, if miracles are unnatural, (Spong’s arbitrary interventions) then we are hopelessly enclosed within the barriers of material laws and absolutely shut off from all intercourse with the Infinite. But this is against the fundamental axiom of religion..[by fundamental axiom Westcott means that the purpose of religion is to religere, to bind together the finite and the infinite]”(The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.32-33)

Westcott moves on from a general consideration of the nature of revelation and the place of miracles in the continuous revelation of a loving God. Westcott points out that miracles are not arbitrary manifestations of the divine power but are divinely fitted to the conditions of humankind at each stage of its development. The Resurrection as the ultimate miraculous revelation of God is not dropped into human history arbitrarily but comes in the fullness of time after long preparation. This preparation includes the expectation of Israel for a Christ who will usher in a new age with the possibility of a new life between God and humanity and the quest in the Gentile world for a transcendent source of meaning and peace. Greek philosophy could ask the fundamental questions of meaning but could not answer them. The most profound thought of humanity could bring to an intense consciousness the problem of life after death but could not provide a equally profound answer. The Roman Empire could raise the possibility of a new unity between peoples and the possibility of a universal justice but could not sustain it. The Resurrection according Westcott is prepared by all the preceding history of both Israel and the pagan world and from the Resurrection all history proceeds in a different direction. Westcott insists on the Resurrection as an historical fact, as the fact of history. He seriously considers alternatives being presented in the 19th century that are similar to theory of Spong that the Resurrection is not about something that happened in history but something that happened in the consciousness of the Apostles. These he rejects as inadequate to the textual evidence and to the vitality of the Apostolic witness. They are also inadequate to the depth of the human hope and instinct that personality has eternal significance. Martyrs do not die to give witness to the transcendent “Ground of Being.” We cannot really be sustained by the hope that “somehow” the spirit is stronger than death. This kind of talk is a pale parody of the Apostolic faith which sprung from the fact of the Resurrection from a new, mighty and miraculous deed of God in history. Wescott sums up his argument,

“It has been shown that the Resurrection is not an isolated event in history, but at once the end and beginning of vast developments of life and thought; that it is the climax of a long series of Divine dispensations which find in it their complement and explanation; that it has formed the starting-point of all progressive modern societies, ever presenting itself in new lights according to the immediate wants of the age. It has been shown that in the character of the fact there is nothing which can appear incredible or in such a connection, even improbable to any one who believes in a Personal God. It has been shown that the direct evidence for the event is exactly of the same kind which we have for the other events in the Life of Christ; that St. Paul appeals to his own experience and to the experience of the Apostles for the certainty of its literal accomplishment; that it is incontestable that the Apostles acted from the first as if they believed it and that their sincerity cannot be doubted; that the nature of the outward proof alleged seems to render it impossible that they could have been victims of a delusion; that the substance of their belief was something wholly novel, removed equally from the belief in a fantastic vision, and from the belief in a restoration to a corruptible life; that the effects of it upon themselves were such that the conviction must (so to speak) have been forced upon them by overwhelming power, capable of changing their personal character, of transforming their hereditary faith, of inspiring them with new thoughts and hopes; that the Christian Church was founded upon the belief, and embodied it in rites coeval with its foundation.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.113-114)

“Indeed, taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it. And it has been shown that when it is considered in its relation to the whole revelation of which it is a part, and to the conditions of the Divine action, which we have assumed, this miraculous event requires a proof in no way differing essence from that on which the other facts with which it is associated are received as true. In a word, the circumstances under which God is said to have given a revelation to men in the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus were such as to make the special manifestation of power likely or even natural; and the evidence by which the special Revelation is supported is such as would in any ordinary matter of life be amply sufficient to determine our action and belief.” (The Gospel Of The Resurrection p. 115-116)

I have focused on Westcott’s defense of the plausibility, even the naturalness of miracle and on his insistence of the Resurrection as a fact, even the fact, of history. There is not time here to go into his deeply moving and enlightening teaching on the significance of the Resurrection for the individual, for the church, for humanity as a whole and for the whole creation. His great teaching is that the Resurrection is the ultimate revelation of a loving God. It reveals the nature of the relationship between humanity and God now in this life and the destiny of humanity and the whole creation in the life of the world to come. Let us give Bishop Westcott the last word and allow his prophetic voice to challenge all contemporary commentators who unwittingly rob the Resurrection of its profound significance by denying it as miraculous fact.

“The Resurrection explains, as nothing else can explain, the acts and words of Christ before it, and of His Apostles after it; it gives a sufficient reason for the spiritual power and insight of the first Christians, which is different in kind from all that went before; it explains the life of Christendom, for it is not a past event only, but a fact attested by its present efficacy, by the signs of an actual union of believers with Son of Man operative in life. If, now, we give fair weight to all these considerations, upon the assumptions which have been laid down, — to the personal attestation of the fact by the Apostles, to the circumstances under which St. Paul was led to proclaim it, to its relation to Christ’s whole work, to the transformation which it effected in the opinions and conduct of the first disciples, to it continuous efficiency in life, to its consilience with instinct, to its harmony with what we can see of the divine discipline of the world,—I find no reason to modify what I have said elsewhere, that, “taking all the evidence together, there is no single historical incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ.

Let any one who thinks otherwise endeavour to frame for himself evidence for the whole fact—for the fact, that is as belonging to two orders, the seen and the unseen, and uniting them—which he thinks would have been more satisfactory than that which we possess, and then candidly determine how far the modifications which he has introduced would have removed his difficulties, and how far they would have detracted from the significance of the fact as a “sign,” a Divine Revelation.”(The Gospel Of The Resurrection p.254-255)

©Leander Harding+2000

Dr. Deming’s work is as much a moral philosophy of management as it is a science of management. There is a vision of human dignity that is foundational to his work. Deming understands that the inherent dignity of human nature is honored when it is possible for people to make a contribution of intrinsic value to the common good. What Deming calls “pride in workmanship” satisfies a deep human need to be really and effectually of service to their fellow human beings and to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Deming recognizes that this intrinsic orientation toward mutuality and cooperation is a far more fundamental and dependable source of motivation toward achievement and excellence than is any scheme of carrot and stick extrinsic motivation. The job of leadership and management is to make it possible for people to participate “with pride of workmanship” in an enterprise that produces products and services that are inherently valuable and provide a positive contribution to the common good.

This requires a clear aim and the identification, development and optimization of systems of service and production that can be improved continuously and forever. Most failures in the development of quality products and services are due to problems with the system of production. Understanding and managing the system is a key management task.  The cooperative participation of workers, managers, customers and suppliers in the process of continuous improvement fulfills the inherent need for human dignity and promotes the conditions in which civil society and culture can flourish. These fundamental principles are as applicable to the government and the not-for-profit world as they are to traditional business enterprises.

Continued reliance on competition and extrinsic motivation robs people of pride in workmanship, destroys systems and leads to products and services of unsatisfactory quality. This leads to a declining quality of life that undermines civil society and culture.

The future vitality and adaptability of our civilization and society depend upon leaders of business, government and the not-for-profit world learning a new approach to leadership and management based upon this vision of human dignity and cooperation.

Thesis number 6 in Spong’s manifesto is :The view of the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive ideas about God and must be dismissed.

We have already reviewed the chapter in Spong’s book entitled “Jesus as the Divine Rescuer: An Image That Has To Go.” Spong rejects the classic Christian narrative of salvation. That narrative is that God creates the world and humanity and pronounces the creation good. A rebellious and evil spirit tempts humanbeings and the human race falls for evil. Because of this fall or Original Sin evil spreads and humankind and the whole creation lies under the spell of evil. God sends the incarnate Son to be a sacrifice for the sins of the world and to restore and redeem a fallen humanity and a fallen creation. Thus as the Prayer Book says “All Glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that thou, of they tender mercy, didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world. . .” Thus Christ makes an atonement, an “at onement” between God and humanity. The chasm of sin which separates us from God has been crossed from God’s side. The traditional teaching of the church is that this healing of the breach is accomplished at the cost of the cross.

Sometimes this story of salvation is presented in a very crude way as in some forms of fundamentalist and revivalist teaching. The story of salvation is told in such wise as to make God an angry God who can only be satisfied by the blood of the Son. God is pictured as angry at us but punishes Jesus instead. In the theology of the church it is always regarded that the Father sends the Son, so that there can be no question of the Son changing the Father’s intention toward us which is always an intention of love. The church in her formularies has not required as a matter of faith a formula describing the manner of the Atonement similar to the precise statements concerning the Incarnation (i.e. very God of very God, of one being with the Father) It is simply affirmed that for us and for our salvation He came down from heaven and gave his life as a ransom for many. The cross has ever been the central symbol of Christianity and that we are saved by the cross of Christ and not our own deeds a fundamental of the faith. Spong rejects not only the crude sub-Christian interpretations of the cross but the whole narrative of salvation. There is no such thing as a perfect creation, no such thing as a fall, no such thing as sin. There should be no such thing as guilt because our problem is not that we transgress a moral order we recognize as righteous but that we are still developing and evolving to “higher levels of consciousness.” Occasionally we succumb to the “baggage of evolution.” We need to be inspired to press forward to be “all we can be.” We are not sinners. We do not need a saviour. The cross shows the freedom of Jesus to “love wastefully” but it does not rescue us from sin. We need no such rescue. The image of Jesus as divine rescuer, says Spong, has to go.

Of all Spong’s theses this is the one to which I am most sympathetic. Particularly in the American religious scene in much popular teaching in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism the cross has often been presented in terms of an angry God who punishes Jesus instead of us. This preaching and teaching exaggerates the extent of the Fall with doctrines such as the “utter depravity of humankind.” There is an attempt to bring people to repentance by artificially cultivating an exaggerated sense of guilt, shame and fear. It is as though we needed to be saved from God instead of sin and evil. This distorted teaching is psychologically damaging and has driven countless people from the church. The right antidote for this distorted teaching is not to jettison the cross (in which case you have simply abandoned the Christian Faith) but to perceive the cross aright as God’s saving act of love whereby we are bought at great price and redeemed as God’s own.

Spong’s alternative to the traditional Christian story of creation, fall and redemption by a loving God is a story of natural, almost automatic growth and development toward higher consciousness. This is a totally inadequate reading of the human situation. It is the most recent generations of humanity that have perpetuated evil on themselves and God’s good creation on a scale unprecedented in history. That we are made for goodness and righteousness, to know and worship God and to love and serve each other, that we have fallen into sin and evil and can not extricate ourselves; that we need a saviour, is a far more profound reading of the human problem and offers a more sure and certain hope.

But how shall a God of love save us? God must conquer sin and evil and communicate that victory to us. But what are the weapons of a God of love; holiness, righteousness and sacrificial love. God conquers evil by drowning it in the blood of the cross. That is to say God vanquishes evil by overwhelming it with love. On the cross God conquers our rebellion and resistance to God and God defeats the power of evil. God’s gift of God’s self in sacrifice becomes active in our lives as a redeeming power which breaks the spell of sin and brings us back to God. There is atonement between us and God. Because we are made at one with God there is a new possibility of forgiveness and unity one with another. So on the cross Jesus is an example of obedience to God and love toward us and He is our saviour and champion who defeats the enemies of our human nature.

But the church has also taught that He has paid the price of our sins. We owed the debt but he paid the price. This language strikes deep in the human heart. It can be distorted as we have noted above but it can not be eliminated. How shall the murder of a child be forgiven if there is not atonement, no amends. If God just overlooks our sin and evil and offers cheap grace, we should refuse it in the name of human dignity. Sin violates the moral order and amends must be made. Atonement must be made. I want to know not only that I am forgiven but that things have been put right, the damage repaired, the bill paid in full. Language such as this is certainly more responsive to the deepest longings of our hearts and the reality of our troubled consciences than glib talk of the “baggage of evolution” and the abstractions of “higher consciousness.”

Here there are words of St. Paul which point to the mystery of the cross, “He made Him to be sin who knew no sin.” He of himself knew no sin. He knew only perfect love for the Father and perfect love for us. But that love lead him to a complete identification with us, to taking upon himself the burden of our sins. God does not just overlook sins, God in Christ meets and bears it away at the cost of the cross with a sacrificial, suffering love.

The cross is a mystery which means that we can comprehend much about it but that it is also beyond our complete comprehension. It is good to think, to reason, to comprehend as much as possible about God’s saving plan made perfect in the cross of Christ. In fact we are called to such a rational comprehension of God’s truth as we are by nature able. But there comes a moment when thinking and puzzling passes into contemplation, wonder, awe and praise and to the confession of the Roman Centurion at the end of Mark’s Gospel, “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

The crucified saviour speaks of God’s compassion and understanding toward those who suffer and of God’s precious and costly forgiveness to those for whom the memory of sin is “is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.” We behold the cross of Christ and fall to our knees in repentance. We cry out for mercy deeply convicted that the one we cry to knows our suffering and is mighty to save.

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle; of the mighty conflict sing;
tell the triumph of the victim, to his cross thy tribute bring.
Jesus Christ, the world’s Redeemer from that cross now reigns as King.
Thirty years among us dwelling, his appointed time fulfilled, born for this,
he meets his passion, this the saviour freely willed:
on the cross the lamb is lifted, where his precious blood is spilled.
He endures the nails, the spitting, vinegar, and spear, and reed:
from that holy body broken blood and water forth proceed:
earth, and stars, and sky, and ocean, by that flood from stain are freed.
Faithful cross! above all other, one and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom, none in fruit thy peer may be:
sweetest wood and sweetest iron! sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory! Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for awhile the ancient rigor that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty gently on thine arms extend.
Praise and honor to the Father, praise and honor to the Son,
praise and honor to the Spirit ever Three and every One:
one in might and one glory while eternal ages run.

©Leander Harding+2000

The third of Bishop Spong’s theses that we are taking up in this series includes number 2 and number 4 in his manifesto. His second thesis is: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. Thesis number 4 is: The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditional understood, impossible.

There are times when the whole purpose of John Spong’s reworking of traditional Christian belief seems to be to deny God any existence apart from the world and to keep such an “external God” from intervening in the world. This strikes me as such an obsession in his thought as to point to some kind of unhealthy fixation. What did the unexpected father do when he finally came home to the young Spong that was so awful that the adult has to create a universe in which there is no God who might ever visit his people? John Spong plucks at the anthropomorphic mote in the eye of first century Christianity while ignoring the self-narrating beam in his own eye. The essence of Spong’s critique of the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man, is that this doctrine is a first century interpretation of the “Jesus experience.” St. Paul and the gospel writers did the best they could to interpret the unique Jesus experience but they were hindered by their inadequate first century categories and especially by the need to think of God theistically. Contemporary thinkers are better situated to understand the real significance of Jesus and to interpret that experience in the more adequate and expansive categories of late 20th century thought. But put simply and without the plausible sounding patter of intellectualized jargon this is the same claim made by Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy and countless challengers to Apostolic faith through the ages. This claim says in so many words,” The original New Testament Witnesses did not really understand and rightly interpret the significance of Jesus, I (Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, John Spong or fill in the blank) have a new insight which brings to light the heretofore real but unknown significance of Jesus.” So Mrs Eddy calls her book Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures.

That people who are nearer to the events and had personal contact with Jesus and with those of his circle, that shared in the world view and thought forms that were most familiar to our Lord should have gotten it all wrong and that we should be in the first generation to get it right, beggars credulity far more than Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale. In his presentation of the significance of Jesus we are moving in a realm where we are presented with a choice between the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the Gospel according to Spong.

Spong’s rejection of the Virgin Birth is by now familiar. It could not have happened because it would involve an external God and a miracle. There is neither an external God nor miracles. Therefore it could not be as reported. Mary must have been the victim of rape and Jesus an illegitimate child. No evidence is offered for this imaginative reconstruction of the biblical story. This imagined reconstruction is to be preferred to the account of the original witnesses since it must be true because it is non-miraculous. This is not scholarship. This is argument by assertion and circular reasoning. For Spong the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is first century people trying to express their Jesus experience.

Indeed it is an expression of the Jesus experience but Spong misses the central ingredient in this experience. Spong is also operating uncritically with a modern theory of religion. Religion in this model has to do with a private world of feelings, values and experiences and not with a public world of fact. This is the sense in which Spong uses the word experience and he therefore takes for granted that whatever else the Apostles are talking about they are not talking about something that could have occurred in the public world of facts. The experience of the Apostles was not some private interior reaction to Jesus but the conviction that in Jesus God had visited and redeemed his people. Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us. In Jesus the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and Mt Sinai, the God who delivered the people from slavery and led them into the promised land, the God who had promised a Messiah after the like of David, had finally come and lived a human life, died for his people and rose from the dead. God raised Jesus from the dead is the original preaching of the Apostles. The Apostles are not witnesses to an interiorized experience but a miraculous life, a redeeming death and an astounding resurrection. They are witnesses to the continuing presence of the risen Lord in their midst and to the miraculous power of his spirit poured out on his people. They are not trying to find adequate words for an elusive inner personal experience. They are giving witness to events of history, not of a spiritualized psychology. “We have seen it with out own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have see it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.” (1 John:1-3.) Spong’s retelling of the biblical story bids us exchange events which he imagines may have occurred for events which are well attested to by otherwise trustworthy witnesses who often choose death rather than relinquish their witness.

Spong also makes much of the captivity of the New Testament and early church authors to the thought forms of their day. This misses the whole drama of the development of the doctrine of the Incarnation. What God has done in Jesus forces the Apostles and the early church fathers to completely rethink their ideas of God and humanity. Jesus was after all put to death for implying that he was the heaven sent “Son of Man.” He was killed for blasphemy, for outraging the conventional wisdom. This is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted the early church and sought to put Christians to death. Saul became Paul when a confrontation with the Son of God turned his life upside down. That “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” as St. Paul says is an astonishing thing for a good Jew to say. The Apostles and the early church struggle to come to this understanding but they are forced to it by the utterly miraculous quality of his life, by the power of his death and by the evidence of the resurrection. It takes over three hundred years to come to the definitions of the Council of Nicea just because the mighty act of God outstrips human thought and compels truly brilliant minds to run to catch up and develop categories which express and guard the unique event of God visiting his people by becoming a human being.

When Spong comes to his own recasting of the Incarnation he calls Jesus the “the spirit person” and a “God manifestation.” Spong takes us on a tour of biblical passages about the Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testament. What he makes of these is that the spirit has to do with life and vitality, with being fully alive, with”being all we can be.” An irony of this tour is that it is a way of using the bible that is very like the way fundamentalists use the bible for proof texting. For instance when Spong invokes the story of the valley of dry bones in the Book of Ezekiel as a story of the spirit giving life and vitality, he ignores the context of judgment and restoration. Israel has sinned and judgment has befallen Israel and disaster and destruction with the judgment. Yet God says to the prophet say that these bones shall live. The passage is not about mere vitality. The passage speaks about the spirit redeeming people from the consequence of sin. Spong completely ignores the close association between the spirit and the law in the Old Testament in developing his portrait of Jesus as “Spirit person.” We are left with a person who has a contagious life in him, an ill defined enthusiasm and vitality. Jesus then is a revelation of the nontheistic, nonpersonal Ground of Being. Jesus is not different from us in kind but only in degree. In him there was an unusual manifest ion of the God consciousness, the God presence. There is no reason in principle why you or I could not attain to the full human life revealed in Jesus. We need to get in touch with the ground of our being and cultivate the God presence in us. To be his disciple does not require assent to any creed. To be his disciple “requires me to be empowered by him to imitate the presence of God in him by living fully, by loving wastefully, and by having the courage to be all that God created me to be.”

Like most heresy Spong’s portrait of Jesus is not entirely wrong. It is true that there is a kind of life in him which reveals a new depth of human possibility. Surely the forgiveness that is in him is something really new. Surely he does reveal life and love. To be his disciple is to seek to be more like him. Spong’s Christ can not do what Spong wants him to do. He cannot for instance reveal love. Love is a personal category. Love is something offered from one person to another person. If it is a mistake to think of God as a person how can Christ reveal God as the source of love. In such a case the revealer with his costly sacrificial love must be greater than that which is revealed which is the non personal Ground of Being.

I have said before that Spong’s non-interventionist God is very like the God of nineteenth century Deism. Deism thought of God as the great watchmaker who wound up the mechanism of the universe but cannot now intervene in the running machine. Spong’s “nontheistic God” is similar except the watch is really self-winding since Spong is so insistent on foreclosing any independence between God and the world. A person who loves sacrificially with thoughtfulness and intention is surely a more admirable entity worthy of praise and adoration than a principle of life which cannot help its role as the engine of evolution. To talk of such a principle, such an abstraction as the source of love makes no sense. Love is personal and involves purpose and intention. Love speaks of giving. To give a gift is by its nature to intervene, to make a difference in another’s life by the gift of your own. If Jesus reveals the ground of love he must reveal a God who is personal. The personhood of God should be thought of as distinct from in both kind and quality of that of all other persons but God must be more not less than personal. That is exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity says; that the personhood of God is the only example of something which is three and one at the same time. It is a personhood which is utterly unique. The inner personal life of God is a life of giving and receiving love. Each person of the Trinity gives all he has to the other persons in such a way as to sustain the personal identity of the other. Everything that the Father has he gives to the Son and everything that the Son has he gives to the Father and the bond of Love that the Father and Son have with each other is the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity describes an eternal conversation of love and an eternal exchange of gifts, of self-donation. It is of the essence of this God to share life and love. The traditional doctrine of Creation is that this God created you and me in order to share with us this eternal life of love, to make us partners in the eternal divine conversation of love. That this desire to share the eternal Word of love with the creature would go so far as to totally identify with the creation by becoming incarnate and fully present in the creation in Jesus makes sense for a personal loving God. A God who is really a God of love would want to share love and life completely with humanity. Such a God would want to give himself to the fullest extent possible. Such a God would want to make a gift of God’s self. How may it be done? St. John says in the famous prologue of his Gospel that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The doctrine that Jesus was truly God and truly human is precisely what reveals God’s love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all who believe in him should not die but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

A God who does not intervene, is a God who is indifferent and unresponsive, who is nonpersonal, nontheistic in Spong’s terms. It makes no sense to speak of such a God as a God of love. To be the “spirit person” of such a God or the “God manifestation” of such a God could do little more than encourage us to worship the vitalism of nature. (I must say again that history shows that when religious thought goes in this direction it is flirting with fascism.) Such a “God manifestation” could do little more than remind us of potentialities that we already have. Such a Christ could not give us what we do not have. We do not have love and righteousness. But the Incarnate Son of God does, the one who is God’s greatest and mightiest intervention and he says to us,”As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love. If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father’s commands and dwell in his love.” (John 15:7-10) To be the God of Love is to be a God who intervenes. In Jesus Christ God intervenes in human affairs by making a gift of the eternal life of divine love to us. God makes us a gift of the very life of God. This intervention is courteous as Julian of Norwich says. It is of the nature of a gift and we can refuse the gift. To take the gift is to be changed by one who is wholly other and who descends to us that we might ascend to him.

©Leander Harding+2000

The second thesis of John Spong we are taking up in this series is the third in his manifesto: The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

Spong treats the concept of the fall and the story of Adam and Eve in a chapter in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, entitled, “Jesus As Rescuer: An Image That Has To Go.” He quite accurately outlines the traditional story of salvation history which begins with a good and loving God freely creating a good creation and as the pinnacle of that creation God creates the man and the woman in his image and likeness. God places the man and the woman in the garden and gives them dominion over the earth. Then the snake appears on the scene and tempts Adam and Eve to break the one commandment that God has given them. Sin enters in and the original relationship with God is broken. From this original sin evil spreads. Traditional theology says that we are all affected by Original Sin and stand in need of an antidote for this sin. God deals with sin and evil by calling Abraham and by giving the law through Moses, by sending the prophets and in the fullness of time, Christ to be the sacrifice for sin. By his death and resurrection Jesus Christ restores our fellowship with God and gives us the gift of eternal life. This basic narrative of salvation Spong calls “Jesus the divine rescuer” which is “dead wood of the past” which “must be cleared out so that new life has a chance to grow.”

There are obvious problems with a literalistic reading of Genesis. My own way of saying this is that the story in Genesis is not about geology or paleontology but about theology and anthropology. It is an inspired story that tells us something about human nature, the nature of God and the relationship between God and humanity and about cosmology in the sense of the purpose of the world. Spong is quite explicit in rejecting such a theological reading of Genesis. He rejects the very concept of sin, which he understands as a fall from an original perfection. There was not an original perfection from which to fall. Indeed according to Spong it is meaningless to speak of the creation as good. The cosmos is not fallen. It is imperfect and evolving. Human beings are not sinful they are incomplete. Our lack of wholeness represents our struggle to become our “deepest and truest selves.” when we get caught in a struggle for survival, “our highest instincts collapse” and “our radical self-centeredness causes us to engage in a tooth and claw struggle all over again.” We struggle with the baggage of evolution. Spong is particularly offended by the way he believes the doctrine of Original Sin has been used to demonize sexual instinct and to control people with guilt and shame. Spong also questions the idea that human life has a unique and eternal significance. All religious systems may err in overemphasizing the significance of the human. Life, (with a capital L), may be able to go on quite well without us. For Spong, exaggerated feelings of guilt are not appropriate for an insignificant species engaged in a simple struggle to be, “our truest and best selves,” and deal with, “the baggage of evolution.”

Spong uses the terms “Darwin, Darwinism and evolution” interchangeably without really defining what he means by these. He seems to not recognize hotly debated questions about the boundary between scientific theory and philosophical speculation. Spong also seems to take for granted that a recognition of the vast time and intricate process involved in the appearance of human life argue against a special creation of the world and humanity by a loving God. John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest, writes of how secular minded scientists looking at the long chain of improbable events that are required for the appearance, first of life, and then human life raise the question of intelligent design under the title of the “anthropic principle.” For many close students of the evolutionary process, the process seems to beg the question of design and a creation by a creator. I have recently been given a book by Michael J. Denton, a Senior Research Fellow in Human Molecular Genetics at a New Zealand University with the title, Nature’s Destiny: How The Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose In the Universe. It is certainly overreaching to present this question as decided and closed within learned discourse.

There is a further problem with Spong’s approach to evolution. He assumes that the process suggests its own meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are categories which depend on revelation. If you knew nothing of time, the most detailed description of the working of a watch would never disclose to you its purpose. When the watchmaker tells you the purpose of the machine then it all makes sense. You can see at once what the numerals and the hands are for or why the digital numerals change in the sequence in which they do. Arguments from design are of this sort. They argue that the notion of a creator gives a credible meaning to careful observation. Concepts like “our truest and deepest selves,” or our, “higher instincts,” are categories of purpose and meaning which are brought in from elsewhere. They are ideas which depend on an understanding of what it means to be human that takes human dignity and significance for granted. They are really borrowed without annotation from the tradition of Christian humanism. An automatic evolution which progresses without divine guidance and which naturally evolves the standards and values for a truly human life is as much a myth as Genesis and one which is a less credible explanation of purpose and meaning. The purpose and meaning of human life can never be discovered by the investigation of natural processes alone. Purpose and meaning by their nature must be disclosed. They must be revealed. Without a doctrine of revelation we are locked in a meaningless universe. Spong has no credible doctrine of revelation. This is the main rock upon which Spong’s argument becomes shipwreck.

Spong’s rhetoric is not only anti-Christian it is anti-human. It says that we are not yet human. We are only on our way to being human. Humanity lies off in some distant evolutionary future. In the present we are imperfect and incomplete beings struggling against a powerful instinct for self-preservation at any cost with fragile higher powers. Our higher consciousness is just beginning to emerge. It is hard to make out why Spong thinks the higher instincts valuable. What if they have no survival value? This was exactly the basis of the Nazi repudiation of the Christian value of compassion. It made people and the nation weak. Should not life belong to the strong? It is hard to see how you avoid falling into fascism with this kind of thinking about evolution. With this ideology you will be very tempted to sanction the unevolved for the benefit of the more evolved. Why should less developed life forms hold back the evolutionary process? If humanity lies in an evolutionary future, won’t you also be tempted to eugenics, to hurry along the process by selective breeding? This line of reasoning about human nature poses as liberal and humane but is in reality proto-fascist. It is to trade a story which has love as its fundamental value for a story which has power for its fundamental value.

Another irony of Spong’s argument is that after complaining, I think unjustly, of the way in which sexual instinct is made sinful in traditional theology, he ends by locating the source of evil in the body. Evil and sin are located in the lower instincts and human goodness is a matter of the higher consciousness. This is a view of human nature which is very similar to the Greek view that matter and the body is evil and mind and spirit are good. The view of traditional Christian theology which is based on the biblical narrative is I believe more profound and offers a more profound appreciation of what it means to be human. We have been made good by a loving God. On this view the body in its entirety including sexual instinct is inherently good. Human nature in its entirety is inherently good. Into God’s good creation comes the spoiler, the evil one. Satan is a rebellious spirit who according to Milton “would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.” This figure of the devil is very important and Spong passes over it in his retelling of the biblical story. The figure of the devil says that evil does not start with us. We are tempted to evil. We fall for evil and now a world in which people have fallen for evil is the only world we can be born into.

As a result of the fall all of human nature is affected. Our higher instincts are as much a problem to us as our lower instincts. Pride, vanity, Greed and lust for power are sins which involve our highest capacities. It is human beings who are the product of a high civilization who are capable of germ warfare and atomic weapons and genocide. Body is not necessarily bad and mind and spirit good. It is more complicated than that. The fall is a compelling account of the human problem. We are not in a struggle with our lower instincts but with sin which has its source in a powerful otherworldly evil. If we do not take the otherworldly character of evil seriously we underestimate our need to rely on God in the fight against evil. We also tend to demonize either some aspect of the body or some group of people. The notion of the a fall which has its origin in a otherworldly tempter protects the dignity of human nature. We have solidarity with each other in original goodness and significance as creatures specially created by a loving God and we have solidarity in our fight against common enemies. We also know enough to look for the working of sin in all that tempts us toward lack of charity toward our fellows.

We inherently sense that we have betrayed our humanity and that the way we live is not the life we were meant for. We are less than we are meant to be, less than we can be. Guilt and shame can be artificially manipulated but that does not explain away the deep sense that we have of spoilt chances. Cranmer’s prayer for forgiveness of “our manifold sins and wickedness. . .the memory of them is grievous unto us and the burden of them is intolerable” more powerfully interprets our experience as individuals and as a race than talk of a struggle with “the baggage of evolution.” We know that to be human is to be responsible. We know we are not right with God and with each other and can not make ourselves right with God and with each other. God in Christ promises us not the victory of some part of human nature over some other part but that we will be transformed into the fullness and likeness of Christ. Human nature was made for eternal fellowship with God in a community of mutual love and service. Jesus as rescuer who takes away sin and conquers evil is good news because it answers the deepest cry of the human heart to be restored to the life for which we were made and from which we have fallen away. The biblical story of creation, fall and redemption is a more powerful and realistic vision of human promise and peril than Spong’s watered down religion of inevitable progress.

Postscript On The Cosmic Fall
The traditional reading of Genesis also tells us that the creation is a fallen creation. The life of nature bears witness to being the creation of a good God but it too bears marks of being distorted by the power of evil. There is much cruelty and gratuitous suffering in nature. The traditional doctrine says to us that it was not meant to be so. As beautiful as nature is it shall be more beautiful yet. Part of the promise of Christian Doctrine is that in the Resurrection of the Body nature itself shall be raised. St. Paul says in the ninth chapter of Romans, that “the whole creation groans in travail as if in the pangs of childbirth” “For the created universe waits with eager expectation for God’s children to be revealed.” Taking the cosmic fall seriously gives us a powerful motive for fighting illnesses like cancer. They are not part of the plan and will be excluded from God’s eternity. This vision also allows us to protest against cruelty to animals, to protect the weak and resist the temptation to assume that just because something is “natural” it is good. It is hard to see how on the basis of Spong’s religion of evolution you could develop a similarly robust ethic of life.

©Leander Harding+ 2000

The first of Bishop Spong’s Theses that we will take up is thesis number 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.

Theism is the belief that there is a God who is distinct from and not dependent on the cosmos. Christian Theism is the belief that this God has revealed himself in creation and history and perfectly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who has taught us to call this God,” Our Father.” In order to understand more clearly what John Spong means by his theses I have consulted his book, Must Christianity Change or Die? Harper Collins, 1998

Spong believes that the God described by traditional theism is the product of a pre-scientific, primitive, patriarchal culture and that as a completely culturally determined by-product of a passe world view should be and is rejected by contemporary people. In the world of Newton and Einstein and Darwin it is impossible to believe in the God described both in traditional theology and in the Western Philosophical tradition. The God of Theism is Spong says, “personal, external, supernatural and potentially invasive being. This God Spong describes contemptuously as the external, super parent in the sky.” (p.46) Spong particularly objects to the idea that God is distinct form the world and can intervene in history. He seems to think that any intervention by an independent God into the affairs of humanity would be by definition arbitrary and capricious. As an alternative to the God of Theism Spong develops the ideas of the late Paul Tillich. God is the innermost depth of things, the Ground of Being. God is not the highest person imaginable but that dynamic at the heart of all things which calls us forth into personhood. God is that which calls us into life and love. The right question about God is not who is God, which Spong thinks a dangerous question because it leads automatically to anthropromorphism, but what is God. God is the source of that ineffable experience of presence to which all the great mystics attest. This presence at the heart of things is the source of life, love and personhood. We can never achieve more than an imperfect knowledge of God but we can honor this spiritual dimension of reality by being, “all that we can be” and by helping others be all they can be. Self-fufillment is thus the ultimate form of the spiritual life.

I hope this is a fair if necessarily brief summary of what John Spong has to say about Theism. I think that the bishop has missed one of the gravest challenges to contemporary to theistic belief in our time and that is the division of the world into a world of public facts arrived at by the use of ‘objective” standards of investigation and a private world of beliefs and values in which there are no objective standards of truth. G.K. Chesterton said that when people stop believing in God it isn’t that they won’t believe anything but that they begin to believe everything. I am not sure that Spong’s reading of the culture is entirely au courrant. I also disagree with his understanding of the theological significance of some current trends in science. The quantum universe of chaos theory is far more friendly to traditional theism than the Newtonian world view. Spong often caricatures the tradition as when he accuses classical theism of gross anthropromophism i.e. that it teaches God as a super parent in the sky. This is just plain inaccurate. For example the principle of analogy, that God is always both like and unlike any analogy, a human father for example, is a principle of theology made famous by St. Thomas. (God as the Ground of Being is also from St. Thomas and given a famous contemporary interpretation by Tillich and I believe misread by Spong in such a way as to turn God into, as my systematics professor, Joop Van Beek used to say, “God the good and kind gas. “)

Bishop Spong’s conclusions do follow from his assumptions and from his way of doing theology. It may be that the greatest service of this book is that it makes explicit the implicit conclusions of some popular contemporary assumptions about God and religion and of a way of approaching the question of God.

Bishop Spong notices the power of world view. Every culture has assumption about the nature of reality that are not proved but assumed to be self-evident. Many aspects of a culture’s understanding of ultimate reality, meaning and morality flow from these uncritically held assumptions. The world view of the Bible is different from the world view of contemporary secular culture. So far, so good. All belief systems proceed from fundamental assumptions and we can not escape basing our thinking about anything, including God, on first principles which we can not get behind. Modern experimental science proceeds on the assumption that the universe is intelligible and the human mind can discern its order. (I think it can be shown that this is an idea that is dependent on a theistic world view but that is another issue.) Science can’t get behind this first principle. Spong acts as though this problem only affects the world view of ancients and does not affect his own. If you argue that the view of God proposed by the Bible is merely the epiphenomenon of culture, then what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander, your own view of God must be held suspect as being no more than the epiphenomenon of culture. If you would live by the sword of cultural relativism, you must be willing to die by the sword of cultural relativism.

Spong seems to assume that world views evolve by some automatic process from less adequate to more adequate and that the trustworthiness of a world view can be established by establishing it date. With world views newer is necessarily better. It is hard to see why a world view which is marked by a reductionistic materialism and radical moral relativism is inherently superior to the world view of the Bible with its sense of the reality of the supernatural and of moral absolutes. We are entitled to be suspicious, by the bishop’s own lights, if a person deeply imbued with the values of a self-indulgent culture proposes to us a vague God whose message, to the extent that it can be deciphered, is, “be all you can be.”

The bishop over estimates the problem of cultural conditioning with regard to the image of God in the Bible and underestimates this problem with regard to his own proposal. He seems particularly unaware of the way his assumptions influence his understanding of revelation and his choice of sources and method in thinking about God. Spong seems committed to a rather unscientific understanding of the laws of science. The scientist would say that so called “laws of nature” are summary and descriptive and open to revision by continuing experimental investigation. Spong seems to think that such laws are prescriptive and describe not only what has happened to this date but all that possibly could happen. By definition nothing can ever happen which is not inherent in the normal processes of nature. If there is a God, God is constrained by these laws of nature and is so identified with the processes of nature as to be indistinguishable from the God of pantheism. God can only affect the world by the outworking of the natural process. This leads Spong to a kind of divinizing of the process of biological evolution and a poignant faith in inevitable progress that is belied by 20th century history. Spong’s world view begins to look a lot like 19th century Deism. The Deists saw God as a great watchmaker who had wound up the mechanism of the universe but could not intervene in the machine once it had been set in motion. Within such a world view the miraculous and the revelatory, anything which speaks in this world of another world is impossible by definition.

The important thing is to note that the antipathy to the supernatural, to the miraculous, to the appearance within the realm of nature of something which speaks of another world, another reality, all of this is an assumption not a conclusion. It is the place where this line of reasoning starts and it can finish in no other place than where it starts. This anti-supernatural bias is what philosophers call an a priori, something taken for granted, from the first. If you have an anti-supernatural, anti-miraculous a priori, you rule out miracles, the supernatural and a God who, as Spong says, intervenes from the beginning before any investigation, before any consideration of evidence. Anti-supernaturalism is not enlightened. It is exactly a prejudice, a conclusion reached before a fair consideration of the case.

With this world view, with these assumptions, with this a priori, there can be no such thing as revelation, as God’s self-disclosure. Within such a world view it makes no sense to speak of the Word of God. There is no such thing as an authoritative Word of God. If we can not give up the quest for God where will we look for God? We will look at the outworking of natural laws and processes and we will look to our spiritual and religious experience. Our interest in the Bible will not be in the Word of God but in the Bible as the record of the religious experience of others. Our gaze is directed not to almighty God but to ourselves and our own inner experience. The image of God that emerges will look suspiciously like the person who looks back at us in the mirror in the morning. Our theology, if we can give it that name, will be a romanticization of nature and instinct with lots of capital letters, like Being, Life, Love. The whole spectacle will chill the soul of anyone with enough historical memory to recall the transformation of liberal German Protestantism into the Volksreligion of Hitler. Spong pursues to their logical conclusions assumptions, sources and methods that are the common denominator of a great deal of contemporary religious thinking. He does us a service by showing us ahead of time the destination of this train of thought. To borrow a refrain from a Gospel song, this train ain’t bound for glory and if you want to get on there is no need to get holy.

Let us oppose to these assumptions another set of assumptions. There is a God who is wholly other and completely distinct from the creation, a God who does not need the creation but who creates eternally and continuously in sheer, gratuitous love. A God who, though above and beyond human understanding, wants to be known to the fullest extent possible and to have real and intimate fellowship with human beings. Such a God, just because He is a God of love, will work to bring human beings into friendship and fellowship with God. Such a God does not will to remain obscure. It will be the nature of such a God to intervene in our affairs with saving love. Such a God will reveal Himself to humanity. Such a God will speak. We assume that such a God has spoken in and through the words of the Bible and that such a God continues to speak to us in and through the words of the Bible. We assume that such God has called a people to Himself to be a light to the nations, so that all people may know and have intimate fellowship with God. We assume that this God who speaks continuously a word of love, in the fullness of time speaks this word perfectly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible recognizes Bishop Spong’s point about the hiddeness of God, even the necessary hiddeness of God. St. John says,”No one has ever seen God; but God’s only Son, he who is nearest to the Father’s heart, he has made him known.”(John1:18)

If we assume that there is a God of Love who seeks ceaselessly to communicate that love, we will expect a definitive, authoritative word from that God and we will look to the Bible as our source in doing theology. We will be interested not so much in experience as God’s self-disclosure in the supernatural Word of God which breaks into our world with words of judgment and grace. We will look to the Word made flesh first and foremost and our theology will proceed on the assumption that God is like Christ and that in Him(as Karl Barth says) there is no unchristlikeness at all. Our hope will not be in the self-fufillment of merely natural potentials but that the God of grace will transform us with His supernatural love until we have grown up into the fullness of Christ, until we are changed from glory unto glory. This train is bound for glory and if you want to get on you have to get holy.

The vision I have outlined flows as reasonably and self-consistently from its assumptions, sources and methods as Spong’s. The question is, when thinking about God; what are your assumptions, what are your sources and what are your methods. Which of these world views is most adequate to understanding the human situation and answering the deepest yearnings of the human heart? Which do you want to bet your life on? Which is most capable of sustaining a just moral order? Which of these visions can best sustain us in the face of the struggle with evil? Which vision will lead you to write hymns, create beauty and sacrifice self for the sake of others? Which of these visions most naturally gives rise to saintliness? Which of these visions do you want to bequeath to the next generation?

©Leander Harding+ 2000

Much of what I have to say in this talk I have learned from the work of the great missionary thinker, Bishop Leslie Newbigin. There is a branch of study called the sociology of knowledge. Sociologists of knowledge, such as Peter Berger, talk about the “plausibility structure” of a society. In every group, in every society, every civilization there are things which “everybody knows” and which are accepted uncritically and in which the rational and conceptional framework of the society are embedded. Recently we have been stunned by polls that show that many people in the Muslim world do not accept that the September 11 terrorists were Muslims but in that world “everybody knows” that Muslims do not do such things. Either they were not really Muslims or they didn’t really do what they are said to have done. It is not that people are being illogical or irrational it is just that they are thinking within the plausibility structure of their own world view. There was a time when everybody knew that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. From time to time things happen which call into question that which everyone knows. The important thing to understand is that there is not such a thing as a pure and neutral rationality and that all reason is carried by a community of understanding and is rooted in fundamental convictions which must be taken on faith, on premises which can not be established on any other basis.

For a long time now in those countries which have their roots in Christian Europe, in what we call the West, everyone has known that there are two kinds of things. There are things which can be known, called facts, and which everyone must admit are true. These are things like, “Stamford is in Connecticut” and ‘water is composed of two Hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule.” There are other things which can never be proved and which fall into the category of things which people may believe. These things we call beliefs and values. Facts have to do with public truth and beliefs and values have to do with private opinions. Since beliefs and values can never be proved, it is wrong to make public claims for them as though they were public facts instead of private, personal opinions. You may say, if you wish, that Jesus rose from the dead and is the Light of the world as long as you will admit that this is your private opinion and is true for you. To assert it as an universal truth relevant to all persons is to by the very fact of making such a truth claim to try to force your private opinions on others. Everyone knows this. People who do not know this are ignorant, backward and bigoted. Everyone knows this as well. If you need any more convincing that no belief could possibly be true in the same way that a fact is true just look at the simple fact that there are so many competing beliefs and values. It is implausible that any one of them could be the truth.

Christianity makes a claim for truth which is in direct conflict with the reigning plausibility structure of what is called modernity and now post modernity. There is no getting around this. Modernity restricted that which could be known with confidence to the realm of facts. Post modernity has seen the circle of dependable knowledge shrink to the vanishing point such that the whole concept of facts is called into question. That is part of what a show like the X files is all about. The characters in this contemporary television drama can not know anything with confidence because they cannot trust anyone and cannot believe anything. Without faith knowledge is impossible. Christianity does not oppose faith to reason but proposes a different but no less rational interpretation of reality and the human situation.

The plausibility structure of our contemporary culture which I have been describing has at its heart as a dogma, a beginning principle which is established on the basis of no other principle, the philosophy of pluralism. Pluralism is the paradoxical philosophy that says there is no absolute truth save for the absolute truth that there is no truth. This doctrine has become deeply embedded in our society. The thought forms of our culture are powerfully shaped by this doctrine. The history of theology in the Christian churches of Europe and North America in the 20th century is in large part a story of trying to forge an interpretation of the faith which fits into a pluralist world view and into the plausibility structure of modernity and post modernity. There are many consequences of this trend including the almost complete loss of evangelical and missionary nerve among the mainline-oldline churches. It has become increasingly clear that the survival strategy of accepting the assignment of Christian truth claims to the ghetto of private values and beliefs while accepting uncritically the reigning plausibility structure is a self-defeating strategy. On this basis we are not even able to secure the commitment of our own children.

Some of the world religions may be able to accept having their truth claims relegated to a private world of beliefs and opinions. Perhaps Hinduism may and more likely I think, Buddhism which may be one reason Buddhism is on the rise, it fits with the reigning plausibility structure. Judaism, Christianity and Islam rest on claims which are inherently public and universal in their character. God chose the Jews and rescued them for Pharaoh and gave them the Ten Commandments or not. Jesus is the Son of God and rose from the dead or not. Mohammed is the only reliable prophet of God or not. Christianity represents a set of truth claims that cannot be fitted into any other plausibility structure. They are themselves the starting point for a new way of thinking about God, the world and the meaning and destiny of human life. One of the earliest Christian thinkers, Origen of Alexandria replied to the charge of the learned pagan philosopher Celsus that Christianity was irrational with the reply that Christianity was not irrational, but that because of what God had done in Christ, reason was given a new “arche” a new starting point.

It is very important when taking up this question of Christianity and the world religions to notice that we are taking it up within the context of a pluralistic culture. It helps to clear the ground on this question to point out that pluralism is itself a set of beliefs and values, a set of convictions about the world and the nature of reality, the meaning of truth and the possible meaning and destiny of human life which are assumed and not proven on any other basis and which masquerade as objective, tolerant and neutral but which are in reality as dogmatic as any other world view. There is no such thing as a nondogmatic world view. That is a world view without a starting point. The atheist and the theist are equally dogmatic. Pluralists do not have objective reason on their side. Their reason is embedded in a particular set of assumptions which are the starting point for this paradoxically skeptical and anti-religous religion.

The world is not divided into what can be known and what may be believed. Knowledge comes by believing. All knowledge is socially embedded and arises under the rationality and logic of a particular plausibility structure. The knowledge that water is composed of molecules of Hydrogen and Oxygen is won because of the classic beliefs of both Islamic and Western culture that the world is a creation by a dependable creator and that the mind which is made in the image and likeness of the creator is capable of discerning universal patterns and having true knowledge about the world. If you believe that the world observable to the senses is maya, illusion, you will not even seek such knowledge of the world. It is not an accident that science arises in the West because of what is believed there. There is a dynamic relation between belief and knowledge. What you believe powerfully affects what you can know.

I have spent a lot of time on the issue of pluralism before getting to the distinctives between Christianity and the other faiths because if we allow the notion of religious truth to be defined by pluralistic assumptions there is almost no point in taking up the issue. You have an investigation which may be titillating, interesting, entertaining but since you are dealing with things that can not by definition be true in an ultimate and universal sense, you are dealing with things that can never demand an ultimate commitment. By the nature of the case you are not dealing with evidence that demands a verdict to paraphrase a popular Christian title. The radical relativizing of religious truth claims in a thorough going pluralism actually makes sustained dialogue between the great faiths lacking in any ultimate significance. It also proceeds on a premise which only Westernized Christians domesticated into the reigning plausibility structures are willing to accept. Certainly no Muslim wants to come to a party for which the price of admission is the surrender of any claim to universal truth.

One of the corollaries of the pluralism which I have been describing is that all religions teach the same thing. They are all different paths up the same mountain. Plausible but just not adequate to reality. Just on the basis of the introductory talks which we have had in this series it is clear that Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam and Judaism are climbing different mountains.

There are points of convergence between the great world faiths and there are things which most of them hold in common to be true. This convergence occurs primarily in the realm of morals and ethics. The writer C.S. Lewis talks about the Tao of religions and about the agreement between cultures and religions on a set of basic moral principles which are resonant with the Ten Commandments. Otherwise the great faiths diverge fundamentally. They each represent a different story about the nature of reality and the meaning of the world, its origin, what is wrong with the world and with human nature and how that might be fixed, about the nature of God or the gods or the no-god in the case of Buddhism and what relation between God and humanity is possible, about the ultimate destiny of human nature. The commitments and beliefs of these great faiths give rise to different ideas of human destiny, human dignity, human rights and justice, of the significance of the world and different ecological policies, of the proper relationships between men and women and parents and children, of different visions of political life. At issue is not just some private religious opinion but the way we see the world and the beliefs that determine every aspect of private and public life.

One of the ideas which has great power in our time is the idea that no one religion can be true because there are so many of them. But the idea that there are many religions is a corollary of the idea that beliefs are quintessentially private and therefore there are as many beliefs, as many religions as there are persons. People will talk about “my beliefs” and the need to construct a “personal spirituality.” Are there really a welter of religions or are not the options relatively few. Martin Luther says there are only two religions. The religion of our laborious ascent to God and the religion of God’s descent to us in mercy and forgiveness.

On one side of a great divide are those religions which teach that God or ultimate reality is revealed in the depths of the individual consciousness. These ways are ways of meditation and spiritual practice guided by great teachers and metaphysical concepts like the Buddha or the ancient teachings of the Upanishads. These are the non historical religions. The outer world of history is a distraction from the realm of the divine of the ultimate which is found in the interiority of mind and spirit. To the extent that history has a meaning, it is the realm of suffering from which the spiritual practices promise escape.

On the other side we have the historical religions of Judaism and the religions which are related to Judaism, Christianity and the most recent of the historical religions, Islam. On the one side is a laborious path of spiritual discovery which may be aided by enlightened teachers and gurus but which is ultimately a private and individual search, a search which may well take more than one life time. On the other side is the God who wishes to be known and who intervenes in history to reveal himself.

Jews believe that God has revealed himself first and foremost in a series of mighty deeds in history which include the calling of Abraham, the exodus from slavery under Moses, the granting of the divine law, the Ten Commandments, the Torah on Mt. Sinai, the leading and protection of God who led them through the wilderness and gave them the promised land and established the kingdom and made it great under David and Solomon. Jews also believe that God revealed himself through the inspired utterances of the prophets and that these prophecies have to do not only with a private and personal relationship with God but with how Jews should live toward God and toward each other and toward the alien and strangers in their land. The prophets say that the suffering of Israel, her defeat at the hands of her enemies is in part the judgment of God and the prophets look forward to the coming of a Messiah, an anointed one who will put right the relationship between God and His people and establish a perfect Kingdom.

Christians believe that the history of Israel is a preparation for the sending of the Messiah, the Lord and King who is the Son of God. Christians believe that the life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the last and final, until the end of the world, in the series of God’s mighty saving deeds in history and that Jesus is the culmination and perfection of that to which the prophets pointed.

Muslims believe that Jews and Christians have corrupted the teachings of their prophets who were real prophets of God and that God has sent Mohammed as the true and final prophet and given him a revelation in the form of a book written in heaven by God in a heavenly language, Arabic and that the Muslim community is the only community to have maintained its revelation unspoiled.

So we are presented with a limited number of choices. Perhaps pluralism is true and there is not a universal trustworthy knowledge of God which is possible and each person must construct as best they can their own spirituality. Or one of the great paths is true. If so is God to be sought in esoteric practice or is God seeking to make himself known in such a way as to require a response and if so which of the three versions of God’s self revelation is the most compelling.

So what is the distinctive account of God, humanity and history which we find in Christianity. Christians believe in one God who is the creator of everything that is. God is good and the creation is fundamentally good. At the peak of the creation is the human race. God created us to know and to love him and to love and serve each other. God is distinct from the creation and with love and goodness exercises a providential control over the creation. What about evil? The creation is a fallen creation. God created free spiritual beings, the angels, and a human race with free will and these free creatures have rebelled against God. Human beings as part of the creation are created good but have been seduced by evil. The rebellion of Satan which human beings have joined is the source of evil and suffering. As a result of the fall people have turned away from God and against each other. This is the permanent human condition. As a result of the fall human beings are afflicted with Original Sin. This means that they are not able to live the life for which God created them and that there exists a breach between God and humanity which can only be bridged from God’s side.

God has a plan for the creation which includes a restored relationship between God and people in a healed and perfected creation. In order to redeem and restore a fallen humanity and a fallen nature and in order to finally defeat evil God from his side begins to bridge the chasm between God and humankind. He calls Abraham and through the covenant with Abraham creates a community which is capable of receiving the self disclosure, the revelation of God. God reveals himself primarily by what He does. He chooses to make Himself known to particular people not because of what they deserve or merit but because God reveals Himself to be gracious and to be a God of love who bestows undeserved blessings. God discloses Himself to be a God who is faithful and who fulfills His promises even when it does not appear possible, for example the promise of making a great nation out of Abraham and the promise of giving to slaves the promised land. God shows Himself to be righteous and Holy by giving the Ten Commandments and through the testimony of the prophets which recall Israel to holiness of life.

So far we have been keeping company with much of what is believed in Judaism. Christians though searching the scriptures of the Old Testament with the spot light of the Resurrection perceive a promise in the prophets which Judaism does not perceive and that is the promise of God to send a Messiah, a Christ, a Saviour who will be the son of God and truly Emmanuel, God with us. God Himself with us. For Christians the meaning of the history of Israel is God’s preparation for His ultimate revelation of Himself to all the nations.

Here we have one of the true distinctives of Christianity. That though God is utterly transcendent and incomprehensible He desires to be known and makes Himself known not only through revealing a divine law and teaching something of His character through His dealings with His people in history but by becoming human Himself. For Christians the ultimate revelation of God is not to be found in divine law or esoteric teaching or exalted spiritual practice, the ultimate revelation is in a person. God wants us to know Him as intimately as we can know another person and becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ who is fully human and fully divine. The claim for the divinity of Christ is blasphemous for both Jews and Muslims. At the heart of Judaism is the Torah, the law, at the heart of Islam is not Mohammed but the Qua ran and at the heart of Buddhism is not the Buddha but his teachings and his mental and spiritual discipline. At the heart of Christianity is this man Jesus who we say is both truly human and truly divine.

It is also a distinctive of Christianity that is in line with the revelation to Israel that when Jesus comes He brings more than a teaching. He does teach and His teaching is very resonant with the Tao of religions about which C.S. Lewis talked. He radicalizes that teaching and especially the command to love and forgive teaching a love and forgiveness of enemies that is an essential of Christian identity. He taught us only one prayer which has the phrase “and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” In this prayer He also teaches us to call God, Abba, which means daddy. This teaching of the possibility of intimacy with God is shocking to both Jews and Muslims.

He also does things. He heals and He casts out demons and frees people from the power of evil and He does what for Jews only God can do, He forgives sins. He outrages the religious authorities by His claim that in Him the promises of God are coming true and as a result of this conflict He is handed over to the Roman authorities and crucified for the crimes of sedition and blasphemy. Three days later His disciples go to look for His body and find the tomb empty and then the Risen Lord appears to them at various times and places for forty days and teaches them that He has overcome sin and evil and death through the cross and that the Holy Spirit will come upon them to give them the life that He has won for them through His cross and Resurrection. This life consists of a new relationship with God and with each other. It begins now and the grave cannot hold it. Between now and the consummation of history when He will return to judge the living and the dead they are to go into all the world and make disciples, teaching them everything I have taught you and baptizing them in the name of the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit.

The Christian Faith is that the cross is no accident but part of what Christ had come to do and the means by which He has become the saviour of the whole world. On the cross God heals the rift between God and humanity from His side. Christians talk about the cross as the sacrifice which brings the forgiveness of sins and God’s victory over evil and death.

This is an absolute distinctive of Christianity, the place of suffering. God saves the world and restores His plan for the creation by coming into the world and taking upon Himself the suffering of the world. This is a distinctive answer to suffering. Suffering cannot be avoided. Suffering will be finally overcome in the consummation of all things but in the meantime God Himself has identified Himself with our suffering and transforms it from the inside out. Christians say no cross, no crown. Jesus says if you would follow me you must pick up your cross. Suffering is not an illusion. It is real but God leads the way through suffering to the new life of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection of the body is a distinctive of Christianity. The material universe is not illusionary. It is not to be discarded, a throw away universe but to be transformed and transfigured as the body of Christ was. He is so to speak the leading edge of God’s work of repairing and renewing the fallen creation. He is the first fruits of the new creation. The Resurrection is often referred to by the church Fathers as the eighth day of creation.

An additional distinctive of Christianity is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Fifty days after the Resurrection on Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on the gathered church. The Holy Spirit communicates the life of the Risen Christ to His people through the words of the Bible and through the sacraments, worship and life of prayer. The Holy Spirit creates a new community in which we live in Christ and He lives in us. In this community by the power of the Spirit we are able to forgive and be reconciled to each other and by the Spirit Christ works in us and through us His continuing work of healing, forgiving, reconciling, overcoming evil with good. The life of this community is to be a down payment and a witness to the perfection of all things in Christ which will come at the end of all time. History has a meaning. It is all going somewhere. Not by some inner working of forces within history but by God’s promise all things will be restored in Christ.

An additional distinctive of Christianity is that God is proclaimed as three in one, a divine Trinity. This is a very precise way of saying that God is love and is something which is known on the basis of Christian Faith and experience and is very opaque to outsiders and constantly misinterpreted as for example by both Jews and Muslims who think it a form of idolatry.

The Christian proclamation is that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God and the cross and resurrection of Jesus the means by which God intends to bring us into a saving relationship with God. To receive the gift of Himself which God wants to give us we must trust Christ, believe in Him, receive Him as who He says He is, the light and life of the world. Does this mean that all who do not profess Christ are lost and damned? Some Christians think so. I don’t believe that commitment to Christ commits us to the belief that all non Christians are doomed to hell. God is just and merciful and infinitely loving and whatever the justice of God will be in the case of any individual soul it will be all of these things. But that thought should not make us complacent in the face of the hunger of the world to know the true and living God and the suffering of a world that struggles to find an answer to sin and evil and the power to forgive.

In the meantime we must be tolerant of other religions. We must seek real understanding of what they teach. We must affirm the truth we find there and the goodness and holiness of their adherents and we must respectfully but confidently share the good news that what they so laboriously seek has been freely given to us and to the whole world in Jesus Christ our Lord. We must do so without any hint of coercion or manipulation. It is for this reason that Christians should not seek to have the state impose Christianity on anyone. We cannot witness to Christ by violating the logic of the cross. Then we must stand aside and let the Holy Spirit work. For that is one of those things that happen that changes a person’s sense of what is plausible.

©Leander Harding+ 2002

The Power and Dignity of the Priesthood

A Talk given at the Annual Meeting of The Society for the Increase of the Ministry
At Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, November I, 1995, By the Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1994

Much has been written about the perception of a crisis in the priesthood. The Cornerstone Project was developed by the Episcopal Church Foundation in order to help strengthen ordained leadership at a time when clergy are reporting themselves to be discouraged, confused and highly stressed. One of the most recent findings of the Cornerstone Project is that the parish priests in the project had difficulty articulating a theology of priesthood. The staff found that the priests in the project could discuss theological readings with competence but that when they spoke about their parish ministries they did not tend to speak in theological categories. I was one of a group of clergy, theologians and Cornerstone staff who attended a conference at the College of Preachers in June of 1995 to attempt to understand the meaning of this finding and to suggest a course of action. The thoughts that I am going to share with you tonight represent my contribution to that discussion.

While there are many practical problems in the parish ministry which must be addressed, it is my conviction that the fundamental stress, the fundamental crisis is a crisis of meaning. There is a genuine confusion about the meaning of priesthood in the minds of the priests, bishops, deacons and laity. What does it mean to be a priest? What is the work of a priest? This question dogs us to such a degree that the question, “Do we really need priests?” is a question seriously asked today. Perhaps you have heard of the cutting edge liturgical practice of celebrating the Eucharist by putting the elements in the midst of the assembly and reciting the prayer of consecration as a group as a way of witnessing to the priesthood of all believers. This kind of activity points toward a crisis in the understanding of the meaning of the priesthood, indeed in the meaning of the church itself.

I had a vivid experience of this crisis of meaning at a recent clergy gathering in my home diocese of Connecticut. At the first clergy conference we had with our newly elected diocesan bishop, there was a great discussion of the number of hours a priest should work per week. This discussion generated more heat than light. It was clear to me that the topic touched the parish clergy in a tender place and that none of the Bishop’s kind and prudential advice about an appropriate work week seemed to console or satisfy. I realized that the question being answered, “How much should I work?” was not the question really being asked. That question was,”Does my work have meaning?” In a growing parish with good finances and improving membership the question of meaning seems to have an obvious answer. Many clergy serve in places where despite persistent and dedicated effort there is little observable result in terms of growing revenue and membership. What does it mean to pour out your life in such a ministry? Does it make a difference? If so, what is the difference that it makes?

Whence cometh this confusion? There are number of factors which converge. There has been a change in the society. There is the much discussed post-modern, post-Christian society in which the church as an institution has become increasingly marginalized. There is the generation shift, the change in values, the consumer mind set of the Baby boomers whose loyalty must be constantly rewon. There is much good discussion of the exterior forces that converge to challenge our understanding of parish ministry and priesthood. These must be taken seriously and they require a response. But all these issues simply exacerbate the underlying confusion in the theological meaning of priesthood. One of the reasons the church and its ordained ministry are having trouble responding effectively to the change in social context is a lack of conviction about what is essential about holy orders and the life of the church. I want to limit my remarks to the theological sources of the confusion. We have no hope of responding effectively to the sea change in the context of the church without an inner clarity about the nature and meaning of holy orders and the church.

But what is it that keeps us from being clear? What confuses us? We are confused about soteriology, about the doctrine of salvation. There is in my estimation nothing like a soteriological consensus in the church today. For some, salvation is rescue from divine retribution by confessing dependence on the blood sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. For some, salvation is the pursuit of a spiritual journey. For some salvation is a metaphor for social justice or psychological wholeness. Most of the popular images of salvation treat the church and its ministry as accessories before or after the fact of salvation. The locus of salvation is elsewhere; at the revival or the charismatic conference, at the meeting of the women’s caucus, at the retreat or the conference on spirituality. We don’t know what salvation is and we are looking for it almost anywhere but in the parish church and we expect almost anyone to be its minister save the parish priest. The result is that we inhabit the forms of the church without understanding their meaning. The church becomes increasingly merely a secular organization. It ceases to be holy, sacred, the sacrament of the new life in Jesus Christ, what St. Paul calls the arabon, the down payment of the Kingdom, the wedding of the bride and the bridegroom. The church ceases to be God saving us by sharing his life with us. Instead the church becomes the organization for those who have been saved and are bible believing or those who believe in empowerment and liberation or those who are on a journey. Many parish churches are crucified and paralyzed by the competition and conflict between these kind of groups in the parish as they struggle for a church “that fills my needs.”

The confusion about the meaning of salvation is a huge problem afflicting the life of everyone in the church and seriously hampering the effectiveness of the church’s mission. It is a problem that is especially corrosive to the life of the priest. The priest has a special ministry, a special service in the economy of God’s salvation. If it is hard to know the meaning of salvation, then the servant does not know the purposes of the master and becomes unsure of what he or she is supposed to do. There are three primary forms under which the confusion about the nature of salvation appears. Salvation is confused with an idea or concept; salvation is confused with an experience or feeling; and salvation is confused with a program of social, psychological or political liberation.

When one one hears of the “Christian idea of God, Gospel Values, The Christian idea of the afterlife,” there is a danger that God’s salvation in Christ is being reduced to a concept in the intellectual realm. Christianity becomes a way of thinking about God, humanity, human responsibility and so forth. The sacraments begin to stand for ideas, concepts, values, rather than being a participation in a living reality. This approach is a natural temptation that arises from the need to study the faith in relation to the other great world religions and the popular secular creeds of the moment. The faith must be objectified to make this study possible. But the faith of the Apostles is not primarily a theory which is to be abstracted from the “Christian myth.” The faith of the Apostles is a witness to the saving acts of God in the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus Christ and the coming of his spirit. The salvation of God is not an idea, the Christian idea of God or the good life, to be compared and contrasted with other ideas. If salvation is reduced to a concept, it will simply dissolve and disappear in the solvent of pluralism. The priest is simply then the representative of one option among many for a private spirituality and will him or herself secretly be on the lookout for a better idea. Such a self-understanding cannot support the kind of sacrifice that the priesthood requires. I once read a book about religion in Japan after World War II entitled, The Rush Hour Of The Gods. There is a danger now of the priest being trampled in the rush hour of the gods.

Salvation is also not to be confused with one event or one experience, for example the experience of “being born again” or “baptized in the spirit.” Then salvation becomes not God’s gift renewed in us daily through our fellowship with God in the Body of Christ, but a possession which tempts us with self-righteousness and threatens to divide the church in a new way between haves and have-nots. In this scheme the priest will either be a have or a have not. The power of his or her ministry will not be the inner mystery of the priesthood but a public claim to a particular experience. The power and dignity of the priesthood will be constantly gainsaid by individuals who claim a more authentic experience. This confusion of salvation with experience and emotion is a rather natural reaction to the dessication of the soul that arises from the abstraction of the first position.

Salvation is also not to be confused with a social program or a political agenda. In our politics and social relations we must witness to the salvation of God but no program of social progress can be identified without remainder with God’s salvation. I remember when I was a student at Boston College, the great Liberation Theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez lectured us and said, “Liberation is very important, perhaps I shall have to die for Liberation, but Liberation is not enough, even for me not enough and for you certainly not enough.” When salvation is confused with liberation, the priest becomes the agent of something which has not yet happened, which may or may not come to pass and which is marked with the moral ambiguity of all human enterprises. Again the priest is attempting to have a power whose source is not an inner secret, the mystery of sacramental priesthood, a particular role in God’s sharing of himself through his Son in the power of his Spirit, but a public claim to the status of victim or righteous liberator. Again the church is divided into haves and have -nots. Those who have the right social and political agenda and those who do not. The priest comes to stand for something which though it echoes and reflects important ecclesial themes is nevertheless of the world and not God’s church. It is good that there be greater equality between men and women in the social and political realm but that is not the same thing as mutual subjection in Christ in whom there is no male or female. The political world of righteous victims and wicked oppressors is the problem to which the great democracy of sinners, the great democracy of the redeemed is the answer.

Salvation is not essentially an idea, or an isolated experience, or a program. Salvation is God redeeming and rescuing his people from sin and evil. Salvation consists of real events that have taken place: the coming of the Messiah, his death for us on the cross, his victory over death, his risen life poured out upon us in the coming of his spirit. Salvation is the recreation of human beings and human society and, St. Paul says, the whole creation in Christ. Salvation is a new life, a different life from the life of the world. It is not an idea or a private experience or a program, it is a reality. The Church is the sacrament of this reality. This reality is to be accepted or rejected. To accept it is newness of life, life abundant, life everlasting. To accept this life is to accept the new reality of God’s sharing of himself with us which is the secret of the life of the church. To reject this life is to be left defenseless in the face of sin and evil, to have no help against the enemy of our souls.

There is also a confusion about the problem of universalism that undermines the missionary zeal of the church. The evangelical and renewal wing of the church has adopted the theology of the American frontier revival. People are sinners in the hand of an angry God and unless they profess faith in Christ through a “personal decision” they will burn in hell. The majority of our people and clergy balk at the idea that friends, family members and faithful adherents of other religions who are unconverted but yet good and decent will be damned at the last day. There is an understandable allergy to the presumption of knowing what God will do with any individual soul on the last day and this translates into a missionary reticence, an evangelical timidity that threatens to trivialize the church and its ministry. The problem as it is presented in the popular imagination of our church is a distraction. We can not know the ultimate destiny of any individual soul. We may hope and pray that God will ultimately turn every rebel home. We must leave open the terrible possibility that God will allow some to rebel against his love forever. We should resist the temptation to become preoccupied with speculation about the ultimate consequences of God’s plan of salvation, profound though the problem may be. Rather we should focus our imagination on the reality of our own struggle with sin and evil. The drama of salvation is not primarily a theoretical problem to be solved, the problem of the relationship between God’s judgement and the pluralism of the world’s religions. The drama of salvation is the drama of real men and women who are really threatened with a real evil and who must face a real death, with real guilt and estrangement. The drama of salvation is God’s real sharing of his life, his grace, mercy, healing, forgiveness, his recreating love with these real people in a real history through the one who is really his Son and in the power of whose Spirit the church really lives.

The world we live in is still a world where there is no human answer to the problem of sin and forgiveness, where death and the devil are still the enemy of our human nature and where the new spiritualities and the great world religions offer people yet one more path of laborious ascent to God. The news of God’s descent to humankind in its distress with a sacrificial saving love, with the reality of a new life, here and hereafter, is still water in the desert, still light in the darkness and still life itself to those who are perishing. It is sad to watch the church constrain and devalue its mission because of a speculative universalism while people are sinking into evil and despair in front of our eyes. If the priesthood is to regain its power and dignity the priest must have eyes to see both the peril in which our people live and the blessing of the church as the reality of the new life, the place where there is a constant transformation of human life in the power of the Spirit. When we are blind to these realities we are blind to the holiness and sacredness of the church as the locus of God’s saving activity and we see the church as a merely institutional and organizational reality.

There are many symptoms of the displacement of the church as a theological reality, as something which is holy and therefore has a holy order by the church as an organization. There is the vain hope that we will find the solution to the problem of the church and its ministry in reorganization, in better management, in training in leadership, in the right social psychological perspective, such as family systems theory. All good things. All good in their place. All representing needed improvements in the life of the church and in the skills of clergy but none of them the long awaited messiah. It is no good to be more efficient and effective if we do not know the secret of our life together and the secret of our individual callings within that common life.

Perhaps the most common symptom of the ascendency of the church as organization is the almost exclusive use of political metaphors of power in our church. There is much talk of the balance of power between clergy and laity. The feeling here is that the clergy have too much power and the laity too little. The image here is of a power pie. If you have power you have taken it from someone. The more you have the less I have. This is real. These are the kinds of dynamics addressed in the canons of the church. They are wise about this kind of power. Our canons and constitution recognize that power can be abused by each order of the church, clerical as well a lay. But there is another kind of power such that the more I have the more you have. This power is mysterious, abundant and fecund. It is the mystical power of Christ, the power of His Holy Spirit gifting the church in such a way that the whole body is built up. The nature of this power is to empower individuals with unique gifts for the furthering of God’s plan of salvation. Israel was not weak because Moses was strong. Israel was weak when it rejected the ministry of Moses. The early churches were not weak because Paul was strong. The secret of his power was his ability to build them up in conformity to Christ.

The church is an organization and institution. These things are good and necessary but they have meaning and purpose only as they transcend and fulfill themselves as elements of the Body of Christ, as the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, as a foretaste of Christ’s Kingdom. The incessant use of political metaphors and power analysis is confusing to the church and causes it to lose its consciousness of itself as a pneumatic reality–a fellowship whose inner secret is an abundant and supernatural power to have a life of love with each other and the Father that more and more conforms to the love the Father and Son share with each other in the unity of the Spirit.

In the church there are those who are called to a distinctive conformity to Christ in His vocation to reconcile all things to the Father in the unity of the Spirit. Jesus says to Peter,”Do you love me more than these? Feed my sheep.” To such as these Christ through the Spirit gives a unique power, an anointing. The priest is a distinctive and unique agent of the power of Christ in the church–the Christ who at the cost of his life gathers the lost sheep of Israel, the Risen Christ who breaks bread with the disciples, who bids them look for the Spirit to come upon them and who sends them to proclaim peace to all the nations.

We are also confused about the necessarily sacrificial nature of the priesthood. Our democratic and egalitarian instincts rebel at the idea of what appears to be an elitism. Both clergy and laity are loathe to admit the costliness of the priesthood. There is a fear of two classes of Christians, of making the clergy into super-christians. There is an insistence by clergy and laity alike that priests be ordinary, that priests have no special status. This can be seen in the move toward a false familiarity between laity and clergy, the abandonment of clerical garb, that traditional symbol of a sacrificial and consecrated life. There is a sort of perverse desire to have a priesthood but one which is not to be revered, to have some sort of order in the church but one which is not holy.

But God works his salvation by giving unique vocations to unique individuals. When a bishop is consecrated, the witness of prophets, apostles and martyrs is invoked. God lays claim to every life by making a special claim on particular lives. “Behold the spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” A life that is surrendered to such a call has a unique dignity and power(what the old writers called an indelible character) not because it is perfect, without human fault, but because it can no longer escape the terrible pressure of being a means God has determined to use to implement his plan of salvation. God’s appeal of love to humanity through Jesus provokes guilt and hostility and rejection which is overcome by the suffering of sacrificial love. The vocation of the priest calls for a close identification with Jesus in his humiliation and rejection and his sacrifice of suffering love. The priest can be surrendered to this vocation. The priest can rebel. The priest cannot escape. This is costly–sacrificial. It is to be identified especially closely with Christ’s longing for the lost sheep of Israel, with his weeping over Jerusalem, with his disappointment over Peter, with his suffering and humiliation, with his cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” with his patience as he walks with them unrecognized, explaining everything in Moses and the prophets pertaining to the Messiah, with his joy as he breaks bread with them after the resurrection.

If because of a confused egalitarianism the priest refuses to identify with God’s hierarchy of sacrifice and service, the priest will miss the power, dignity and blessing of his or her special calling. If the laity refuse to revere the reality of such a call, such a unique sacrifice. If they prefer mere comradeship to a mother, a father, an elder, a presbyter in God, one through whom God makes his unremitting, terrible, yet tender appeal for fellowship with Him through his Son in the power of the Spirit–if such is the case, God’s desire to pour out his power upon his people is frustrated. When the people revere the special sacrifice that is the life of a priest they do not diminish themselves; they claim their own dignity as a people who are ever redeemed by a costly and sacrificial love. When the people discount and are irreverent about holy orders(sometimes sadly with the collusion of a cynical priest), they demean themselves and lose their dignity and cut themselves off from a mighty channel of the transforming love of God.

St. Paul says (ICor:26) of the Body of Christ that when one organ suffers, all suffer, and when one organ flourishes, they all rejoice together. The solution to the problem of a lack of dignity and power in the ministry of the lay order implies a corresponding problem of a loss of dignity and power in the ordained. We cannot build up one part of the church by diminishing another part. The church finds itself in a new and challenging missionary context. To be effective in this context will require prudence about cultural sensitivity, leadership skills, organizational effectiveness etc. But these things in themselves will not renew the power and dignity of the church, that power and dignity which is inherently attractive. To this end priests must regain a consciousness of their dignity and power as a unique and indispensable vocation in the economy of salvation. This is an essential step for the church as it regains a consciousness of itself as God’s communication of his life to his people, as the anticipation of the kingdom which is to come, as the reality of God’s salvation.

A Response By Leander Harding, To Reflections On Being A Priest In A Difficult Time by Philip Turner and Christopher Seitz

In my neck of the ecclesiastical woods there is a standard format for sermons at ordinations, celebrations of new ministry and Holy Week meditations on the renewal of priestly vows. The speaker is obliged to give a passing nod to the event at hand and then devote the rest of the agenda to a discussion of the preeminence of baptismal ministry. The hoary bogie man of clericalism is trotted out and denounced to the satisfaction of all present. Patriarchalism, hierarchalism are said to be bad and collaboration and mutuality are said to be good. Something is often said about the ministry belonging to the people and not the priest and about looking to the members of the congregation who are the “real” ministers.

Like so much of the semiofficial rhetoric in the Episcopal Church today the problem is not the text but the subtext. The dignity of baptismal ministry, the dangers of clericalism, the role of the ordained as servants of the servants of God, who can deny the significance of these themes? (Though even these themes can be used in disturbingly hostile ways. I once listened to what seemed like a tome on lay ministry at the service to honor a priest who was retiring, beloved by the congregation, after a long and honorable ministry, of which 25 years were spent in the parish where the service was being held. While there was nothing wrong with what the bishop was saying, the context made it seem an astonishing indifference to a life of sacrifice and caused one to wonder if an intentional insult were being offered.) Very often these sermons and speeches about “mutual ministry” and “common total ministry” which are offered on occasions when the liturgy is speaking of the unique offering of the priestly life say little with which I would want to take issue. It is the subtext which often leaves me oppressed in the spirit. The subtext says in effect, “Let us not be confused. There is nothing happening here which has any eternal or supernatural significance. For after all neither the church, nor its preaching, nor its sacraments, nor its orders of ministers are really necessary in any meaningful way. Let us not expect very much of this priest. Let us not expect anything sacramental. Let us not expect any unique presence of Christ in the church through this offering. Let us especially not expect any unique sacrifice on the part of this individual. For we all know that if we require a profound and irrevocable sacrifice on the part of our priests we shall be expected to make profound and irrevocable sacrifices ourselves. And let us not be confused about the solemnness of this person binding him or herself to the profession of the Apostolic Faith. Let us not think that anything dangerous is happening when a man or woman signs on the dotted line that they believe the scriptures to contain all things necessary to salvation or when they undertake to lead the congregation in the recitation of the creeds of the church. For if we thought that then we would be bound by something more than our own unformed and uninformed consciences and would be obliged toward a dangerous and risky profession of faith ourselves.” Sadly sometimes one looks over and sees the ordinand happily nodding through it all, relieved to be let off the hook at the last minute. So instead of confession in all its meanings and a sacrifice of thanksgiving, we get one more ritual where we assure ourselves that our sins our benign and God indulgent.
To cultivate a clergy who are encouraged as a matter of principle not to believe in the uniqueness of their vocation is yet another symptom of the difficult times to which these talks are addressed. Against the backdrop of predictably anticlerical and psuedo-egalitarian talk about the priesthood this collection of sermons and meditations by two faithful scholar-priests comes as the shelter of a mighty rock within a weary land.

Both Philip Turner and Christopher Seitz give very sober estimates of the theological crisis of the Episcopal Church and both counsel perseverance and warn against schism and the sectarian impulse. Philip Turner takes up a theme that has become a hallmark with him, that is what is needed in this church which is embracing revisionist theologies and practices that are nothing short of apostate, is not more argument but more faithful practice. He argues that sound theological discernment requires a community of faithful practice and he warns us away from fruitless partisan wrangling and politicking and calls us to renew the practices of prayer, scripture reading and community life that might create an environment in which faithful theological discernment might take place. Turner questions whether the witness of scripture and the wisdom of the tradition can be apprehended in churches where the fundamental Christian practices have atrophied. Philip urges the clergy to pick up that particular aspect of their vocation which calls them to constitute themselves as a college of presbyters who meet in prayer, and particularly the scripture soaked prayer of the daily offices. and in the context of this prayer and with a commitment to the mutual charity and submission of true Christian community take up the great issues that divide the church. He has faith that more people are converted by holiness of life than by argument. One is reminded of St. Francis, “Preach the Gospel always, use words when necessary.”

It is a very odd fact of life in our church that the typical life of a diocese provides for little interaction between the clergy and virtually no connection between the bishop and clergy apart from official visitation. The vision that Philip Turner proposes of the bishop and the college of presbyters as a real Christian community gathered regularly in common prayer, worship and spiritual conversation is hopeful. It is the monastic strategy for dealing with the unfaithfulness of the church. The monastic strategy seeks to renew the church by forming exemplary Christian communities while at the same time resisting the sectarian temptation to schism and separation. The proposal is to reform the church by creating within its structures islands of winning and winsome faithfulness. There will be places where such a strategy will work and where community can even be built across lines of division. There will be other places where the polarization is too well defined and such community building is only possible among the like minded. I endorse the effort. It will bless us in any event to return to the practices of prayer and study which should have defined our lives all along. But while we are praying and engaging in the overdue business of renewing our Christian and priestly practice, the General Convention will likely vote us into new regions of apostasy.

I miss in both sets of talks a consideration of the priest, in the phrase of Austin Farrer, as a “walking sacrament.” One of the things that has devitalized the sign of priesthood in our church is the way in which the bonds between the signifier and the signified have been loosed. To be a priest is to be someone whose hands are tied. While Anglo-Catholic ritual is not always good theology it is ever good psychology and the ritual of binding together the new priests hands and placing in them the Bible and the communion vessels shows to all and no less to the new priest that this is a life that is by choice constrained by choice and vow, by a faithfulness that allows no second thoughts, as Philip Turner helpfully reminds us. So the people when they see a priest should know what this person is bound to confess and perform. We have already entered into a time which shall soon become more well defined when it will seem that we are tied to things which can not be found in the scriptures, the creeds or the historic liturgies. Of what shall we then be walking signs?

Turner’s proposals give us a spiritually challenging way to live and renew our vocation in a church which has itself become a broken sign but a practical way of saying I intend to be a sign of this and not that is needed. There is a need for some distinction and separation that is not schism and sectarianism and the fruitless search for the pure church. There is a need for clarifying the sign so that the sacrament may be preserved. The model of Roman Catholic clerical congregations is well worth considering. This has traditionally been seen in Anglicanism primarily in catholic circles but perhaps the time is ripe for an order of priests founded on adherence to orthodox doctrine and commitment to practices of prayer, bible reading and study that could include priests from across a spectrum of churchmanship. It could give a way for the pastoral fruitfulness of different theological postures and different visions of priestly fidelity to be put to the test. It could give congregations a chance to understand easily to what sort of things particular priests are bound and for which they stand.

Christ Seitz’s meditations helpfully direct us to the Old Testament. Here we find the story of a church more like our own than the church of Acts. He directs us to those prophets who are called to minister to a church that is manifestly unfaithful and corrupt. He reminds us that hidden within the prophets words of judgment are words of grace and that hidden within the words of grace are words of judgment and that these realities are not mutually exclusive but hang together in God’s faithful love for His church and are two parts of God’s one act of providential testing and refining. It is very helpful to be reminded that in the Bible, “the language of judgment is a language of purification and hope.” The present chaos is forcing clarification, forcing decision and forcing alliances that would have seemed impossible a short while ago. We must be cautious about identifying ourselves with the prophets because prophecy is not a self-choosen vocation but it may come at any time to any one of us and we can all be encouraged by the remembrance that the prophets were not in control of the response to their message nor the consequences of the response. The prophets had a role that was given to them which required faithfulness and trust in the wisdom of God.

Providence is one of the great neglected themes in contemporary theology even in more traditionalist circles. It is good to be reminded that the Bible teaches that “man meant it for ill but God meant it for good.” It is good to be reminded that the living through of God’s providential history may well be hard. But that does not mean that we live in a God forsaken world. It is not beyond the powers of God to turn the present troubles to great good for His church. This should give us courage to persevere in faithfulness to our vocation.

I am also grateful to Seitz for bringing our attention to the role of the priest as intercessor. It is very helpful to do this by way of contemplation of the prophets. Thus we can put aside any lingering nervousness about crude and superstitious ideas of intercession associated with chantry masses and Reformation debates and can see the connection between being the bearer of the Word of God and the necessity, the inevitability of intercession. How can the heart of the priest not be broken by the response of the people to the Word of God whether it is a response of repentance or a response of resistance. It would take a very stony heart to resist the call to offer up prayers on behalf of these people, impossible once commissioned to bear the Word of God to a particular people not to constantly carry them on your heart as you stand before the Lord.

Here for me there is a disconnect between these earnest discussions that we church professionals have amongst ourselves and the reality of the parish and the people for whom I particularly intercede. Most of what distresses me is simply unknown to them. One of our local parishes invited John Spong to town. I was riled, I was distressed, I was roused to apologetic zeal and the defense of the true faith. We had a few folk who went to the lecture. They didn’t stay to be part of the new and improved Christianity. Most of the folk in my parish had no idea what I was talking about. They were too preoccupied with the sick spouse, their drug addicted child, the recent lay off, their own struggle to find the bare essentials of faith. Within the parish I live very much in the church into which I was ordained and I exercise a ministry that has a form that is recognizably the same as the ministry exercised by the nine rectors before me in the 260 year history of the parish. It is when I am with other clergy, in the conventions and conventicles of our church that I am forced to confront militant unbelief and unfaithfulness and moral relativism. I have these things in the parish but even their practitioners do not want to advertise or advance them. I find myself wondering how to raise and handle the issues of the “difficult times,” that seem so irrelevant to the real difficulties of the real people for whom I pray and hoping and praying that God will sustain us all in our several callings. If I resign from the parish over some action of the General Convention many people are likely to understand only that one particular intercessor has stopped praying for them. I need very much a way to stay with them without seeming to stand for things that are contrary to the vows I have taken.

1. My experience with parish conflict. I have been ordained for 20 years and have led 4 parishes of which three have had a history of conflict. I was a diocesan consultant in Maine and Massachusetts and spent over a year working in one highly conflicted parish in which fist fights had been a feature of previous parish meetings. I was an early advocate of applying Family Systems Theory to parish life before this perspective was made famous by Edwin Friedman’s great book. As an adjunct professor I taught Family Theory and Therapy at Andover Newton Theological School and was a supervisor of field education supervisors at Episcopal Divinity School. My most profound experience of parish conflict was the first three years of my tenure at St. John’s in Stamford which culminated in the vestry asking for my resignation and my request for a Godly judgment under the canons from the Bishop. I participated in an ongoing group for survivors of extreme parish conflict held at E.D.S. in 1992-1993. Of the dozen or so members at the time I attended, including a bishop who was forced to resign his see, I was the only person who ultimately stayed in place and continued in office. During my eleven year tenure at St. John’s I have had three of the most difficult years in the priesthood and eight of the best.

2. Learnings from my experience and from the survivors group. Most of the parishes of the members of the group were known to have a history of conflict before we arrived and often had a history of involuntary terminations. Many of these parishes had outstanding problems associated with membership and financial decline which had not been resolved and which were not the primary topic of conflict. Often we felt these parishes were lacking in spirituality or theological integrity. We were often perceived as being “hard nosed” for trying to promote minimal standards for vestry service(church attendance) or administration of the sacraments(preparation meetings). Interestingly, frequently the conflict flared up when the parish was growing in both numbers and finances. In many cases where the clergy resigned for “the good of the parish,” the conflict continues. By the time we were meeting in our group some of the parishes involved were already moving toward involuntary termination with our successors.

Most of the parishes of members of the group had difficult interims and the interim process was often a source of conflict. In many cases the interim ministry was unskilled, untrained and unsupervised. Often the rectors we replaced where larger than life figures with a great deal of personal charisma. When first introduced as the rector of our parish many of us were told that we didn’t look the part. These parishes were often characterized as being very dependent on the personality of the rector and often were perceived to have faltered when the previous rector left. Often the leave taking of the beloved former rector had not been emotionally appropriate and had often been sudden or abrupt.

A sensitive issue that emerged was the role of substance abuse by previous clergy and key lay leaders in many of these parishes. Many of the members of our group were either in recovery or adult children of alcoholics or had other formative experiences of abuse and trauma as children. Many of us felt that there was a certain psychology of the victim at work. After being publicly berated and humiliated we found ourselves ashamed and secretive, often not reaching out to people who could help us and often blamed for causing our own problems when we did. We found that we were often making decisions not on the basis of our cherished beliefs and values but on the basis of how to avoid being beaten again.

Previous parish experience and advanced training were not good indicators of the potential for the ability to survive and thrive in these highly conflicted situations. Most of us were experienced and had been recommended on the basis of having the skills and experience to “handle” this kind of parish. Most of had been successful and effective in other positions and had often managed parish conflict well. Before encountering the particular parish that brought us to the group, many of us felt that, though parish conflict could be very difficult. it could be managed with the right tools and approach. “Everything that worked before, didn’t work here,” was a refrain in our group.

Though the members of the group represented a broad spectrum of theological opinion, we all felt that we had moments when we encountered spiritual evil in a way that we had not experienced it before. We all agreed that the experience deepened our sense of dependence on God and our prayer life. Those of us who stayed in spite of requests for our resignation all felt in different ways that we were called by God to do so.

The intervention of the diocese and consultants in many cases made things worse rather than better. In highly conflicted parishes consultants that were highly competent and experienced made what they admitted were “dumb” mistakes. In these highly anxious systems competent people often became incompetent. Our reflection was that most consultation models are mediation models or negotiation models. This is a model that works well with in a relatively stable situation when people of fundamentally good will disagree over some objective content. One of the features of these conflicts was that it was very difficult to uncover an objective content to the conflict. Our antagonists often could not articulate specific complaints or specific desired actions or corrections. The interim priest of a famous New York parish which has recently pushed out its rector commented when asked about the parish that “the vestry had no idea what it wanted and would stop at nothing to get it.”

A useful distinction is made by Kenneth Haugk in his book, Antagonists In The Church, between conflict for which mediation is appropriate and conflict for which adjudication is appropriate. There is some conflict that is driven by emotional and spiritual pathology and is not amenable to negotiation. Perhaps the most famous example of someone misreading the nature of conflict in this way is the British Prime minister, Chamberlain at the Munich Conference with Hitler. The end game that led to final resignation often included a number of steps the purpose of which was to appease the antagonists. They usually wanted more. The very presence of the consultants on site often seemed to embolden the antagonists. Often processes that were set up to facilitate communication were “hijacked” by antagonists who engaged in “get out the vote campaigns” while the supporters of the clergy were often not aware of what was going on. Often we were counseled by bishops and consultants to “take the high road” and not attempt in any organized way to rally our support. This was often a source of great anger and bitterness to our supporters when we left or resigned. “I had no idea what was going on,” or“I wish someone had talked to me,” were refrains that we heard from supporters after the event

It is sometimes appropriate to use the canons and the system can work. In most cases we were counseled to avoid the canonical process at all costs. Resignation of the rector was seen by many consultants and bishops as a last resort that was still to be preferred to enacting the canonical process. In my own case I was repeatedly warned that if I invoked the canons I “had already lost,” and that “even if you win canonically, you will not be able to govern the parish afterwards.” In my own case I am convinced that this was bad advice and that much like the Watergate episode in American political history, a crisis which can be resolved by the rule of law has a role in restoring faith in the integrity of the institution and the office involved. It is good for people and bad for bullies when the rules are understood and uniformly enforced. Rather than being morale destroying the are times when invocation of the rule of law can be morale building.

It takes extensive, overlapping support systems to survive and overcome in severely conflicted parishes. I had a spiritual director, therapist, organizational coach and several support groups. I also found solidarity in prayer with other clergy vital.

3. Suggestions For Action

A. Establish an early warning system. The diocese already has an ordinands training program that provides an opportunity to be in touch with new clergy who may be experiencing parish conflict as they start their careers. It might be helpful to establish two additional groups. There could be a group for clergy that are leaving their cures that could provide mutual support, encouragement and training in best practices for a good close to a term of ministry. This group should cover at least the last three months of ministry. Another group would be for clergy of whatever stage of experience that were taking up a new cure. This should cover at least the first year to eighteen months.

B. Trained interims are not necessary in all transitions but in parishes with a long history of conflict there is a need for well trained and well supported interims. The amount of support and supervision people working in such an environment need is roughly equivalent to the clinical supervision needed by a therapist working with a severely troubled family or with borderline personalities. In other words a lot of debriefing time off site with an experienced colleague.

C. Continuing supervision for the new rectors in troubled parishes by supervisors who have psychological and organizational skill and who have spiritual depth. Catching conflict early and intervening with skilled off site coaching of the clergy and at times key lay leaders appears to me more effective than sending in the “mission impossible team” at a later date. On site consulting often moves conflict in these parishes to a higher level.

D. A clear message which permeates the diocesan system that clergy can be terminated for good cause but that unless it involves moral failure, such terminations are rare and costly.

E. Establish a norm for lay leader training where lay people can learn about the polity of the church, come to understand diocesan vision, values and policy and learn necessary skills, like conflict management and how to appropriately handle antagonists in the church.

F. Do anything which will raise awareness about the problem of substance abuse in parishes and which will help the many clergy who have grown up in alcoholic families understand how that experience might be affecting their ministry.

G. Continue to keep an emphasis on spiritual growth and development. Emotional, spiritual and organizational health are interrelated.