Unbelievable. Book Review

I'd read only one of John Shelby Spong's books before I read this one. Back in the day I'd found  his Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism, by turns helpful, illuminating and infuriating. Helpful and illuminating because it articulated many of my own opinions about the Bible, and infuriating because the scholarship was at times careless and because Spong's own claims for his opinions and for himself were not as unarguable as he pretended they were.  I've had a pretty similar reaction to this book.

Unbelievable is 319 pages long including footnotes and index, and is printed on odd, lightweight paper by Harper Collins. It was published this year.

Central to this book is the observation -pretty obvious and incontrovertible, really - that an experience and the description of that experience are two different things. Experiences can sometimes be universal, that is, they have a constancy over time and space, but the explanation given to the experience is culturally and personally conditioned, in that it will vary from place to place and change over time. So, to use an example given by Spong, epilepsy is a universal experience of humankind, present in every culture and throughout all of human history. The explanation of epilepsy, however, is not constant: while we now believe it to be a function of some specific brain pathologies, it was once explained as the result of demonic possession, and it would be unhelpful, and maybe even abusive and damaging, to use the ancient explanation of epilepsy in a contemporary context.

Using the dichotomy of an experience and its explanation, Spong says that experience of the divine is a human constant, but that the way that experience is described is cultural, and must be expected to change with place and (particularly) over time. He says that the explanations we Christians give for the universal human experience of the divine were formed, largely, in the first few centuries after the birth of Jesus, and in the period of the Reformation. Human understanding has developed exponentially since then, and we have reached a point where the explanations we have inherited and forged into the religion called Christianity, are no longer believable.

Spong's stated purpose in writing this, his last book, is, to provoke a new Reformation. He attempts this by doing what Martin Luther did, presenting a number of theses (in Spong's case 12 instead of 95), which are aimed at undermining the established explanations of our religious experience in order that those experiences may be taken out of hiding and made more accessible. He sees that Christianity as we have received it is dying, and that it has two choices: to acquiesce in that death, or to so redefine its explanations that Christianity would be unrecognisable. Either way, the Church as we know it is living on borrowed time.

The book is divided into 15 parts, with 12 of them devoted to one of Spong's theses. These are God; Jesus the Christ; Original Sin; The Virgin Birth; Miracles; Atonement Theology; Easter; The Ascension; Ethics; Prayer; Life after Death; Universalism. He briefly examines the received doctrines on each of these things before proposing what he sees as a better reframing of the experience they contain. I won't rehearse Spong's views on each of these, but if you're a traditional Christian you might want to take your blood pressure pills before you start reading. Mind you, nothing he says here hasn't been said before, and he is right about so much. For example, his notion that God is not a being, but Being itself, goes back further than Paul Tillich (whom he quotes as its source) and is at least as old as Meister Eckhart, and indeed, probably as old as the writers of Exodus.

And, as far as Spong's central idea is concerned, I agree with him. Completely. The comprehension of the divine and a sense of lived participation the work of Christ as as widespread as ever, but in a quantum, relative, post Newtonian, post Darwinian world, the explanatory doctrines forged in the late Roman Empire and in late Medieval Europe are increasingly incomprehensible. To most Westerners, even those still inside the Church, they are simply unbelievable.  It was Spong's addressing of this issue which persuaded me to shell out for the book. I'm glad I did: it's worth the read, but I just wish he wasn't so damned annoying. What I like least about the book is the carelessness with detail.

For example: when he gives a brief overview of the Galileo controversy of the early 17th Century, he merely reproduces the popular, but inaccurate narrative and in doing so adds to the mistruth surrounding this seminal event, and misses an opportunity to examine ways which our own explanations of experience - including those of both Pope Urban VIII AND Galileo -  are culturally bounded. This is one example of the many slick and cheap glosses to which the book is prone. I am not a great fan of some of his language either, which slips with alarming rapidity into meaninglessness. Discussing love, for example, he doesn't pause for a minute to tell us what he intends by that overworked word, but ploughs ahead into vacuousness and turgidity:

"If love is the power that enhances life, then is not love the meaning found in the process of photosynthesis that draws plants into the life-enhancing rays of the sun? Is not love the instinctive behaviour of the mother cat licking the fur of its kittens or the mother cow giving the warmth of its body to the newborn calf?"

And let's overlook for a moment the hubris of the book's intended aim. It's very readable and should garner quite an audience. Spong's prose is accessible and rips along at a jolly pace, so this is a book most people could read in a sitting or two. It will no doubt provoke its fair share of consternation and spluttering amongst those who retain a vested interest in the old explanations, but they aren't the people John Shelby Spong is talking to. He is one of the very few people, in the popular arena at least, who is asking these questions  and he deserves to be heard.