Bold and opinionated, Bishop Spong was memorable and ever confident

On Oct 2, 2021

John Shelby Spong – Bishop Spong to friends, foes and press – was an emblematic religious figure for decades. He alarmed the defenders of tradition and gave hope to believers-in-exile. He was the southern-born heretic who would abandon the old creeds and capitulate to modern fashions. Or he was the voice of sanity who fought for a more welcoming church in the modern era. One of his many book titles bluntly declared: “Christianity Must Change or Die.” Nobody was neutral about Episcopal Bishop Spong, who died last month, age 90.

I interviewed him once – he was friendly, accessible, opinionated, a reporter’s dream. He was confident about Christianity’s ills and the future of faith. Maybe too confident. His death reminds me how much the world has changed since his heyday. And keeps changing. For years a simplified conflict model of public faith helped define spiritual politics – reason vs. superstition, past vs. future, left vs. right, modern science vs. ancient cosmology. Maybe too simple.

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He retired from the Diocese of Newark, N.J., in 2000 – before 9/11, before Afghanistan and Iraq, before Katrina, before Facebook, before the 2008 financial crisis, before the Obama years, the Trump presidency, #MeToo, extremities of weather and the murder of George Floyd. Those things have remade the public world and altered many a religious debate. In various quarters today, national politics has replaced denominational doctrine as the thing that divides people. Hurtful family feuds are more likely to erupt over the presidential election than the Virgin Birth.

Perhaps these rampaging events exposed a weakness in the media-fueled religious conflict model of old. People got weary of it. It didn’t reflect their complex experiences of grace, grandeur, grief, mystery, uncertainty and death.

Spong kept writing and speaking after retirement, never giving up hope that churches must boldly become less fearful of pluralism, more welcoming, more whole. In a 2009 interview, he spoke more personally and poignantly, disclosing that his study of science was edging him toward mystical frontiers.

“When I think about life after death, I do not envision a place, but more of a relationship,” he told “Church Times.” “I have come to a mystical awareness that in my relationship with God I participate in that which is eternal.”

The experience of eternity he describes, a voyage to the divine presence, strikes me as potential common ground between left, right, and none of the above. To me this mystical awareness is, at certain moments, the feeling of amazement that this world, so hotly contested every day, exists at all, and each person is given the gift of being present with it for a time, with each moment carrying a dream of wholeness that defies the fragmentary rush of each day.