Whenever Bishop John Shelby Spong visits Australia, as he did last month, it is certain that the attention he receives from the nation’s secular press will be out of proportion to his international significance. He is winsome, he has a reputation as a campaigner for the rights of oppressed minorities, and he attacks evangelical Christians using the fearful epithet ‘fundamentalist’.

He appears to justify the media’s dismissal of gospel truth as irrelevant and merely an expression of ignorance and prejudice. And just to sweeten the deal, he knows how to play to an audience.

Anyone who takes on John Spong is bound to be presented as defensive and unenlightened. Indeed Spong himself does his best to label anyone who disagrees with him in precisely this way (eg: Lambeth ‘98 was a ‘madhouse’; the Pope was rude to Rowan Williams; Peter Jensen is irrelevant).

He proclaims his own interest in truth above all else. He is not seeking popularity, he says, nor is he defending denominational unity. He is prepared to go out on a limb and stand against the prevailing trends for the sake of truth. He even entitled his autobiography Here I Stand, inviting a comparison between himself and the great reformer of the 16th century, Martin Luther. He is the last crusader.

And yet it is a carefully choreographed charade.

His own ideas have repeatedly been shown to be contradicted by the evidence and so untrue (eg: N.T. Wright’s Who was Jesus? from 1992), yet he continues to insist that he values truth above all else. He labels his opponents as arrogant but is reluctant to subject his own theories and speculations to testing by evidence or argument. He simply dismisses all criticism as uninformed and out of touch. He suggests that evangelicals inhabit a small ghetto in Sydney – ours is a world that exists nowhere else in the world. Yet what of NEAC 4, held in the UK in September? What of the Anglican leaders in Africa, Asia, and South America? What of the trenchant opposition to recent developments in ECUSA by faithful Christian leaders in America and Britain? Spong knows how to produce a soundbite, but his soundbites cannot stand up to the facts. Listen for how often he uses the word ‘homophobic’.

Bishop Spong sees himself as a man on the cutting edge of scholarship and Christian ministry while his opponents cannot see beyond yesterday’s horizons. Yet he is self-consciously committed to an approach to Christian theology espoused by John A. T. Robinson (his Honest to God was published in 1963), which in turn was indebted to the assumptions of a 19th century brand of biblical criticism.

Today these approaches command little respect. Biblical and theological scholarship has moved on, and this older liberalism is very clearly on the wane in academic circles. Even those who would oppose evangelical theology on other grounds find his ‘Twelve Theses’ for the future of Christianity difficult to reconcile with anything distinctively Christian. The first two of these, with their combination of parody and unbelief, make clear how far he has departed from ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.

2. 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. (1)

Christians seeking to be faithful to the teaching of the Scriptures have nothing to fear from Jack Spong. He did, sadly, receive a measure of publicity while he was here, but he is not the crusader for truth he claims to be. Here is a man trapped in a discredited theology desperately trying to damn his opponents by association with the evils of the past.

Ironically, Bishop Spong himself is a testimony to the truthfulness of the Scriptures. Did not Jesus himself speak about the assault on the truth of the gospel that would come in the last days? Did not the apostle James warn about the stricter judgement to come for those who are teachers?

Mark Thompson is Academic Dean and Senior Lecturer in Theology at Moore College.

Endnote
<font size=“1”> (1) Included as an appendix to his Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality (San Francisco: Harper, 2000), p. 453. <font>