Rest In Peace Bishop

Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong died last Sunday at the age of 90.  According to his obituary written by Harrison Smith of the Washington Post:

(begin) Bishop Spong was an outspoken leader of the church’s liberal wing, known for his efforts to open the faith to marginalized groups and preach a message of love and justice that would resonate in an increasingly secular age. He acquired an international profile while writing more than two dozen books, appearing on TV shows such as “Oprah” and “Larry King Live,” and serving as bishop of Newark, where he was the spiritual leader of some 40,000 northern New Jersey Episcopalians from 1979 to 2000.

As a theologian, he was known for questioning some of Christianity’s fundamental doctrines, including the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus and the existence of miracles. Those views infuriated Christian leaders who labeled him a heretic, although he was part of a long tradition of theologians who argued that taking the Bible literally was to miss the truth behind its teachings.

“He was trying to find the kernel and sweep away the husk of what it meant to follow Jesus. He was always seeking after that truth,” said the Rev. Canon Kelly Brown Douglas, the canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary. “What he truly came to understand is doctrine, dogma, doesn’t make us Christian. Doctrine, dogma, doesn’t make us church. What makes us church is respecting the sacredness of every single human being and creating a world that does that and making sure the church is leading the world in doing that.” “In so many ways,” she said, “he was ahead of the church.”

Raised with fundamentalist Christian values in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, Bishop Spong was taught as a young man that gay people were sinful, women were subordinate to men and African Americans were inferior to Whites. He should always say “Sir” and “Ma’am” to his elders, his father told him, so long as they were not Black.

But as the civil rights movement took hold, Bishop Spong preached to Black and White congregations alike, working to shed what he described as the “residual racism” of his upbringing. “I happen to believe that God’s image is in every human being, and that every human being must [be treated] with ultimate respect. . . . And the Black people in America were the first people who made this very clear to me,” he said in a 2001 interview with the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster.

Bishop Spong later expanded his ministry to encompass the fights for gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Soon after he arrived at the Diocese of Newark in 1976 as bishop coadjutor, a steppingstone to bishop, the diocese became one of the first to ordain women to the priesthood. In 1989, he ordained the first openly gay man to the Episcopal priesthood, the Rev. Robert Williams, who had written to Bishop Spong after reading his book “Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality.”

An out lesbian, the Rev. Ellen Barrett, had been ordained to the priesthood more than a decade earlier. But the Williams ordination made national headlines — Bishop Spong had sent letters to all the church’s bishops, inviting them to attend — and thrust the issue of openly gay clergy members to the fore, threatening to divide the denomination.

The church’s House of Bishops voted to censure Bishop Spong in 1990. But over the next two decades, the tide turned in favor of LGBTQ rights: An Episcopal Church court ruled in 1996 that there was no “core doctrine” barring the ordination of gay men and lesbians, and in 2003, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson was consecrated as the church’s first openly gay bishop. The church voted in 2015 to allow religious weddings for same-sex couples.

Bishop Spong was “a prophet,” Robinson said in a phone interview, using the term in the sense of “someone who speaks truth to power, who says those things that people don’t want to hear because it calls their morality and their lives into question.” “I stand on his shoulders,” he added. “Were it not for the work that he did and the ministry that he did and the advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ people that he did, I wouldn’t be a bishop. He did it long before it was popular or politically correct — he did it because he believed it was the gospel.” (end)

I have been an avid reader of Bishop Spong’s many books.  He was thought-provoking.  He made me think, and I have long recognized his views and analyses were very controversial.  Nevertheless, controversy represents different opinions with one or more of them often creating a furor.  So be it.  There is much about our Church’s history that needs explanation and elaboration, especially the perils of literalism and fundamentalism.  

Two of his most recent books were: “The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic” (2013) and “Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today” (2018).  Good reading, but be prepared to exclaim, “Say what!?”

Rest in peace Bishop.  You deserve that peace.

Deacon David Pierce