STEPHENS: In your latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, you reiterate: 'Christianity is dying ... The experience of Jesus is newly dawning and will in time create new forms.' Are you heartened, or concerned by, the prominence of militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens?
SPONG: It gives me great heart. But so does the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. I keep trying to build a community between radical (or rabid) fundamentalism, and this disillusioned secularity. My marching orders are in John's description of Jesus' purpose: 'I've come that they might have life.'
STEPHENS: I often wonder about the ethical consequences of your version of Christianity. There are expressions of religion which are diabolically compatible with our modern self-centredness. Western Buddhism and even Pentecostalism seem to me to be disgustingly bourgeois forms of religion. Isn't your vision of a "new Christianity" pandering to the same bourgeois temperament?
SPONG: That's probably a legitimate criticism. Religion is always going to be changing its face in response to an ever-expanding worldview. Darwin challenges the way in which the Christian story has been told. Before Darwin we told the story of the Christian faith in terms of human beings created perfect in God's image, but who disobeyed God and fell into sin. Finally God enters the world as a saviour-rescuer. But it doesn't work. We never were created perfect in God's image. We were created as single-cell units of life. We are radically self-centred, survival-orientated creatures, and we had to be to win the battle of evolution. I think we've got to turn our whole Christology toward seeing Jesus as the kind of humanity that enables us to get over [survival] and begin to give our lives away.
STEPHENS: I'm going to have to pull you up here, because what you've just proposed is very different from one of your previous positions. If I may be perfectly blunt, your chapter on "Original Sin" in A New Christianity for a New World gave me a lot of trouble. In it you present a disturbingly New Age, quasi-Jungian image of the human being in which 'God and Satan, light and darkness, good and evil, Jesus and Judas" etc. must be embraced as part of some greater "wholeness. Now, I'm with you in your rejection of the traditional notion of original sin, and I am deep agreement with you in placing the Christian story against a Darwinian backdrop. But I don't see how you can reconcile your compelling picture of human-animals caught in the survival-instinct, from which we must break away in Christ, with this amoral description of human wholeness.
SPONG: That was the most difficult chapter. You don't become whole by simply suppressing your dark-side, but rather by accepting it as part of your being and redeeming it and living through it. Retrospectively, I'm not sure that I knew what I was writing, to be perfectly blunt back at you. Except that I still believe that Jung was right when he said that it was a great day for Christianity when the Roman Catholics promulgated the doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary, because for the first time Mary was lifted into the sense of the divine. And then he said that God will finally be complete when the devil is lifted back into God and so God's dark-side is also embraced in what is ultimately holy. That's what I was trying to say about human life.
STEPHENS: I want to press you a little further on this. You most often refer to God, following Paul Tillich, as "the Ground of Being" and insist that we participate in God by becoming fully ourselves. But even Tillich was keenly aware that there are ways of "being" which are in fact delusional, inauthentic, even idolatrous. In your previous work you don't seem to have factored in this aspect of Tillich's thought. Haven't you left the door open for all kinds of self-seeking idolatry in the name of one's search for God?
SPONG: I don't know quite how to respond to that. I'm currently working on the question of whether someone with my theological understanding can have a belief in life-after-death. And my answer is yes. Now I think that will be my next book. But along the way I've examined what life-after-death means to most people, and it is a fiercely self-centred kind of idolatry.
If the only motivation in my life is that I'll get the reward of heaven or escape the punishment of hell, then it's still nothing except a self-centred act. That is a form of idolatry that must be overcome. If we can get to the place where life-after-death is not just about reward or punishment, then I think we can start understanding what such a life-after-death really is. Not only is that the next step in my writing, it's the next step in my personal pilgrimage, which I think is increasingly beyond any theological system into a kind of wordless mysticism.