First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon

REDEFINING THE MEANING OF – VI Based on John Shelby Spong’s Book: “A New Christianity for a New World”

“The Reality of Evil”

According to Spong, babies are not born with the stain of original sin but “with a loudspeaker on one end and no sense of responsibility on the other.” Rejecting the traditional Christian interpretation of the fall of humanity as depicted in Genesis 3, Spong prefers instead to look at the wonder of humanity and to celebrate the incredible gift of self-conscious life that has emerged from our earliest living ancestors. Nevertheless, he does recognize and seeks to address the reality of evil that is also an undeniable part of the human story. And so we begin with the question: what is evil? Our first vision of evil is seen in the cruelty that one person commits against another in the competitive game we call life. These cruel deeds, Spong says, are not the products of some original sin but the direct byproducts of our evolutionary struggle to survive. This innate competitive drive to survive accounts for the military capability that human beings develop and exercise when other less drastic methods of competition do not work. It accounts for social systems, such as slavery, segregation, and apartheid which are imposed and maintained with military might on those tribal members who are the losers in these competitive struggles. The oppression of women in a patriarchal world can also be seen as a survival tactic, as can the suppression of homosexual people who appear not to be interested in the normal pattern of mating and reproductive activities on which the life the tribe depends. The seemingly senseless slaughter of thousands of young people in gang- related violence is often born out of a competitive drive to claim and maintain “territory” against the incursions of others. As life emerged into self-consciousness, humans organized their world around the self-centered virtue of their own survival. Much of what we label as “evil” in human history can thus be explained by the human sense of incompleteness which is rooted in the fact of our historical journey from simple to complex forms of life. The explanation that evolutionary human life is driven by a survival mentality that locks self-conscious creatures into a radical self-centeredness indicates that we are not fallen creatures so much as we are incomplete creatures. But these categories, enormous as they are, still do not exhaust the experience of human evil, nor can self-centered competition and the struggle for self- survival adequately explain all the manifestations of evil in the world. What are we to make of the evils of addiction to alcohol and drugs, mental disorders, those who destroy others in obedience to their convictions, and those who, seeking love in what is for them a natural way, find only death by disease? These are clearly evils that cannot be satisfactorily explained by pointing only to a self-centered drive for survival, for they are examples of people in the throes of an evil power over which they appear to have no control. Carl Jung described it as the “shadow” or “dark side” of our humanity, an aspect of our being that is feared, repressed, denied, coped with, and in some cases even transformed to serve the well-being of the person. However, Jung argued, one’s shadow is never healed until it has been brought into the self-consciousness of the person whose dark First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon side it is. Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil cannot be removed from our being because it is part of our being. In the parable of the tares, said both the wheat and the tares must grow together until the harvest. We cannot remove the tares without destroying the wheat. Evil, like the tares, is part of the nature of reality. Our being is always light and darkness, love and hate, God and Satan, life and death, being and nonbeing—all in dynamic tension. We cannot split off part of who we are. We cannot pretend that we are made in God’s image until we own as part of our being the shadow side of our life, which reflects the shadow side of God. That is why evil is always present in the holy; that is why evil is perceived as relentless and inescapable; that is why Jesus and Judas have been symbolically bound together since the dawn of time. When the Gospel of John suggests that Jesus was the pre- existing word of God enfleshed into human history, it needed to include who was also mythically present in God at the dawn of creation. The mythical themes are woven together time after time: God and Satan, life and death, good and evil, sacrifice and freedom, light and darkness, Jesus and Judas—all are inextricably bound together. One’s shadow can consume one’s being, and when it does we become possessed people, addicted people. Our incompleteness is thus augmented by a fuller view of the complexity of human life. This is the part of human life that cries out for a rescuing act, for we have no power to save ourselves. This is humanity in need of a power that will lift us beyond these evils into a new way of being. But can such a power be found within a non-theistic Christianity in which Jesus is no longer seen as the sacrificial lamb “who taketh away the sins of the world”? By stripping Jesus of his theistic powers, have we also denied ourselves access to the very power needed to be freed from the ravages of the evils we deplore? Is there an aspect to our God-experience that can address and finally make sense out of these darker, shadowy aspects of our humanity? According to Spong, the source of our rescue is not the theistic God coming to save us. Instead, he argues that that is the proper role of the church—the people of God. It is the church, not the Jesus figure, that must play the role of the rescuer reaching out to those who appear to be the possessed ones, whether that possession be to alcohol, to drugs, to mental illness, or to whatever. These things are but the symptoms of the ultimate need in human life for a redemptive process to occur. The healing power that can address our shadow is not forgiveness—it is the love that accepts us as we are, shadow included, and says that every part of who we are is made in the image of God. So the call of Christ to the life of discipleship and the message of the rescuing community is simply to grasp our own being—all of it, light and darkness—and to practice wholeness. We cannot do this individually; we have to build a community so deep and real that good and evil, God and shadow, might dwell together. The primary task of a faith- community, then, is to assist in the creation of wholeness—not goodness, but wholeness.

Questions for Discussion

1. Do you agree or disagree that “Evil cannot be removed from our being because it is part of our being”? Discuss the reasons for your answer. 2. Spong dismisses the notion that it is God in Christ who saves us, but that it is rather God in the Church who must assist in the creation of wholeness. Discuss.