Traditional Christianity must change or die, says one of the foremost religious scholars of our time, and he believes the Unity movement may hold a key to Christianity's future. Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of some two dozen books, most analyzing the Bible, spoke at a recent educational symposium on spirituality and theology at Unity Village.

Spong spoke in three sessions … each time extolling the Unity movement and urging Unity to stick to the universal spiritual principles it espouses until others catch up. Alluding to two of Unity's basic principles, Spong said that Unity understands God as one presence and one power, permeating all that is. And Unity views humanity as questing toward oneness, the human part of God. There is no separation between humans and a God of love.

“You're holding something so crucial that the Christian Church has got to recover,” he said. “You are standing in a critical place in a fantastic turning away from yesterday and into tomorrow of the Christian faith.”

The trouble with traditional Christianity, he said, is that it is built on two assumptions that are inadequate and dying. First, salvation must come from a God outside us—a theistic God, in Spong's term. Second, human beings are fallen, broken, sinful and in need of redemption. In other words, Christianity is based on a God with the power to save and humans who need to be saved. People are cast as “quivering children before a punishing, divine parent figure.” Human depravity is necessary before we can see the grace of God, who “saved a wretch like me,” Spong said, quoting the old hymn.

“No one has been helped by being told how wretched they are.”

Victimized worshippers often become victimizers, just as abused children often grow up to be violent, he said. … Unity, on the other hand, is free of guilt and does not condemn human life, Spong said. God is best seen when people are free to “live fully, love wastefully, and be all that we can be.”

A Critic and Encourager

… Religion keeps people childlike; even the term “born again” means never growing up, he said, and most churchgoers are encouraged not to think.

… Spong recommended that Unity deepen rather than abandon its Christian identity in order to make a better contribution. That's why he is more attracted to Unity than Religious Science, he said. Although both are branches of New Thought, the American spiritual movement that evolved in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Unity uses the Bible as its basic text and emphasizes the teachings of Jesus. For Unity, offering a different approach to Christianity could be more powerful than stepping outside it, he said.

Friend of Unity

Spong was introduced to Unity when he was invited in the 1990s to speak at the church in Anchorage, Alaska. His first thought was: “Those poor people don't know how to spell Unitarian.” He later spoke at Unity in Atlanta and began to appreciate Unity's positive message, lively music and focus on education and study. He also liked Unity's view of Jesus as a role model—not a savior but a God-presence who empowered human beings to live more fully. Spong said he was speaking at Unity Church of Dallas when he realized children in Unity are not taught that they were born in sin. At the end of the service, the children were brought onstage and the congregation said: “We love you, we bless you, and we appreciate you—just the way you are!” “I watched these little faces beam,” he said.

… Although he remains an Episcopalian, he and his wife Christine say they always return to home base, after each year of traveling, by attending a Sunday service in December at Unity of New York. They live in New Jersey, where Spong presided as bishop of the Episcopal diocese for 21 years.

Before he retired in 2000, Spong fought long battles within his denomination on behalf of blacks, women and gays. He also wrote a series of books demythologizing the Bible and the life of Jesus, emphasizing Christianity's Jewish roots and its first-century context.

Spong has been denounced as an apostate and a heretic for his challenges to traditional Christian theology, but he has also been invited to speak all over the world as book after book was published. Among his best-known titles are Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, and his autobiography Here I Stand.

… The Mystery of God Spong's next book, to be published this summer, is about life after death. It is a blend of spirituality and science, which is a departure from his decades of reinterpreting the Bible.

This excerpted article is from the March/April 2009 issue of Unity Magazine®.