Doug Muder’s notes on Why Christianity Must Change or Die by John Shelby Spong

Epilogue: A Final Word

I believe that there is a transcending reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all of our fearful and fragile human limits. I believe that this reality can be found in all that is but that it reaches self-consciousness and the capability of being named, communed with, and recognized only in human life. I believe that heaven ... is not a place but a symbol standing for the limitlessness of Being itself. I believe that this realm of heaven is entered whenever the barriers that seem to bind human life into something less than that for which it is capable are set aside. I believe in Jesus ... I believe that in his life this transcendent reality has been revealed so completely that it caused people to refer to him as God's son. ... I believe that Jesus was a God presence, a powerful experience of the reality of that Ground of Being undergirding us all at the very depths of life. ... I believe in that gift of the Spirit who was called "the giver of life." Once we located God only externally and called this God the Father Almighty. Next, we located this God in Jesus, and we called him the Son Incarnate. Now we locate God in every person, and we call this God the Holy Spirit. I believe that this Spirit inevitably creates a community of faith that will come, in time, to open this world to God as the very Ground of its life and Being. ... I believe ... that being in touch with the Ground of Being creates the universal communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the reality of resurrection, and the doorway into the life that is everlasting. -- p 220-225

Religion is, therefore, not what we have always thought it to be. Religion is not a system of belief. It is not a catalogue of revealed truth. It is not an activity designed to control behavior, to reward virtue, and to punish vice. Religion is, rather, a human attempt to process the God experience, which breaks forth from our own depths and wells up constantly within us. ... The only divine mission in life that the Church of the future could possibly have is to open people to a recognition that the ground of their very being is holy and that when they are in touch with that holy Ground of Being, they can share in God's creation by giving life, love, and being to others. -- p 225-226