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

13. Eternal Life Apart from Heaven and Hell

Will pilgrims in the exile seek God in the ground and depth of their own being if there is no perceived and obvious reward? ... Is there hope for life beyond this world apart from the images of our theistic past? -- p 200

I do believe that there is an eternity that lies beyond the limits of my human finitude and in which I can participate. ... [But] the content of this reality of life beyond the boundaries of death is so radically different from anything that has been proposed by the religious systems of the past that it is all but unrecognizable. -- p 201

I accept as a valid starting point most of those liberal efforts to capture some shred of credibility from the traditional view of life after death. I do not denigrate them because they are not enough. ... I do think that we live through our children, our friends, and our associates far more powerfully than most of us can perceive or admit. ... Yet all of these aspects of an interdependent immortality put together still constitute but the tiniest speck of what I mean by eternal life. If there is not more than this, there is no lasting power, no ultimate truth in the concept itself. -- p 210-213

Spong mentions points in his life where unforeseeable new experiences opened him up to life's possibilities: starting college, starting seminary, entering the priesthood, and becoming a bishop.

Each of these four expanding experiences made me aware that I do not know much about the ultimate size and shape of life and that frequently when I think I have approached life's limits, I am shocked to discover that I have simply reached another security barrier beyond which I must journey in a new and seemingly limitless expanse. I suppose my hope for and confidence in life after death or eternal life is nudged into reality and then fed by this realization. -- p 215

My conviction about eternal life, however, is not just a pious dream standing in hope at what seems to be the ultimate barrier of death. It is also attached to my understanding of God as the Ground of all Being. I know what it means to have my life and my grasp on being shrink in the face of hostility, fear, and abuse. I also know what it means to have my life and my being expand to the place where hostility, fear, and abuse become so insignificant as to be dismissed as nothing. ... That is part, a bigger part if you will, of what life is all about, life that is eternal. -- p 215-216

I am a person who knows what it is to be loved. ... This love emboldens me to press life's edges, to touch the dimensions of life that we call transcendence, to be introduced to that which is both infinite and beyond but that also seems to dwell in the heart of life. ... The God that I define as the Ground of Being seems to meet me in this place, and finitude fades into infinity. -- p 217

I move next to explore my human experience that love is the power giving birth to life. Love enables being to emerge in each of us. When that love is total, or when it reaches toward totality, the journey into being can and does occur. That journey for me also becomes a journey into God, who is without limits. ... When my being is enhanced by love ... then I believe that I have touched that which is timeless, eternal, and real. ... I stand here convinced that there is something real beyond my ultimate limits. I have but tasted it. So I embrace this vision and live in this hope. -- p 217-218