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

In Chapters 3 and 4, Spong deconstructs and reconstructs the concept of God.

3. In Search of God: Is Atheism the Only Alternative to Theism?

We must discover whether or not the death of the God we worshipped yesterday is the same thing as the death of God. -- p 41

For the purposes of this book I will define theism as belief in an external, personal, supernatural, and potentially invasive Being. -- p 46

It becomes so clear that the God most of us have worshiped during human history has looked and acted in a very human manner. In view of this fact, my first discovery in the exile is that I can no longer approach this subject by asking, "Who is God?" Nor can I be limited to personal images for God. ... But to reach this conclusion means that I must be prepared to dismiss most of the God content of the ages.-- p 48

When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that is was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying. -- p 49

Only when we recognize this defense mechanism in religion can we grasp the meaning of the constant presence in primitive religion, and certainly still present in Western religion, of an intense, even killing, anger. Irrational hostility is a symptom of hysteria. Anger has always marked the religious establishment. -- p 53

Today this theism is collapsing. The theistic God has no work to do. The power once assigned to this God is now explained in countless other ways. ... Human beings have evolved to the place where the theistic God concept can be and must be cast aside. -- p 54

It was when I reached this conclusion but still could not dismiss what seemed to me to be an experience of something other, transcendent, and beyond all of my limits that I knew I had to find another God language. -- p 55

4. Beyond Theism to New God Images

Buddhists clearly believe in God, but not in a deity who is defined in theistic terms. Exploring the levels of meaning that can be found in an Eastern faith tradition can help us learn to see through such limited words as theism. It also reveals that our ancient Western definitions of God do not exhaust the reality of God. -- p 58

The God worshiped by the Jews before their Babylonian exile was not the same God who emerged from the exile. Much later a longer-range view of Jewish history reconnected the two, but that was not the sense of the people who lived at the time of the exile. Similarly, the God worshiped in the Christian West will not survive the thought revolution that has produced our exile, though we, too, might hope for some future reconnection. The Jews came out of Babylon as a people of faith with a God who had been transformed from the tribal deity of Israel's past. Can we come out of our exile with a God who has been transformed from the theistic concepts of antiquity? -- p 59

To get beyond these definitions, it is necessary to pose the religious questions not by pretending we have a source of divine revelation, but by looking at the human experience in a different way. ... Is there, we now inquire, a depth dimension to life that is ultimately spiritual? If so, what is it? Is there a core to both our life and the life of the world that somehow links us to a presence that we call "transcendent" and "beyond" and that yet is never apart from who we are or what the world is? If so, what is it? Is there a presence in the heart of our life that could never be invoked as a being but nonetheless might be entered as a divine and infinite reality? If so, what is it? If we could open ourselves to such a reality, become intensely aware of it, and have both our being and our consciousness expanded by it, could we use the word God to describe that state of being? -- p 59-60

The mystics of every religious tradition have always cried out against every specific definition of God. The Western mystics appear to have assumed that a personal God was only a stage, and an inferior one at that, in human religious development. ... This wonderous, mystical God experience did not reduce human beings to the status of powerless, dependent children, subject to the will of an external authoritative deity. Rather, it called human life beyond every boundary until that life itself was seen as a revelation of the God who emerged out of life's very depths. ... Each person is called to journey into the mystery of God along the pathway of his or her own expanding personhood. Every person is thus believed to be capable of being a theophany, a sign of God's presence, but no one person, institution, or way of life can exhaust this revelation. -- p 62-62

For Tillich there was no imploring an external power to serve our needs. One rather experienced a growing awareness of the Ground of Being and of one's relationship with all those who also shared that infinite and inexhaustible ground. -- p 64

So the call of this internal God found in our depths becomes primarily a call into being. It is a call that has nothing to do with religion per se. It is a call that refocuses what has been known as the religious dimension. The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be. -- p 66

The realization is dawning that we human beings are alone and therefore are responsible for ourselves, that there is no appeal to a higher power for protection. We are learning that meaning is not external to life but must be discovered in our own depths and imposed on life by an act of will. We are being made aware that life is not fair and will not necessarily be made fair either in this life or in any other. So we have to decide how we will live now with this reality. -- p 69

So I start here. There is no God external to life. God, rather, is the inescapable depth and center of all that is. God is not a being superior to all other beings. God is the Ground of Being itself. And much flows from this starting place. -- p 70