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

10. A New Basis for Ethics in a New Age

If we can no longer conceive of God as the one who ... metes out rewards and punishments either temporal or eternal, then does any basis for ethics remain? -- p 149

My search for the basis of ethics to guide me beyond the exile drives me back to the same arena where a non-theistic God was found and where Christ was redefined. -- p 167

This mythology of a divine source of ethics enforced by the all-seeing God, however, has been revealed by the ancient codes themselves to be utter nonsense. A careful study of these codes reveals nothing less than the tribal prejudices, stereotypes, and limited knowledge of the people who created them. -- p 151

Pages 151-154 apply this claim to the Ten Commandments, demonstrating how the prejudices and misconceptions of its time are embedded in it. Pages 155-158 attack the claim that there is a consistent sexual ethic to be found in the Bible, or that it can be applied to condemn homosexuality without also condemning many practices we take for granted.

No heavenly parent figure sets down and enforces the rules by which life is governed. ... The God who once was perceived as undergirding these primitive assumptions has been taken from us and destroyed by both the march of time and the explosion of knowledge. -- p 159

To build a new basis for ethics, we must learn to look in a different place. We look, I believe, not outside of life for some external and objective authenticating authority, but rather at the very center and core of our humanity. -- p 160

In the process of pursuing the goal of happiness, I discover that my individualism is nothing less than a gift to me from the community in which I live. I cannot achieve my own destiny except as a part of the destiny of my interdependent world. I am thus both free and bound at the same time. I can seek my own well-being only in terms of the well-being of the community. The conclusion of this humanistic search for ethical norms is that something like ethical objectivity begins to emerge. -- p 160-161

There is, therefore, an objective wrongness in seeking to cause or to increase pain in another life. There is an objective value in seeking knowledge. There is an objective wrongness in continuing to defend or to act on the basis of one's ignorance. Virtue is to be found in wisdom, in knowledge, and in openness to the nature of reality itself. ... If freedom, knowledge, and wisdom are recognized as objective values, then the extension of these values to all becomes an ethical imperative bordering on ultimacy. ... Thus the highest value emerging out of the depths of our humanity is the expansion of the boundaries of the human experience. To enhance the being and deepen the life of every human being and to free the love that emanates from each person become part of the ultimate and objective standard for determining proper human behavior. -- p 162

Does this position give us only a humanistic ethical system? I do not think so. If we can only begin to grasp the possibility that the Holy God is not external to life but is rather the Ground of life itself, the Being in which all being is rooted, then these ostensibly human values can be seen to be eternal and rooted in the ultimacy of God. -- p 164

Was it not these very qualities of selfhood -- the ability to live, to love, and to be -- which were observed in the life of Jesus, that caused people to see the presence of God in him? Is this not what the disciples were trying to say about him when they said, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God"? -- p 166