SONG OF SPONG So far as we know there is no direct equivalent of SoF in the USA - but there is Bishop John Spong. Married to an English wife, Spong outraged many in the Episcopalian Church when he ordained two gay priests in his diocese of Newark, New Jersey, and scandalised the British tabloids when he blessed gay couples at the London service which launched a new homosexual prayer book.
His own new book Born of a Woman (Harper-Collins, £6.95 paperback) contains many SoF-type ideas, though the language is significantly pre-Cupitt (e.g. "realist" for "non-realist": that old problem again). Take this, for instance:
"Watching ecclesiastical leaders today dance gingerly around the question of how to understand the traditional ecclesiastical claim that the Bible is the Word of God is both amusing and sad, for in their heart of hearts they know that this claim is not sustainable in any literal form.
"The legitimacy of slavery, the chattel status of women, the flatness of the Earth, the understanding of epilepsy as demon-possession, all asserted in the Bible, simply will not be saluted in the 20th century. Most religious leaders just do not have the honesty to say so publicly. Hence, what comes forth is rhetoric that uses the traditional words but suggests that they mean something quite different from what they were understood to mean in the past. It is an understandable strategy but it will never win the day. Such tactics are reminiscent of rearguard battles where skirmishes are fought in an inevitable retreat into oblivion.
"Only those whom the traditionalists mistakenly call liberals carry within themselves the seeds of renewal and future life for the religious traditions of yesterday. A title more appropriate than 'liberal' might well be 'open' or 'realist'. They are the ones who know that the heart cannot finally worship what the mind has already rejected. They know what fundamentalists do not seem to know, namely that literalisation guarantees death. They also seem to know what secularists do not, namely that to abandon the historic symbols is to abandon the doorway through which our ancestors in faith found the meaning by which they lived. Those symbols must be taken seriously but they cannot be taken literally."
SoF philosophers would want to question Spong's language (and his concept of language), but it is good to know that in God's Own USA, where the religious Right declared it a sin to vote for Clinton, and where churches which claim to be in the mainstream still preach that the world was created in 4004BC, there's an occasional sensible bishop. How long before we are linked with an American SoF? - D.B.
Born of a Woman, by John Spong. Harper-Collins, £6.95 (paperback).