Widely Divergent Christianity: Remembering John Shelby Spong and David Yonggi Cho

Last week, two renowned Christian clergymen died: John Shelby Spong on Sept. 12 at the age of 90 and David Yonggi Cho on Sept. 14 at age 85. These two men represented two widely divergent forms of Christianity—so different it is almost as if they were adherents of two different religions.

Spong’s Liberal Christianity

John Shelby Spong was born in North Carolina in June 1931. After graduating from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1955, he served as the rector of four Episcopal churches in North Carolina and Virginia from then until 1976.

He was consecrated the Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, in 1979 and held that prominent post until his retirement in 2000.

[Spong in 2006; photo by Scott Griesse]

Bishop Spong became a leader of liberal Christianity by authoring more than 30 books. Perhaps his most influential work was Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998). His Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991) was also highly popular. 

Spong grew up in a fundamentalist milieu, but he became “fed up with fundamentalism” many years before I published my book by that title in 2007—and his anti-fundamentalist position propelled him to what I have termed the opposite extreme, which is also unsatisfactory to my way of thinking.

In my The Limits of Liberalism (2010, 2020), Spong is one of the Christian thinkers I criticize most for what I consider his too-far-to-the-left positions on numerous Christian doctrines.

I wasn’t as harsh in my criticism, though, as Russell Moore was last week. On 9/16 I received an email that contained the “Moore to the Point” newsletter from Christianity Today, Moore’s current employer. The subject line read, “Death of a heretic.” (Here is the link to that article.)

Whether you agree with Moore’s label for Spong or not, he is quite correct in saying that Spong dismissed “key doctrines of the historic Christian faith as outdated and retrograde.”

Cho's Evangelical Christianity

In February 1936 David Yonggi Cho (Chō Yong-gi, 趙 鏞基) was born into a Buddhist family who lived on the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula. He became a Christian as a teenager while hospitalized for tuberculosis.

In 1958 Cho joined with his future mother-in-law to start a new Christian church in Seoul. There were only four or five who attended their first service, but by 1979 they had 100,000 members! The church was re-named Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC) in 1984, and it had 400,000 members by then. 

[Cho in 2013]

(The church’s membership seems to have peaked around 2007 with more than 800,000 members.) 

In July 1983, I was asked to accompany Seinan Gakuin University’s Glee Club’s concert tour to Korea. During our time there, we visited YFGC and a few of us were able to meet Pastor Cho. He was an impressive leader of a most impressive church, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God.  

However, I have serious questions about some of Cho’s beliefs and emphases. He preached something quite close to the problematic “prosperity gospel,” and his statement that the terrible March 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan was “God’s warning” was not helpful.

To say the least, Cho’s strongly evangelical understanding of Christianity was decidedly different from Spong’s. In fact, there was such difference between the two, one might wonder if they were really preachers of the same religion.

Still Seeking the Radiant Center

In spite of the wide divergence in the theology of Bishop Spong and Pastor Cho, I still want to champion a Christianity that has a broad, inclusive radiant center.

While I can’t accept all of Spong’s or Cho’s ideas, they both have made important affirmations worthy of thoughtful consideration.

For example, Spong’s last book was titled simply Unbelievable (2018). He writes nearly 280 pages about what he thinks is unbelievable about traditional Christianity.

He ends, though, with a short, five-page Epilogue titled “My Mantra: This I Do Believe.” There he refers to God as the Source of Life, the Source of Love, and the Ground of Being (pp. 285-6).

Pastor Cho wouldn’t have used those words, but perhaps he was in basic agreement—and I certainly am.

_____

** My Jan. 15, 2019, blog post was titled “Two Christianities,” and it is closely related to this post without the references to Bishop Spong or Pastor Cho.

The Decline and Resurgence of Theological Liberalism

Chapter Two of my book The Limits of Liberalism, which I am updating and slightly revising this year, is titled “Contemporary Liberalism.” Please think with me about the decline and resurgence of theological liberalism, two of the matters discussed in that second chapter. 

From the cover of the 2010 book; the pictures (clockwise from the bottom right) are of Schleiermacher, Bushnell, and Rauschenbush (from Chapter One) and Marcus Borg (from Chapter Two)

The Decline

Liberal theology began to fall upon hard times in the 1920s. The widespread scope of the Great War (World War I) and the extensive suffering and carnage caused by that war called into serious question the central tenets of liberalism.

Those tenets included emphasis on the innate goodness of human beings, an optimistic view of social progress, and the intention to realize the kingdom of God in society through human effort.

European theologians such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner began to develop a theology that avoided what they saw as the errors of the failed liberal theology of the time but that also affirmed some of the progressive elements in that theology.

That new emphasis was often called crisis theology in its beginning, but in the U.S. it came to be known mostly by the rather paradoxical name of neo-orthodox theology.

Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian who early began to question theological liberalism. His Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) struck a blow at the optimistic view of humanity long held by liberalism.

My own theological education in the 1960s was largely shaped by neo-orthodox theology, which was regarded as the bulwark against both a failed fundamentalism and a failed liberalism.

Elsewhere, though, conservative theologians were criticizing neo-orthodoxy for being liberal, not acknowledging that it was a position developed in opposition to the liberal theology that had been prevalent in Germany.

The Resurgence

The resurgence of liberal theology began in the last half of the 1960s. In the following decades, that resurgence was seen in many active theologians, especially the three I have written about in Chapter Two of The Limits of Liberalism. (Two of them have died since the book was first published in 2010.)

Englishman John Hick was long an influential contemporary theological liberal, particularly in the fields of the philosophy of religion and religious pluralism. His writings have had considerable influence, and current Christian thinkers must seriously grapple with the issues he raised.

Among the important books by Hick (1922~2012) are God and the Universe of Faiths (1973), God Has Many Names (1980), and A Christian Theology of Religions (1995) as well as two that he edited: The Myth of God Incarnate (1977) and, with Paul F. Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (1987).

It is probably safe to say that John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop, has been the most widely read Christian liberal over the past thirty years. As Hick also did, much of his writing was done in opposition to fundamentalism. In fact, his bestselling book is Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991).

Other significant books by Spong (b. 1931) are Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998) and A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born (2001).

While more moderate than the previous two, Marcus J. Borg is the third of the contemporary liberal leaders I have written about in Chapter Two. Borg (1942~2015) wrote in such an evenhanded and convincing manner that in some ways he is the most “dangerous” of the contemporary liberals.

From my perspective, Borg (1942~2015) is “ dangerous” because his moderate position is easy for non-liberals to accept even though his position contains some misleading aspects that threaten what has long been, and still generally is, widely considered to be orthodox theology.

Jesus, A New Vision (1987), to mention only one of Borg’s many books, contains much that should be affirmed. Still, I find much that is questionable in that book, as in many of his other books, and I refer to him several times in later chapters.

In chapters three and four, I look first at the appeals of liberalism and then consider the problems with liberalism, and I look forward to sharing blog posts about those chapters in the next two months.

Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?

Last week as I was having coffee with friends, I mentioned that I was really enjoying Philip Yancey’s book Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church (2001). One of my friends didn’t know who Yancey is.

Yancey (b. 1949), I explained, is a widely read Christian author who has written often for Christianity Today. My friend then asked this rhetorical question: Isn’t that a rather conservative magazine?

In response, I told him how Eric Rust, my esteemed seminary professor, referred to it as “Christianity Yesterday.” (An article in it had criticized Dr. Rust, accusing him of being a liberal.)

CT’s 60th Anniversary

The next day I opened the new issue of CT, as it is often called, and saw that it was the 60th-anniversary edition. After awaking from a dream in 1953 and feeling led to found a new Christian magazine, Billy Graham was successful in getting the first issue of CT published in October 1956.

I was impressed with the cover of the new anniversary issue: the picture of a painting by Makoto Fujimura, the Japanese-American artist I recently introduced (see here). The painting’s title is “Grace Remains—Nard,” based on Mark 14:6-9. 

"Grace Remains -- Nard" by Makoto Fujimura

Through the past 60 years, I have read CT off and on. For several years now have been getting an email from CT almost daily with links to articles and other information. I have mixed feelings, however. There is some good and helpful stuff, but at other times I agree with Dr. Rust: it seems like Christianity yesterday.

The “Radiant Center”

My positive feelings toward CT are because of people like Yancey, who is still one of the fourteen “editors at large.” It is hard to find fault with people like him. He is the author of the scintillating book What’s So Amazing About Grace? (1997), and he, among several others, has written many superlative articles for CT.

In Soul Survivor Yancey tells about writing the cover story for a 1983 issue of CT. It was about Gandhi. Yancey remarked that he “was not prepared for the volume of hate mail the article generated” (p. 171). Many of his conservative readers thought he/they should not praise a “heathen” (non-Christian) so profusely.

In my book The Limits of Liberalism (2010), I call for seeking Christianity’s “radiant center,” between the extremes of fundamentalism and liberalism. In many ways Christianity Today, and certainly Philip Yancey, is a good example of a publication, and a person, in that center—although the magazine would definitely be on the right side of the center.

Beautiful Orthodoxy

The cover story of the new issue is “Beautiful Orthodoxy,” which is also the title of editor Mark’s Galli’s short new book, which I’ve just read. The book wasn’t bad, but I was a bit disappointed with it.

To the degree that Galli and other editors at CT thinks that “beautiful orthodoxy” and Christianity today requires blanket condemnation of any abortion by any woman and the denigration of LGBTQ people, I’m afraid it needs to be considered “Christianity yesterday.”

The growing percentage of the “nones” in American society is not so much because of their rejection of “orthodox” Christian doctrines but rather because of the condemnatory, intolerant, and judgmental attitudes of purveyors of traditional Christianity.

While I take great exception with much of what Bishop John Shelby Spong writes—he is an example of the liberal extreme—I do think he makes a valid point in his 1998 book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

We need a Christianity today that focuses on meeting current challenges rather than just seeking to preserve yesterday’s ideas and practices.

Is Proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection Political Incorrect?

A few weeks ago I posted a blog article about political correctness. For the most part I favor the effort to be politically correct, for in its best form political correctness shows empathic understanding of those who are often discriminated against or belittled.

There was some questioning of a more recent article, though, along this very line. There was no direct reference to my not being P.C., but it was implied that what I wrote about the origins of Christianity and of Islam was problematic.

From the beginning I knew that there would likely be some pushback, for what I wrote could be used as an excuse to criticize, discriminate against, or mistreat Muslims today. I tried to counter that possibility by writing what I did in the final paragraph.

Christians around the world have just celebrated Easter (except for those in the Orthodox tradition who will not celebrate Easter until May 1). If there was, in fact, something historical about the resurrection of Jesus, Easter is an event that decisively differentiates Christianity from other religions.

Many have understood Jesus’ resurrection much too literally, seeing it is some sort of miraculous resuscitation of his physical body. That is not the kind of resurrection I am writing about.

On the other hand, many liberal Christian interpretations emphasize that Jesus’ resurrection was mainly metaphorical or “psychological” rather than historical. That is, it is explained as the “resurrection” of the spirit of Jesus in the hearts and minds of his early followers.

John Shelby Spong, for example, contends that the Jesus’ resurrection took place in Galilee, where the disciples had fled after Jesus’ crucifixion, rather than in Jerusalem, where Jesus had been buried in Joseph’s tomb.

Liberals need some way to explain the resurrection so Christianity can be considered just one religion among many that are equally valid and valuable.

That is not the kind of resurrection I am writing about either.

Recently, I have written a review of a book about the life and thought of Lesslie Newbigin. In that process I looked again at some of his notable writings, especially The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989). Newbigin (1909-98), an Englishman, was one of the premier missionaries and missiologists of the 20^th century. (Several years ago I wrote a blog article in praise of Newbigin.)

Newbigin repeatedly used the words “public truth” in referring to the Christian message, and one of his smaller books is titled Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (1991). The idea of public truth, of course, stands in stark contrast to the relativistic idea of truth in post-modernism and often in liberal Christianity as well.

He wrestles with the problem of truth not just from the standpoint of religious faith but also epistemologically, making repeated references to the significance of Michael Polanyi’s emphasis on “personal knowledge.”

In Truth to Tell, Newbigin avers, “To believe that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead, left an empty tomb, and regrouped his scatted disciples for their world mission can only be the result of a very radical change of mind indeed.”

He goes on to assert that “the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point” (p. 10-11).

Belief in the Resurrection should never lead to arrogance, condescension, or triumphalism. That belief should, however, lead faithful Christians to have confidence in the uniqueness of Jesus and to proclaim, boldly and lovingly, the significance of that pivotal event—even though some might consider it politically incorrect.