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The Spong-Cupitt Debate (2) By Douglas Lockhart Today, the public reputation of Christian ethics has crashed, amidst far too much evidence of great unhappiness and truly malignant human relations within the churches. There has been too much child abuse, rampant misogyny and homophobia, and reflex fear and hostility towards new technical and scientific developments, especially in medicine and genetics. In some places there has been too much collusion with nationalism. It is not surprising that public bodies are no longer quite so keen to have church representatives on ethics committees. Don Cupitt Reforming Christianity p. 4.
The issue here lies in breaking out of the traditional theistic definition of God, which blocks for so many the meaning of Jesus. It is the fully human one who makes the holy visible, the fully conscious one who enables us to see that the human and the divine are one, and the fully alive one who enables us to see that death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness. John Shelby Spong Eternal Life: A New Vision p.xviii.
The End of Monotheism?
The above quote from Don Cupitt's 2001 book, Reforming Christianity, helps sets the pace for what we are about to consider, for if anyone has taken Christianity to task for its many misdemeanors, it is Cupitt, and rightly so. So also Bishop Spong. He too has lambasted Christianity in book after book, although with a tangentially different purpose in mind. Which takes us back to The Spong-Cupitt Debate Part One where I compared their separate philosophies and concluded that their contributions reflected the intellectual/emotional struggle detectable among a wide arc of theologians and New Testament scholars. When I say "emotional" I am of course not referring to emotionalism, but to the evaluative-feeling dimension of human nature; an observable adjunct of Spong's charismatically articulated vision that is not strongly represented by Cupitt. Cupitt's reforming vision, although so similar in many ways to Spong's, is a cool, logically directed vision driven by a Pinkeresque acceptance of neuroscience's dictates, Spong's,
THE SPONG-CUPITT DEBATE (2) ©2019 Douglas Lockhart :: www.DouglasLockhart.com