The Need For A 21st Century Testament

If you can find a copy of Corpus Reports (September/October 2013), you will see therein a gem:  John Shelby Spong’s address regarding “A Need to Reform Christianity?  A New Language for God.”   My dear Bishop Joe loaned me his copy to read and I must recommend it to anyone who is seeking to reconcile their experience of God and their experience as a 21^st Century human being.  He avers that Christianity is not dying; the explanations of antiquity are dying. 

We have an Old Testament and a New Testament.  What we need is a Current Testament.  The experience of the Christ is not the same thing as a description of that experience.  The descriptions of that experience which we have are rooted in the times they were written.  This is interesting in light of an ongoing discussion regarding the future of the church. 

As a member of a small Independent Catholic Church (the Celtic Christian Church), I sometimes wonder what will happen to us when the present generation of leaders dies.  The roots of the Celtic Church are not buried in the Old Testament, but in the Old Religion, which considered creation as good, and humanity not as fatally flawed, but glorious.  Our leaders are chosen by our members, not imposed by a hierarchy.  Our relationship with God is about relationships and service.  We love one another in a way that others find attractive and want to share.  It is my prayer that we will not lose these characteristics. 

As time moves on, we Christians are beginning to realize that the Christ experience removes all artificial tribal barriers.  Like Paul, we begin to see that in Christ there is no male or female, slave or free, just and unjust, saved and unsaved.  Rather than justifying exclusion, we find the experience demanding the inclusion of all.  A result of the Christ experience is an urgent need to pour out that experience on all who still experience life as suffering, broken, unforgiven and other in any way.  One who has the experience of Christ cannot sit idly by and not feel the injustices of predatory behavior. 

This is my current understanding, at any rate, of the way in which conscious contact with God has changed my life.  It has brought deep peace in the face of my own mortality.  It has brought deep pain in the oneness demanded between myself and the other, who is not truly separate from me, but is another unique expression of the Ground of Being. 

If you find Spong challenging, good!  Keep reading and thinking and most of all, keep on serving God in the People of God.  If you seek the Christ experience, stay in the Silence with the One.  Stay and be loved.  Stay and be changed.  You will find yourself.  And then you will give yourself away.