John Shelby Spong - Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

I look back with some amusement on the fact that I have introduced all of my recent books as probably my last book. In all honesty I must confess that this has been accurate. At the time I was engaged with each last book I had no idea that another lay hidden under the doormat, but that happened to be so. A new book was always born in the process of going over the present book. I did not mean to be dishonest. The fact remains that I have thus far written five last books. I think I can guarantee that this current volume, however, will be my last.

I am now in my eighty-seventh year of life and when this book comes out in 2018 I will be (if I am still living) in my eighty-eighth year. It continues to be a rich and full life. So far in the study for this book no subjects have presented themselves, but if they had I would have to say no. The reasons for that statement will be clear as this preface unfolds.

I have no regrets. Some of my best books have been written in these twilight years of my life. I look at Eternal Life: A New VisionBeyond Theism, Beyond Religion, Beyond Heaven and Hell, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, and Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, for example, my three last books, and feel a great sense of accomplishment. Like those predecessors, this new book, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today, is based on the experience of finding that the traditional words of religion have lost their believability; for me, it became a necessary piece of work to clear away things that had not been dealt with in previous books. It is a fitting culmination to a writing career that has extended for almost fifty years.

Let me tell you a story, a true story. My wife and I had planned on finishing my lecturing career at the end of June 2017. We had actually planned on doing it earlier, but the invitations continued to come. It seemed as though they would never cease. With all of the travel and sleeping in a wide variety of circumstances, it became harder and harder to prepare and to make the lectures. Yet I continued to love to do it. Still, Christine and I decided that June would be it. We agreed that perhaps if an invitation came that was just irresistible we might consider it, but by and large June 30, 2017, would be the end. Consequently we planned these last few months carefully, with the goal of returning to some of our favorite places.

We began by returning to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. I think I have been there on eight different occasions. It is a rich diet. In recent years I was there with Roger Rosenblatt, who brought with him each week a series of stars from the world of Hollywood, television, Broadway and the arts. We met Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, Jane Pauley, Garry Trudeau, Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, Alan Alda and many others. Roger introduced them all and called forth the inner self of each. Earlier I had also spent a memorable week with Buckminster Fuller. During each weekday morning these lectures followed a worship service with a noted preacher.

The 2:00 P.M. slot each afternoon was the theological hour and the time when I spoke. I introduced a book about every two years, and for the last three times I was there the recorded attendance was more than two thousand people a day. About twenty-five percent of my audience was Jewish. I love that place deeply. So in 2016 we went back to Chautauqua to introduce Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy. It was a highlight in our lives.

This was followed by a period of time in the mountains of western North Carolina near Highlands and Cashiers. Christine and I have gone there annually for years, climbing a mountain a day. We always saved the hardest mountain, Chimney Top, for the last day. We had failed to make it to the crest in 2015, having halted about a hundred yards from the top because we did not feel up to scrambling/climbing the last bit. It was for us both a crushing defeat. We charged it off to age. That summer of 2016 we went up again, not expecting to reach the top, but just to see how near we could come. We made it all the way, and filled with the celebratory sense of achievement, we came back home in a rainstorm that was quite refreshing. We looked like drowned rats!

On Sunday and Monday nights I lectured to about two hundred people at the Church of the Incarnation in Highlands. I had been a lecturer there for a number of years and knew the audience well. Most of them were summer tourists, who were the intellectual leaders in their communities all over the South, but they listened with their ears attuned to a new dimension of understanding.

We then enjoyed some family time at the wedding of my brothers only daughter, Ashley, and her husband, Mark, in New Orleans. It was a joy to be with my deceased brothers family. Next we visited with our children and grandchildren in Vermont.

After that we set off for Marquette, Michigan, to begin the fall lecture schedule. Following our visit to Marquette we planned to take our last European tour. First, there would be a relaxing trip down the Rhine River. When that was ended we were to take a train to Paris and do lectures at the American Cathedral in that city, where the dean, Lucinda Laird, is a former priest of our Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. Then we would stay in Paris for an additional two days to do lectures and media events for our French publisher, Karthala Editions, which was bringing out two more of my books in translation in 2016.

We were then scheduled to go to the United Kingdom, starting first in Glasgow, followed by an appearance at a conference at the Gladstone Library in Wales. We were to be there for seven days in all, and I would actually be doing a lectureship named for my mentor John A. T. Robinson and myself, the Robinson-Spong Lecture on Contemporary Theology. One does not get a chance to fulfill a lectureship in ones own honor very often! Following that we would go to Birmingham and London, including visiting St. James Church, Piccadilly, a wonderful church in London. We were to return to the United States about the first of November. It was, however, not to be.

We got to Marquette on Friday night, September 9. Nothing was scheduled that evening except for a lovely dinner party at one of Marquettes top restaurants. It was a delightful time seeing old friends and renewing relationships. We laughed and enjoyed ourselves greatly. My first assignment was at the University of Northern Michigan at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday. I got up early, went to the fitness center and got in my regular four miles on the running track. Returning, I took Christine to breakfast, came back and showered, shaved and dressed to get ready for the day. That was when it happened. Suddenly I was on the floor and unconscious. I say unconscious for that is what it seemed like, but I was high above my body, surveying the whole scene. I was wonderfully at peace. I did not feel a thing. Suddenly those attending me felt a need to cut off my clerical shirt. I watched them do it and then I truly did enter into unconsciousness. I later asked Christine what had happened and she told me that they had cut off my shirt, just as I had seen them do, in order to place sensors on my body. They even gave the shirt back to Christine. I have it now. It was quite surreal, but in fact it was a stroke hitting the right side of my body, which I could no longer move. That was September 10, 2016. I stayed in the Marquette Hospital for about a week before being transported in a medically equipped plane to Morristown, New Jersey, where I spent an additional two weeks in the hospital, learning slowly and patiently to walk again. As I write this, I seem fully recovered. I now walk on my treadmill every day, I am able to go to church every Sunday and recently took great delight in watching my wife run a half-marathon in Richmond. I still have trouble writing. Oh, I can do it all right, but as yet no one can read it! I expect that to improve with time.