The Bishop who didn't believe a word of it

"I'm a communicator, not a theologian".

I can’t resist this one. I have just discovered a profile I wrote of Jack Spong in 1994 and it’s still entertaining. There won’t be bishops like him ever again, for reasons that should become obvious as you read. It should be said in his defence that he had as a young man been a brave, principled, and effective advocate for civil rights in Virginia.

This is the copy as I filed it

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It is a difficulty for thoughtful Christians that so much of the bible is palpably untrue. One of the most radical solutions to this problem has come from John Shelby Spong, the Anglican bishop of Newark, New Jersey.

Working with a forensic savagery unusual in Bishops, he has deconstructed the Virgin birth as a patriarchal invention; St Paul as “a self-hating gay”; Mary Magdalene as Mrs Jesus. Now he has turned his attention to the Resurrection. Other bishops, like David Jenkins have squirmed when asked whether they believed that Jesus' followers really found his tomb was empty. Jack Spong has no such doubt. There was no tomb, he says. The whole story was made up.

There was, he says, “a resurrection experience”, which transformed the disciples from a demoralised rabble to people who could go out and spread the gospel. “But whatever happened, happened in the realm of God. It didn't happen in the realm of human history.”

Views like this, expressed with great charm and fluency, have brought him a fame unrivalled among liberal clergymen. He must certainly be Rupert Murdoch's favourite theologian: his Murdoch-owned publishers HarperCollins have given him a hardcover print run of 35,000 and a soft-cover one as long for Resurrection, Myth or Reality. But any account of Jack Spong that stopped at his views would be wildly misleading. The only thing to match his opinions for force is his charm.

“He is the only man I have ever met who could get onto first name terms with a BBC tea lady and be asking about her children in the time it took me to take a leak,” says the Rev Geoffrey Kirk, a London campaigner against women priests who, like most people who disagree with Jack, enjoys his company immensely.

When he heard I was coming to Newark to see what his diocese was like, he insisted on putting me up at his house, and on driving to meet me at the airport. He was, I think, genuinely sorry that I could not bring my wife, whom he has only met twice. He travels nowhere without his English wife Christine. When I emerged from the customs, he was waiting like a flamingo in an overcoat, tall and gracious with his purple stock just visible inside a black suit. He had passed the time discovering the life story of the man waiting next to him at the line.

Bishop Spong is a traditionalist in some matters. He drives a Volvo with a car phone, ed: this is 1994] as an Anglican bishop should. As we headed towards his home in Morristown, a colonial town where one of the shops has a shingle proclaiming it “The Olde Discount Stockbrokers”, he told me about the dinner party planned in my honour: “I wanted a cross-section of the diocese of New Jersey. So we have got you a woman priest: she's divorced, but I'm sure she'll be a bishop soon. Then there is the man who founded Integrity, the organisation for Lesbian and Gay Christians, and his partner, who is black. And we have a Dutch woman who calls herself a recovering Roman Catholic, with her husband.”

Jack Spong's support for homosexuals has probably caused him far more oppobrium than his theological views, so far as the two can be disentangled. In 1989 he ordained an openly gay man named Robert Williams to the priesthood; Williams was then living with a partner, and had gone through all the approved diocesan hoops. The ensuing furore was just dying down when Williams said in an interview that celibacy was bad; and that even Mother Teresa would be better for a good seeing-to. Spong sacked him for misconduct. Williams died of Aids a year later, running a storefront church in Massachusetts.

He has lost four of his 286 priests to Aids, he said as we drove, and a fifth had been diagnosed over the weekend. Two had been married. The Lesbian and Gay priests he had, he said, would work in inner city areas where no one would take a family. He told me the story of one of the dead priests, raised a Southern Baptist but divorced, who had told no one of his condition until a month before his death. Then, when the bishop visited him and asked, he told the truth, both about his illness, and about his sexuality; and, said Jack, he wanted everyone to know after he was dead. So he had preached a sermon about it at the funeral, in front of the family up from the South, who had not known any of it. The sermon had been published, and later translated into German. He was proud of that, too.

The Spongs’ house was a reminder of just how comfortable American middle class life can be. There are eight bedrooms, five bathrooms, and all the trappings of minor celebrity: a signed photo of Bill Clinton in one of the guest bedrooms; and in the hall a bronze bust of the bishop, a pencil drawing of him, framed; a drawing of his crozier, nearly life-sized, framed; and a front page from the the Wall Street Journal with a story about him that spilled over several columns inside, also framed.

It was the birthday of Christine Spong’s younger child Rachel, a 22-year old student, who was there for supper with a couple of friends. The Spongs have only been married for four years, but they have known each other for a long time. Christine, was with her first husband a friend of his first wife. He makes a very public show of being devoted to her. Visiting a church, he will tell the congregation that she's easy to recognise -- just look for the most beautiful woman in the building. But they are a devoted couple in private too. I have seldom seen two people who take such a relish in each other's company.

Christine Spong had come to America in the Sixties as one of those slightly terrifying English secretaries whose good manners are exceeded only by their competence. She was on her way round the world, but married an American instead and settled in New Jersey. After her husband left her, she found a job in the administration of the diocese of Newark. A couple of years after that, the first Mrs Spong, who had been mad for some years, died, and about eighteen months later, the Spongs married. If a ministry to second marriages is part of the function of a modern priests, as surely it must be, the Spongs are admirably qualified.

The next day, Jack drove me in search of his urban ministries. New Jersey is a state with extremes of wealth and poverty remarkable even by American standards. Newark, he said, has the lowest per capita income of any city in the USA. There are parts of the city where the ambulances will not go after dark. In the centre of Newark, the old, colonial Episcopalian cathedral now has only two white congregants left, whereas the nearest Episcopalian church to the Spongs, in Morristown, has endowments of $5m to $6m.

Unfortunately, none of the inner-city priests he had wanted to show me were available: all were at a retreat. Instead, he took me to Jersey City, and what is probably the only Episcopalian church in the world with a Dunkin' Donuts franchise. Even this is not a salubrious part of the world. “Nobody swims in the Bayonne bay unless they've got their feet in concrete” said Jack. But the church was doing well. The fast food franchise was only the latest part of its work to find jobs and homes for the handicapped and poor.

The Rector, Fr Jerry Pisani was a bouncy outgoing gay who offered to show me a video about the Church's activities. “I have publicity coming out the wazoo. I have to raise $800,000 a year for this.” Dwight, his partner, served us all coffee. The Bishop's mug said “Smartass”; mine was a souvenir from London. Fr Jerry had one that said “Bitch Bitch Bitch”. He boasted that he was going to house the Dunkin Donuts in a disused bank in central Bayonne. “I think I convinced them that they want to sell me the branch for $1.00 They have come down from $600,000,” he said, and laughed again.

This might not be as decorous as the Church of England. It was also a damn sight more effective.

While we drove back towards the suburbs, the bishop talked theology. The theologian he most admired, he said, was Michael Goulder, one of the authors of a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, which was a landmark in modern liberal theology. I thought this remarkable, since Goulder, alone among the authors, now calls himself an atheist. Jack couldn't understand why he does so.

“I'm not a professional theologian”, said the bishop. “I make no bones of that. I'm a communicator.” Living in Sin?, his book about homosexuality, written just before the Robert Williams furore, had catapulted him into the front rank of American media theologians. It was to have been published by a Methodist publishing house. Two weeks before it was due, they pulled out under pressure from conservative Methodists. A week later, he had resold the book to Harpers, who changed the title, put the price up two dollars, and put him on television. “I did all the chat shows: Donohue, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Buckley. It was a whole different level; a world of writing I didn't know existed.”

His next book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, had sat on top of the religious bestseller lists for eight months. His last had attacked the Virgin Birth, and now we were on to the Resurrection. His next is to be subtitled “A bishop rethinks the creeds”. From the outside, this progression from sexuality through Biblical authority to the Gospels and the creeds can look like an increasingly desperate search for things a bishop could possibly rethink in a shocking way. But he told me in the car that the whole thing had been prefigured in his first book, This Hebrew Lord, published when he was still in Richmond, Virginia, minister of a church with a three-storey underground car park of its own.

That book seems to have set the direction for most of the rest of his life. It drew a great deal of local media attention: he ended up with his own religious show with one of the local rabbis; it led to the first accusations of heresy against him; and while he was writing it, his first wife started to go mad. She suffered from increasing paranoia for the remaining eighteen years of her life. She believed the CIA were spying on them through the radiators and lived more and more in the attic. She suffered from cancer, too, for the last six years of her life. I had not meant to raise the matter. It is not really part of his public biography, though it is not a secret; but he told me a little while the Volvo lolloped between potholes through Jersey City.

I asked what effect such a ghastly experience had had on his theology. “You have to be careful. People can start drinking, or — running around with someone wrong. I filled up my days with work.

“But it was out of that experience of being married and not having a partner that I became sympathetic to gays. I realised something of what they were going through when we denied what their relationships were really like.

“Now I revel in my relationship with Christine.

“She is such a deeply committed Christian” the bishop said in a tone of loving wonder, and then, as if aware that it was a slightly odd thing to say, added. “I think that I am too, but I don't wear it on my sleeve.”

It seemed to me an extraordinarily moving confession, partly because God didn't come into it at all. Every other media cleric I know would have used such suffering as an occasion for a sermon, if he had mentioned it at all. Some time later, when I was asking him whether he thought God made any difference in the world at all, he said that he could not really believe in healing prayer, because, when his first wife developed cancer, people all over the diocese formed prayer groups for her, and the longer she lived, the more they believed that God was responding to their prayers. “But I thought, suppose a garbage collector's wife got cancer and no one was praying for her. Would she die more quickly because of that?”

“I get up every morning at six, and I spend two hours in prayer and bible study,” he said. “I believe I open my life and the lives of others to God's action. But the magical supernatural, intervening God is a God who has died.”

It is difficult to know exactly how he believes God might act even within the laws of nature. “I don't want to sound spooky, and, like, telepathic,” he said. “But if I pray, I believe I can open some channels for the healing power of God.” But it is very hard to know what he meant by this, for later, he said, “An intervening personalistic deity who affects the life of this world by an intervention of any sort is a concept I find difficult to understand; and I don't think that it is the essence of Christianity.

“I want it to be so blatant in your story that a bishop of the church regards the empty tomb, the women, the virgin birth, as simply legends; and yet I can make the Christian affirmations.”

I still don't quite know how he can. It seems to me that if you remove from God all power to make any difference in the world, you are not a heretic but an atheist. no matter how well you perform your other functions as a bishop. But then I, too, am a communicator, not a theologian.

On Sunday, the bishop had a confirmation, in an evangelical church in the rural west of the diocese. There had been some danger that we would arrive accompanied by 50 gay and lesbian protestors, since the Vicar had publicly offered healing services for homosexuals. But this had been averted: a delegation would come and argue with the parishioners some other time. Instead, Jack preached to them. He went on for about ten minutes too long, but for the first fifteen minutes, he could have marched them across the Red Sea. After that, they were merely silent and attentive. When he fumbled for a reference, there was not a murmur, nor a cough.

The church had no pews: instead, there were chairs arranged in a semi-circle. The Bishop stood, and sometimes paced, in front of them. He started straight in on the resurrection, asking what it meant to say that Jesus had risen "after three days" when we believed he had died on a Friday and risen on a Sunday. Quoting from a heavily annotated bible in his hand, he went on to deconstruct the resurrection story almost completely.

He doesn't believe the gospel stories were made up from thin air. He argues that the gospel writers used a method known as “Midrash” which he supposes to be the retelling of Old Testament stories as New Testament history. And, he believes that this concept , if reapplied to their work, provides us with a key to unlock all the meanings we need from the Bible. The technique is to look for Old Testament parallels to New Testament stories, and, as soon as you have discovered one, explain that the story could not possibly be historical fact, since it had such a clear pedagogical purpose.

It should be said at this point that the consensus of scholarly opinion is that Jack Spong's use of midrash is “Nonsense with a capital N” in the words of one English theologian. Dr Geza Vermes, one of the world's leading authorities on first century judaism, says that “Midrash has been dreadfully misused. The idea is very important, so long as you know what you are talking about. But if you start with a totally illogical premise, you can reach totally ridiculous conclusions.” A Rabbi, who didn't much want to be quoted, said it was simply “Balls.”

But it made great theatre. After he was through, the vicar called for a standing ovation, and the congregation were happy to give it. Afterwards, he talked parish administration and family matters with the vicar. He can lead and manage, as well as preach and charm. And a modern bishop's work is never done. Later that day, there would be another confirmation; two days later, the Spongs would rise at 4.30 am in the morning to catch a plane to a seminar in California. There he hoped to prove that Judas was a wholly imaginary figure.

will this do? acb