A Conversation with John Shelby Spong, author of Eternal Life: A New Vision
(HarperOne, September 1, 2009)

You’ve challenged traditional Christian theology throughout your career, but in your new book Eternal Life, you make a case for life after death. 
I do believe there is life beyond death. Yet, my journey has carried me beyond religion, beyond Christianity as it is traditionally understood, and beyond heaven and hell. It has brought me to a new vision of eternity. I can give that “yes” answer with conviction and integrity.
   
You’re now 78 years old. Is this book a natural culmination of your own spiritual journey?
These “golden years” have been the happiest, and the most creative and productive years of my life. Still I sense that this life that I love so passionately is not all there is. I have reached the point where I, like Saint Francis before me, can welcome death as my brother. In recounting my personal journey, I show how the presence of death actually makes my life more precious. It calls me to live each day fully, and it is by living fully that I enter the timelessness of life.
 
You trace the 3.7 billion year life journey from a single cell to the complexities of self-consciousness. Where does religion come in?
I seek to get beyond religion since I see religion as a device designed to enable human beings to bank the fires that the anxieties of self-consciousness ignited. It’s a human creation designed to meet human need. We cover religion with myth and magic to make it easier to pretend that it is about an external power and not about ourselves. It is not divinely inspired, it is manipulatively human. Truth is not religion’s ultimate agenda. Security is. I seek a “religionless Christianity.”  

Describe your vision of God and how that shapes your belief on life after death.
No one can do that. I can only described my experience of God. Even then I must face the fact that this may be delusional. Yet I experience God as one, and I see each of us as part of that oneness. My concept of eternal life rises out of that conviction: I am finite, but I share in infinity. I am mortal, but I share in immortality. I am a being, but I share in being itself. To the degree that I am in communion with that ever-expanding life force, that life-enhancing power of love, and that inexhaustible Ground of Being, then I will live, love, and be a part of who God is, bound not by my mortality but by God’s eternity.

Where do heaven and hell fit in?
They don’t. I entitle one chapter “Heaven and Hell will have to go.” Both heaven as a place of reward and hell as a place of punishment have lost their credibility in the marketplace of contemporary ideas. They have nothing to do with life after death, but everything to do with controlling human behavior in the here and now.

No one becomes holy through fear. No one becomes whole by a promised reward for good behavior. We must jettison from further consideration in the debate about life after death all concepts of reward and punishment, dismissing them as crude, debilitating, juvenile and unbelievable.

Will we see our loved ones again in afterlife?
I do not know how to answer that, for it assumes that there is a place where all the deceased are physically gathered in recognizable forms where we can seek out those for whom our hearts ache. I understand that yearning. But I am not drawn to such meaningless spatial images. What I can say is that none of us becomes human in isolation. We are rather the creations of those who have loved us. So if I have eternal life all those who helped make me who I am will also.
                     

How can we prepare for death?
Death is part of life. The only way to prepare for death is to live each day to participate as if it is part of eternity. We prepare for death by living.

I end the book by calling my readers to live fully, to love wastefully, to be all that they can be and to dedicate themselves to building a world in which everyone has a better opportunity to do the same. That to me is to be part of God and to do the work of God. That to me is to be a disciple of Jesus. That to me is the way to prepare for life after death.
 
So if religion is dead or dying, where do we go from here?
The religion of the past sought an answer to the unique human awareness of death by postulating a realm in which death is overcome. I seek a doorway into the eternal by going deeply into this life. My search for “heaven” will cause me to turn to this life, for that is the only place where I believe we can hear the echoes of eternity. We no longer look outward for God, but begin to look inward. That is not to walk away from God. It is to walk into God.

What do you see in Jesus?
Jesus pushed the boundaries of self-consciousness so dramatically that he made God visible. I can see in him what I can be—a life at one with God, at one with myself and a part of eternity. The Christ-path is a human path that all people in all times and in all places can walk, regardless of the name by which they call it, for the pathway into God goes through the human. 

How did the mystics get it right?
Mystics walk into mystery where words become inadequate. The language of mysticism is the language of oneness in the divine. The Gospel of John’s mystical approach to Jesus shouts the reality that we share in the life of God, just as Jesus did. What the mystics seem to grasp almost intuitively is that God is not a being external to life that we must woo and flatter to gain divine protection. The mystical perception is that God is.  Being in which our being shares, the life in which our lives share, the love that calls us into new levels of consciousness. 

Was it difficult for you to disengage from the view of God that you grew up with?
Yes, I find myself deeply and emotionally conflicted even now to state these conclusions. The traditional definition of God has been my companion from the earliest days of my life. When I state that this God is no more, I do not deny the reality of my God experience, but of the way God has been defined. The fact that the way we thought of God in our past has died does not mean that God has died or that there is no God.

You include an epilogue that addresses the right to die. What is your view of that issue?
Medical science has given us choices that our grandparents did not have. I rejoice in this fact, and I want to live as long as life has meaning. What happens when the ability to expand life begins to change into the process of simply postponing death?  Then I believe it is time for life to end.

I cling to the hope that the final decision I make in my life will be to bring my life to an end, to lay it down with grace and beauty. I want physician-assisted death to be my legal right and to be among the choices that I alone can make for myself and for those I love.

Life is precious. I have loved my journey through it. I want the moment of my departure to be celebrated in a manner similar to the way the moment of my arrival was greeted, with joy and great expectations.