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“[A] challenging,
intellectually rigorous culmination of his body of theological work. . . . This work, bound to be influential, offers new
insights into religion's big questions about life and death, making an invaluable contribution to both religious scholarship
and faithful exploration.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Spong’s thought and theology are crucial stimulants for every thinking Christian; an important book.”
—Library Journal
Progressive Christian Thinker Again Challenges Traditional
Theology
New Book by John Shelby Spong Offers Surprising Argument for Life After Death
In Eternal Life: A New Vision (HarperOne, $24.99, September, 2009), John Shelby Spong, the longtime champion
of progressive Christianity and pioneer for human rights whose books have sold more than a million copies, once again challenges
traditional Christian theology. This time, he offers a deeply personal consideration of the question to which religion devotes
so much energy: whether death might be a doorway into something more.
It may surprise some readers that the liberal
theologian, who disputes the existence of heaven and hell, among other traditional beliefs, answers a resounding “Yes!”
to the question of whether there is life beyond death. Here, Spong invites readers into the journey that has brought him “to
a new vision of eternity, to the place where I can give that ‘yes’ answer with both conviction and integrity.”
Combining science and theology, Spong examines the 3.7 billion-year human journey from single cell life
into the complexities of modern self-consciousness, including his own journey to his eighth decade of life as he weaves the
story of life’s radical interdependence.
Spong shows that it is the nature of human life to seek meaning,
purpose, and victory over mortality. Religion developed to enable human beings to deal with the anxiety of self-consciousness.
“Religion is not divinely inspired, it is manipulatively human,” Spong says. “Truth is not religion’s
ultimate agenda, security is,” he says.
Many people are disillusioned with religion because its basic presuppositions
are under assault from the knowledge revolution of the past 500 years. The traditional theistic definition of God as a supernatural
being, a miracle worker, or an exalted parent figure has died, Spong argues, and with it any sense of purpose, meaning,
or immortality that is outside life.
For Spong, the death of theism opens new doorways into life, into timelessness,
and into the mystical experience of being one with the presence of the holy. This is how we live on after death: not in heaven
or hell, but as part of the larger whole—the eternity that continues after we die and escapes the barriers of time and
space.
Spong
says the eternal can be found within us as we go deeper into ourselves and that by living each day to its fullest, we will
come to understand how we live on eternally. He calls us to “live fully, to love wastefully, to be all that you
can be and to dedicate yourselves 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, to be a disciple of Jesus, and finally, the way to prepare for life after
death.”
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