Excerpt from the writings of Bishop John Shelby Spong. See Resurrection, Myth or Reality? (1994), and Eternal Life: A New Vision, (2009).
I discover at the heart of our humanity something that is not bound by our humanity or terminated by death. I find it in the human capacity to embrace both transcendence and timelessness, to share if you will in those qualities that relate us to the eternity of God. My problem is not a lack of belief, but a lack of words through which to state that belief. It is much easier to state what I do not believe about life after death. I do not believe in a behavior-controlling system of reward and punishment connected with an after life. I see that as little more that an attempt to create fairness in an unfair world. I have no desire to continue a self perpetuating hoax derived from our self-centered survival-oriented humanity. I also do not believe in life after death just because I have some sense that this life is incomplete without it. If this life is all the life I have, I am quite content. I have lived it long and I hope well. I can, therefore, live without a belief in life after death. Yet I still affirm quite strongly that self-conscious human life has become something more that molecules formed by chance and born only to eat, grow, mate, reproduce, and then die with no meaning beyond that. I believe we were made for something more.
The inability to find words big enough to convey this meaning still eludes me. I struggle to make sense of those experiences that I do not believe are delusional. I have had transcendent moments in which time seems to stand still and eternity is engaged. The theologian Paul Tillich alluded to such things, I believe, when he coined the phrase, “The Eternal Now.” Yet I have only human language, bound as it is by both time and space, in which to make sense out of that experience. I do not know what the time-bound word “after” means when we say “life after death.” I do not know what words like “eternal” and “everlasting” mean, for all of those are time words that make no sense beyond this life. Space words like “heaven” and “hell” also lose their meaning in every effort to speak of that which is not bound by space. There are those who dismiss this problem as nothing more than a word game based on wishful thinking. That is not a sufficient explanation for me.
When life is lived deeply enough, I believe that eternity is experienced and when transcendence is engaged at the heart of life, that for which we have coined the phrase “God” becomes real. Can human beings experience eternity, but not be able to describe it? Can we explore love so deeply that all boundaries fade and transformation occurs? I think we can, and I do not think these things are either delusional or wish fulfillment.
11/20/07
The death of a child is particularly traumatic for a parent. We take our children so for granted day by day. We worry about their rebuffs and failures. We rejoice in their accomplishments and their successes. We watch them grow. We watch their personalities develop. We laugh with them and we cry with them. They are on the path to becoming adults. All the reaching and the stretching, all the growing and the learning. Yet it is not to be. We wonder about a life that ends so soon. What was it for? Why were they here?
The answer is simple. They are here to love and to be loved. They give their love to us and to those around them. And we give our love to them. So their life is complete after all. Our dismay at its shortness cannot diminish its fullness.
Their life is love. And love is eternal.
Note: The above was written on the one-year anniversary of the death of my daughter Susan at 16. Originally it had her name and the pronoun “she” but it applies to all of us.
Loren Bullock
April 12, 1967
In our churches, stewardship is usually the once-a-year activity when we pledge money to next year’s budget. But there’s more to it than that.
Stewardship is what a steward does. In general, a steward is one who is entrusted with something that belongs to someone else. He or she could be a trustee of property or an estate, the manager of a large household, or a keeper of the silver or wine or food to be served to others – a wine steward in a restaurant or an airline steward or stewardess . If we are to be stewards in a Christian sense, then, what are we to be stewards of and for whom? The implication is that we have been given something by somebody else, and we are to hold that something in trust – to be responsible for it, to care for it, perhaps to distribute it appropriately and to be accountable for it, perhaps by providing periodic reports.
For Christians, the Who is, of course, God. As for the What, God has given us our life, our body, our mind, our very being, in trust to be used carefully and responsibly. As trustees of that life, we are to protect it and maintain it and nourish it. And at the same time we are to be servants, using our lives in service of others. In addition, God has given us an amazing power to love, and we are supposed to use that love by giving it away to others. Fortunately, God makes that easy to do. For the presence of God within us is the power for us to live our lives and to show His love each day.
How do we do this? By the way we treat other people every day. By the way we use our time and resources. By the way we “wash more feet.” This is the way we become a community of stewards of what God has so abundantly given us.
Loren Bullock
November 14, 2006
Stewardship to me has something to do with assets and how we use those assets. And by assets we usually think of money, i.e., cash or checking accounts or mutual funds or also property such as houses or cars or things that George Carlin calls “stuff”, and we all have lots of “stuff.”
But assets are more than money and stuff. For my very life is an asset. It is an asset that God has given to me as a gift – not just to keep – but to use. It’s an asset like an interest-free loan that I didn’t even sign for, and that I have been entrusted with for a while. And I’m supposed to use that loan responsibly and not just for myself. Surprisingly enough, I am supposed to use that loan by loaning it out to others – also interest-free. My life is an asset that I am supposed to give away! And the amazing thing is that even though I use the asset and even give it away, the principal doesn’t get any smaller. If anything it gets bigger. (I wish that applied to my Home Equity Loan.)
So my very life is a gift. A gift to me to use for a time. And then eventually give it all back. And included as a part of that gift, God has given me some marvelous things: a mind to think with, eyes to see with, ears to hear with, and a heart to feel with. But more than anything, He has given me love – His love of me – plus the capability within me to love others. What a precious gift we’ve received! And it is a gift!
So stewardship is just giving it back every day – not waiting until that final due date. Stewardship is our purpose in life. It’s why we’re here. And that’s why our real job in life is stewardship.
Loren Bullock
November 7. 2004
M Loren Bullock 