Bishop Spong Creed

I believe that there is a transcending reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all of our fearful and fragile human limits.

I believe that this reality can be found in all that is, but that it reaches self-consciousness and the capability of being named, communed with, and recognized only in human life.

I believe that heaven, the domain in which this reality has traditionally been domiciled, is not a place but a symbol standing for the limitlessness of Being itself.

I believe that this realm of heaven is entered whenever the barriers that seem to bind human life into something less than that for which it is capable are set aside.

I believe in Jesus, called Messiah, or Christ.

I believe that in his life this transcendent reality has been revealed so completely that it caused people to refer to him as God’s son, even God’s only son. The burning God intensity was so real in him that I look at his life and say, “In you I see the meaning of God, so for me you are both Lord and Christ.” I believe that Jesus was a God presence, a powerful experience of the reality of that Ground of Being undergirding us all at the very depths of life. That is why the earliest Christians interpreted this Christ experience in the language of theism. That was the only language in which they knew how to speak of God. It needs to be said clearly that the God presence of this Jesus will lead us ultimately beyond every religious definition. Indeed, it will lead beyond Jesus himself.

I believe in that gift of the Spirit who was called “the giver of life.” I believe that this Spirit inevitably creates a community of faith that will come, in time, to open this world to God as the very Ground of its life and Being.

I believe, therefore, that being in touch with the Ground of Being creates the universal communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the reality of resurrection, and the doorway into the life that is everlasting. Those may not be the words I would now choose to use to describe the reality to which they point, but once they have escaped their idolatrous literalization, those words will do.

Religion is a human attempt to process the God experience, which breaks forth from our own depths and wells up constantly within us. We must lay down, therefore, the primitive claims we have made for our religious traditions. None of them is drawn from otherworldly revelations. None of them is inerrant or infallible. None of them represents the only way to God. The only divine mission in life that the Church of the future could possibly have is to open people to a recognition that the ground of their very being is holy and that when they are in touch with that holy Ground of Being, they can share in God’s creation by giving life, love, and being to others. That is the task of those who claim to be God bearers.