One Good Reason to Believe in the Bible: Guilt (and man’s attempts to avoid it)
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Editor’s note: Good Reasons Apologetics has graciously allowed us to republish their series, “One Good Reason” You can find the original post here.
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths-2 Timothy 4:3
On September 12th, 2021 a 90 year old man named John Shelby Spong passed away in his sleep. Spong was an American Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey from 1979 to 2000. In the course of his tenure as Bishop and afterward, Spong wrote a number of books expressing his thoughts on God and Christianity. Spong’s works were not what you might guess would come from a person who had risen to such a position of prominence in a Christian church. Spong called for a “fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines.” 1
Spong came up with what came to be called his 12 theses. Just as Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door at Wittenburg, Germany to call for a reformation of the Roman Catholic Church, Bishop Spong posted his 12 ideas for a new reformation of the Christian Church today. The 12 ideas Spong put forward included the ideas that the idea of God as we’ve always understood it is totally wrong, the story of a perfect creation and fall from grace is nonsense, there is no set of laws that can govern people for all time (think 10 Commandments), prayers to God are meaningless, the miracles of the Bible are untrue, there was no virgin birth of Jesus, the story of Christ’s death on a cross for the salvation of others is barbaric and primitive, and Jesus could not have been literally resurrected.
Of Bishop Spong’s 12 theses, the one that may be most telling is his belief that, “the hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.”
I would argue that it was the last idea that led to him trying to sell the other 11 as facts, with much pushback from scholars I might add. With the exception of a few sociopaths, being guilty is a problem for us. In the course of interviewing many people suspected or known to have committed crimes, clues of someone lying all boiled down to the person being physically uncomfortable with lying or facing the idea of their own guilt. I also found that when a true confession came, there was a tremendous sense of relief by the confessor. The burden of hiding the truth was over, and they were almost always visibly relieved to let the truth be known, despite the consequences.
Spong followed the patterns of many “critical” scholars who have attempted to dig holes under all of the things that the first 2000 years of Chirstianity claimed to be true of itself, such as the idea that God created everything perfectly, mankind is fallen, we have all sinned, and therefore we all need the sacrifice of Christ crucified to return us to fellowship with our Creator. In his attempts to remove an all knowing, all powerful God, creation, sin, guilt and Christ’s work on the cross, Spong was ultimately trying to provide another way out of guilt that he seemed to be accusing Christianity of using against its members. However, if we are honest with ourselves we all know the truth. We know we are guilty anyway. Like a defendant pleading not guilty, just because you say it doesn’t make it true.
Like me, I am confident that you have done things you wish you could take back. You have had to be forgiven, or pay the price for things you’ve done. People know the guilt is there without needing to go to church. We make excuses for our behavior, but that doesn’t get rid of guilt. However, the sooner we acknowledge the truth of our own guilt, the sooner we can work to reconcile those we have hurt. Even if it’s the Creator of the universe.
Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor's degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics. Tony has been married for 9 years and has two sons. He and his family currently reside in Southern Illinois.
