A “Muslim” Note on John Shelby Spong
Oleh: Ulil Abshar-Abdalla
In the journey toward the truth, people tend to take the easy tack. The easiest way is to treat religion as an heirloom inherited from our ancient predecessors; to treat religion as a set of doctrines that have clear-cut boundaries or, more precisely, boundary (in a singular form). The easiest way to be in the way of being “religionist” is to follow the well-trodden path of the predecessors without daring to ask or challenge. To question what has been laid down as doctrines by our pious predecessors is tantamount to an act of heresy.
John Shelby Spong is one of my favorite theologians. All of his works have stuffed my private library, including my favorite, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Irrespective of the fact that the message contained in the book is addressed toward Christians, but it speaks very well to the very problem faced by Muslims nowadays.
If we swap the word “Christianity” in the above title with “Islam”, the message of the book is still relevant. Yes, both Islam and Christianity are faced with the same problem, i.e. the problem of literalistic reading of the Scripture. Sharing Spong in what he said in this book, there are myriad doctrines both in Islam and Christianity that we who live in twenty first century can no longer believe in without being subject to reinterpretation.
For instance, I can no longer believe in the doctrine that Islam is the sole path toward salvation, that Islam is the only religion that embodies the Divine Truth. The exclusivist claim such as that is widely found in any religion, particularly among the family of Semitic religions.
Paul Knitter calls this phenomenon as a “claim of uniqueness”. Almost all religions pride itself to be the unique path toward the truth, rendering other faiths or religions as spurious or less capable of guiding people to the salvation.
Divine truth, as one mystic aptly describes it, is like a broken mirror with its pieces spread here and there. Each religion is like one piece that mirrors small part of the Truth. He or she who is out to seek the Whole Truth has to put hold on all pieces—an undertaking that is hardly capable of being accomplished by a single person. Divine Truth is beyond the reach of us the mortal human beings.
To think that one piece of broken mirror is the whole mirror is tantamount to arrogance, or takabbur.
Spong can no longer uphold such arrogant belief. He describes himself as a man who is strolling along the path of quest, seeking the truth. All believers, irrespective of their faith, are fellow seekers. Seeking is a process with no foreseeable end. I share Spong this vision of religion as a process of seeking truth without end.
Spong also describes himself as a “believer in exile”.
In the journey toward the truth, people tend to take the easy tack. The easiest way is to treat religion as an heirloom inherited from our ancient predecessors; to treat religion as a set of doctrines that have clear-cut boundaries or, more precisely, boundary (in a singular form). The easiest way to be in the way of being “religionist” is to follow the well-trodden path of the predecessors without daring to ask or challenge. To question what has been laid down as doctrines by our pious predecessors is tantamount to an act of heresy.
People like Spong is of different breed. He refutes to believe the way ordinary people who are content with well-defined doctrines believe. He chooses the harder way: to embark on an un-ending process of quest.
That is why he describes himself as a believer in exile. He breaks the rank with his fellow Christians who prefer the easiest way of being Christian. He is still a believing man, yet he is exiled and banished from his home of “birth”.
This is what I would like to call “liberal faith”, a faith that liberates us from the shackle of inherited set of doctrines believed to be a lasting truth for every time and place. The truth that many religionists try to bury deep beneath the carpet is that there is a wide hiatus between what is claimed to be a religious doctrine and teaching and the real and ever-changing situation lived by its believers.
All thinking person would understand by the simplest common sense that many claimed to be divine teaching is closely correlated with a concrete situation lived by people of the yore.
Take for instance the ruling claimed by many Muslims to be an eternal truth because it is revealed by All-Knowing God, i.e. the teaching related to how women should dress in front of men. This is what is called hijab or jilbab in popular Muslim parlance.
According to many Muslim scholars, women are obliged to cover their whole body except their face and arm. Some other scholars even go further as to say that the face of women is also un-exposable; therefore it has to be entirely covered. Hence the practice called burqa, a woman’s outfit that covers her entire body including her face such as we see practiced widely in Afghanistan.
It is true that in Quran, there are verses that indicate toward that effect. Or precisely speaking, women are required by Quran to let their dress hanging loosely as to cover their bosom (or cleavage?) so that they are not subject to harassment—a practice that Quran indicated to have been rampant among Arab society during the life of the Prophet.
I do not believe that covering the entire women’s body is a rule Muslim has to adhere to in all situations, and in all times. First of all, the divine rule that exhorts women to have their bosom covered is correlated with the context in which women are subject to men’s harassment in the Arab society of Prophet’s time. Secondly, the essence of Islamic teaching on dress is not how women practically should cover their body, but rather how they dress themselves decently so that they are not subject to social harassment.
Hijab or jilbab is just a practical example of how women during the life of Prophet should dress in a way that is commensurate with their dignity as human being. Dressing is a cultural practice that is always changing over time along the development of human civilization. The concept of decency is not a monolithic and fixed notion that applies in all societies.
Therefore, I do not believe that Islamic rule on jilbab is meant to be an eternal rule that is applicable permanently. There are many other things in religion, including Islam, which needs to be refreshed and read with a “new eye”.
To lock religion up in an antique vessel and shield it away from change and revisiting is, to me, an act of suicide. There are only two options for any religion as Spong rightly asserts: either to change, or die!
Let me end by quoting some lines from Spong as follow:
Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its own origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits.
Please, don’t be misled by the word “Christianity” in the above citation. You can put “Islam” in its place, and yet the whole sentence still makes a full sense.[]
Post a Comment
Great Site. Was added to mybookmarks. Greetings From USA.
Dear Ulil Abshar-Abdalla,
Thank you for your very honest article. It is so wonderful for people of diverse faiths to share their views and learn from each other. I agree with the person who wrote about not giving up one’s morality, and I agree that we need to follow moral codes that are appropriate to our era now - I especially like Anson Laytner’s comment that knowledge on everything else has progressed, so why not our knowledge of God? I also agree that we are not able to ever understand God, but we can try to follow the teachings of the Messengers of Yaweh/Allah/God/the Great Cosmos/ Creator Spirit. I think that all of our precious faiths have a core element which is in agreement - the spiritual essence - and it is just the material side which changes according to the understanding and needs of the people of the time that Messenger comes. None of our teachings say to hate people, exploit the vulnerable, follow your own desires at the expense of others, do whatever you want! I was brought up Catholic and have recently become Baha’i, which means that I believe ALL of the religions, which is a great relief for me because I always felt uncomfortable with the idea that Christianity was the only way. Why would God create such diversity? If we look around the planet, God loves diversity, every leaf, every person, every wave is unique. But we are also all connected in our being alive and being an outcome of God’s love, we are all brothers and sisters. I look forward to learning more about faiths I know little of (especially Islam and Hinduism), so that I can feel more connected to my human spiritual heritage and love people more by understanding them more.
Andria
Australia
the 2 reasons why i follow Christianity are the prophecies regarding Jesus in the Old Testament(Torah) before Jesus’s birth, and the miracles (supernatural healings of diseases, men seeing visions, men still being able to prophesy,etc) in the Church even today. Muslims generally believe that although God did many miracles through Moses,Jesus, etc, He is not doing miracles today and that the miracles claimed by christians today are fake. I just wanted to ask that why would God who is fully capable of performing miracles, stop performing them in today’s age for no proper reason? i think that miracles dont happen to muslims not because God has stopped performing miracles today, but because God doesnt want to misguide them. If He starts performing miracles among muslims then they would reason that since islam is correct,thats why God is giving them signs through these miracles.. I continue to see miracles in the Church in which i go to pray..
Advice to liberal Muslim women....DON’T UNCOVER!
Also do not accept being forced to cover to ridiculous and hysterically reactive extremes!
John Shelby Spong is a great writer, one I admire greatly yet he and I start to part ways at the topic of sex. I applaud his well-intentioned effort to rid religion of it’s body-negative, sex-negative and woman-negative biases and the fear and anger that are directed at women by men who externalize their struggle with their own sexuality and blame the object of the desires(woman) rather than themselves....yet he goes too far into accepting everything. He does not ask whether there is a good reason, or a benefit to any of the traditional teachings...all that is non-traditional becomes acceptable and even laudable.
A better writer is the Catholic Ronald Rolheiser in “Forgotten Among the Lilies”. Far from being sexuality negative he begins with, “ We are fired into life by a madness that comes from our incompleteness. We awake to life tense, aching, erotic, full of sex and restlessness.” But rather than simply advocating that people shack up, he defends the traditional moral teachings. Not by a resort to shaming and name-calling, but by noting the effects of the loss of those teachings in human terms, and social justice terms.
“The oppression of women in our culture is especially sexual. In a culture which is sexually irresponsible the inevitable losers are women. They end up suffering the most.” He goes on to note the lack of trust between men and women and even hatred between them. While there are certainly men who hold women in contempt in traditional cultures, being freed from sexual mores has not freed us from that misogyny...if anything it has simply been increased, having been freed from any artificial constraints or limits that religion placed on it. Even some of the otherwise nicest men and women I know are full of rage for the opposite sex, unable to trust, unable to do anything more than visciously tear into the very person they wish to love for belonging to that hated group.
Go into any Christian and Jewish liberal community and look where the pressure is on women, look where all the bare skin is...it’s not on the men! How many of their members have sex with people they have no commitment to, no real concern for the consequences to them? How many defend exploiting others for sexual gratification under the banner “mutual consent”? How many divorces, viscious battles over property and custody? How many beautiful, smart women, looking for marriage and children are unable to find husbands? How many men in their 30s and 40s with excellent careers are incapable of commitment, preferring to pick up women for sex or drag some hopeful woman through years of being a “roommate with benefits” while her biological clock ticks away and he neurotically ruminates about whether he is “ready”? How many men there seem reduced to an extended adolescence, locked in perpetual ambivilance and indecision? How many fatherless children? How many kids crying about their parents divorce? How many kids growing up jaded, cynical about love and marriage, expecting only betrayal and abandonment there?
Think hard and carefully before you give up your traditional morality...reform it if you must, but do NOT give it up. It is so easy to give it up and so impossible to get back once your culture starts down that slipperly slope. Do not believe the good intentions of most men who defend the freedom of women to sleep with whomever they choose...they aren’t defending her...they are defending the right of men to sexual gratification without commitment and responsibility. It is the men who are “freed” and the women who end up being “responsible” and paying the price!
I too am a fan of Bishop Spong’s work and have found great inspiration in reading his books. I am not aware of any works that Bishop Spong has written that deal specifically with Islam, but I would enjoy reading about his perspective.
Thank you for highlighting one of the leading theological minds in the world today.
Comments (6)
(Displaying 5 latest comments, descending)