Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell

Drawing on a lifetime of wisdom, New York Times bestselling author and controversial religious leader John Shelby Spong continues to challenge traditional Christian theology in Eternal Life: A New Vision. In this remarkable spiritual autobiography about his lifelong struggle with the questions of God and death, he reveals how he ultimately came to believe in eternal life. |

Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Sins of Scripture, and many other books, is known for his controversial ideas and fighting for minority rights. In Eternal Life: A New Vision, a remarkable spiritual journey about his lifelong struggle with the questions of God and death, he reveals how he came to a new conviction about eternal life. God, says spong, is ultimately one, and each of us is part of that oneness. We do not live on after death as children who have been rewarded with heaven or punished with hell but as part of the life and being of God, sharing in God’s eternity, which is beyond the barriers of time and space. spong argues that the discovery of the eternal can be found within each of us if we go deeply into ourselves, transcend our limits and become fully human. By seeking God within, by living each day to its fullest, we will come to understand how we live eternally.

Always compelling and controversial, Spong, the leading Christian liberal and pioneer for human rights, wrestles with the question that all of us will ultimately face. In his final book, Spong takes us beyond religion and even beyond Christianity until he arrives at the affirmation that the fully realized human life empties into and participates in the eternity of God. The pathway into God turns out to be both a pathway into ourselves and a doorway into eternal life. To Job’s question “If a man (or a woman) dies, will he (or she) live again?” he gives his answer as a ringing yes!

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“Offering deeply personal reflections on his own Christian journey and priestly career, Spong reviews a lifetime of passionate engagement with biblical study and with questions of faith, charting his growing discomfort with language that seemed limited, falsifying and inadequate…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

“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

“John Shelby Spong, the reinterpreter of Christianity for the doubtful, retired as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey in 2001 but not from his religious provocations. . . . People have to get beyond the idea of God as a heavenly judge who hands out rewards and punishment, he said. Spong never specifically defines what life after death will be like --- he thinks that can’t be done --- but he tells of his own experiences of the ineffable and relates those to eternal life. Spong, known as a religious rationalist, admits he has become something of a mystic.” - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“John Shelby Spong, the reinterpreter of Christianity for the doubtful, retired as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey in 2001 but not from his religious provocations. . . . People have to get beyond the idea of God as a heavenly judge who hands out rewards and punishment,.” - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Spong invites us to engage the questions, to revel in the mystery, and finally to find our place within God’s place, our time within God’s time, and our life within God’s life.” - Anglican and Episcopal History

“Spong wants to carve out a new Christianity, one that marries belief in God with sober scientific inquiry. Spong doesn’t want to address either fundamentalists or atheists; he wants to find the disaffected Christian in the middle, the person searching for a faith that embraces the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein. . . . He asks his readers and audiences the same question he has asked himself all of his life: ‘Is there another option?’ Spong has faith there is.” - Charlotte Observer

“Eternal Life: A New Vision doesn’t actually give us a clear vision of eternal life at all. Spong would never do that.... Instead he frees us to dream a dream of what life, eternal or otherwise, might be.” - Central Coast Express

“His courage, candor and intense awareness are unique gifts to people both inside and outside Christianity at this critical time in human and planetary history.” - Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing

“In Spong’s perpetual quest for truth and knowledge, he has transformed the enigmatic cosmic energy of the ‘big bang’ into an afterglow of human hope for the ages.” - Daniel H. Gregory, M.D., Senior Attending Physician, Bassett Healthcare

“Spong once again puts his intellectual money on common sense, buttressed both by the scientific method and the discoveries it yields. . . . Religion’s purpose, he claims, is “security, not Truth” - a key insight that demands, in turn, a set of wholly new visions. . . . Spong’s approach lets us see his growth from a narrow (racist, fundamentalist and homophobic) Southern childhood into the role of a public thinking man with a profoundly educational mission. And indeed, one of the book’s most valuable chapters comes last, a persuasive and lyrical case for the right to make one’s own end-of-life decisions: Bishop Spong will chair his own death panel! In any event, when the day comes, thinking humans will be deprived of a unique visionary.” - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Spong once again puts his intellectual money on common sense . . . Religion’s purpose, he claims, is “security, not Truth” - a key insight that demands, in turn, a set of wholly new visions. . . . Spong . . . [is] a unique visionary.” - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“What Spong says is his “fifth ‘final book’” concerns life after death and the meaning of mortality. In its “internal narrative,” he recalls gaining his first awareness of death, that of a pet when he was three, and with it the devastating lesson that when something or someone dies, they disappear forever. Spong has spent his life and work making sense of this most fundamental human issue, and he discusses the selfconsciousness involved in the adoption of religion to cope with the finality of death. Some observations are humorous: he makes gentle fun of the birthday card and cosmetics industries’ attitude toward aging. More often he offers thoughtful, serious commentary on topics that include the rise of liberal politics and secularism, the religious approach of the mystics, and the Resurrection as symbol and reality. He concludes with the rather courageous belief that individuals be allowed to determine when and how to die. His fans will find this spiritual autobiography fascinating, but so, too, should anyone interested in the still uncomfortable topics of death and mortality.” - Booklist

“Spong has spent his life and work making sense of this most fundamental human issue . . . His fans will find this spiritual autobiography fascinating, but so, too, should anyone interested in the still uncomfortable topics of death and mortality.” - Booklist

“Spong, the controversial retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, may rightly be considered the bellwether of the most advanced opinions in theology that still cling to a nominal Christian identity. With subtlety and complexity, Spong promotes an idea of an ongoing existence beyond our physicality, one that entirely supercedes “religious” notions of Heaven or Hell and even conventional notions of God. For conservative Christians, Spong’s views are heretical; for many other readers, Christian and non-Christian, Spong’s writing here as elsewhere is intelligent, engaged, comforting, and uplifting. VERDICT Spong’s thought and theology are crucial stimulants for every thinking Christian; an important book. ” - Library Journal

“With subtlety and complexity, Spong promotes an idea of an ongoing existence beyond our physicality, one that entirely supercedes “religious” notions of Heaven or Hell and even conventional notions of God . . . Spong’s writing here as elsewhere is intelligent, engaged, comforting, and uplifting. ” - Library Journal

“Fear of death is the most fundamental fear of human existence. The only way it can be conquered is through knowledge and experience of your eternal being. Eternal Life: A New Vision is elegant invitation to find this part of yourself and be liberated.” - Deepak Chopra, author of The Third Jesus