From Rowan Williams’s 1998 response to Newark Bishop John Spong:
The fact is that significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.
Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited. … Is this tradition as barren as Spong seems to think? […]
Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don’t believe in a God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it’s harder to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.
Perhaps, too, it has a bit to do with the sense of utterly unexpected absolution or release, the freeing of the heart.
The cross as sacrifice? God knows, there are barbaric ways of putting this; but as a complex and apparently inescapable metaphor (which, in the Bible, is about far more than propitiation) it has always said something sobering about the fact that human liberation doesn’t come cheap, that the degree of human self-delusion is so colossal as to involve ‘some total gain or loss’ (in the words of Auden’s poem about Bonhoeffer) in the task of overcoming it. And that human beings compulsively deceive themselves about who and what they are is a belief to which Darwinism is completely immaterial. […]
Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong’s account of classical Christian faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely reflect his own knowledge of it. I think I understand the passion behind all this, the passion to make sense to those for whom the faith is at best quaint and at worst oppressive, nonsense.
But the sense is made (in so far as it is made at all) by a denial of the resources already there – to the extent that Spong’s own continuing commitment to the tradition becomes incomprehensible.
Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious, inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?
Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this; and – if I can’t try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit – I don’t know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.