Singing a New Song or Rehashing Old Heresies?

This past weekend, United Methodist advocates for liberalizing sexual ethics met at Sawmill Creek Resort in Ohio to discuss the furtherance of LGBTQ agendas within their denomination. The event claimed the moniker “Sing a New Song.” This phrase acted as the leitmotif of the entire conference schedule. Speakers prophesied not only new customs and policies; the conference hosts also envisaged a completely new way of theology and approach to life.

For doctrinal and Scriptural guidance, SANS participants looked to retired Bishop C. Joseph Sprague. What they actually received was a worn-out lesson in theological liberalism and even ancient heresies. A decade ago, Sprague publicly denied the eternal deity of Jesus Christ, asserting that Jesus became divine only gradually through his good works. His direct denial of Christian orthodoxy made him no stranger to IRD’s attentions. And it also provoked other bishops, especially Timothy Whitaker of Florida, publicly to dispute Sprague’s theology, a rarity among United Methodist prelates who prioritize collegiality. Sprague published his heterodox beliefs in a 2002 book, Affirmations of a Dissenter. He retired from his Chicago post in 2004, earlier than required, and expected to become a chaplain at the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill. The resulting controversy effectively spiked his plans, and the once high profile bishop has been surprisingly quiet over the last seven years.

Now resurfaced, Sprague spoke in both a SANS workshop and evening plenary. He presented two main concerns: activism and theology. The former was nothing less than a radical Big Government program touching on nearly every hot-button political issue. Besides glorifying the LGBT cause, he praised pacifism and the Keynesian top-down approach to economics. Sprague exclaimed, “Make jobs, not war anymore!” Not only did he condemn “immoral preemptive strikes and attacks” and ancient just war theory that “contaminated the soul of this nation” but also “demeaning jobs” without benefits. Putting a hardened union boss to shame, Sprague derided difficult and menial jobs and called for “honorable work and decent wages.” This is all to give “the opportunity to catch up.” He continued to point out the means for this economic transformation, declaring “It is the responsibility of the government to provide such jobs…The private sector has proven…that it will not put the unemployed and underemployed to work.” For Sprague, the nation must solve a moral crisis, namely “the theological rupture of the American dream.” America’s economic woes can be mitigated by reenacting the 1930’s New Deal, with the bishop urging America to “establish a new WPA.”

Bishop Sprague preached these political principles as if they were Gospel truth. Indeed, he proudly named this program the “seamless garment of issues.” This exemplifies his extravagant commitment to the Social Gospel, which downplays the supernatural elements of the Christian faith in favor of good works for others in the community. For the progressive theologian, a true disciple is a social activist, not necessarily someone adopted into the household of God by the blood of Christ.

What places Sprague outside the pall of traditional Christianity is his denial of key orthodox doctrines. He avidly rejects “Christocentric exclusivism,” which asserts that Jesus Christ is the only way, truth, and life. “Such theological triumphalism has hubris matching the idolatry of religious Zionists and Islamic fundamentalism,” Sprague bewailed. In his workshop, he further argued: “We need to have a low Christology…That virgin birth story was a myth.” Sprague proved himself to be a stark Arian by preaching: “Christ as the relational, not substantial, Son of God.” One Virginia United Methodist asked Sprague about the famous homoousiosphrase in the Nicene Creed, which affirms Christ as the eternal Son who “of the same substance as the Father.” Sprague admitted that he at first downplayed the creeds in the order of service of his own congregation years ago. But he recalled later contextualizing the creeds as the beliefs of a particular community long ago. He came to see the creeds and uncomfortable Scripture passages as “symbolic liturgical elements,” having no innate reality within themselves.

Ultimately, for Sprague, something (or someone) cannot be fully mythical and fully historical. He complained: “I don’t want these Bible stories to be taught as facts.” He condemned “all this literalism in the Methodist church;” he even disparaged that children are taught Bible stories as if they actually happened. In short, Sprague perfectly models Richard Niebuhr’s famously derisive definition of liberal Christianity: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Traditional Christians never cease to be unimpressed by these frantic grasps for novelty. Unbelief and haughty impiety may compose new little jingles, flourishes, and harmonies to distance themselves from the authority of God. Still, the melody of sclerotic heresies remains the same. Generations may look back on today’s scorners of orthodoxy, if they remember them at all, as we now look back on Nestorius and Pelagius—as opponents of the true Gospel of Christ. To echo famed 18^th century English classical historian Edward Gibbon: “[T]hey concealed the sentiments of an atheist under the sacerdotal robes.”