Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality.

Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality, by John Shelby Spong (Harper & Row, 256 pp., $15.95)

ONLY A modern-day Episcopal bishop could write a book like this one-literate, articulate, heavy with sociological jargon, indifferent to the accumulated wisdom of the past-and hopelessly naive.

John Shelby Spong, bishop of Newark, New Jersey, and talk-show celebrity extraordinaire, is the latest in a long line of right reverend goofballs, beginning with the late James Pike of San Francisco, continuing through Paul Moore of New York, and threatening to stretch far into the future. Prelates of this sort seem to think it their bounden duty to explode the "backward" beliefs of pious people. They fling wide their arms to embrace new "truths."

It is fair to say that Episcopalians have not cornered the market on theological nincompoopery. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics all have made their distinctive contributions to the unsettling of settled beliefs. But Spong has an unusual gift for the provocative position and the catchy phrase. If the church can bless foxhounds, he asked recently, why can't it bless committed homosexual unions? Fittingly, Phil Donahue recentIy put the bishop on his show with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who several times commended him for the depth and humanity of his thought.

Spong is so unshackled, one wonders if he's fastened to anything. Certainly not the Bible, many of whose moral prescriptions offend modern sensibilities. Not the tradition of the church, which he sees as shaped by males seeking to enshrine patriarchy. Spong basically is off doing his own thing. He isn't just open, he's porous.

The burden of Living in Sin is that modernity is leaving the church behind. This is perhaps the most engaging part of Spong's thought-the idea that modern life need not measure up to the church's standards: it's the church that has to toe the line.

Spong declares that he's still against promiscuity and for commitment; he regards marriage as the norm. But he understands that there are different strokes for different folks. Puberty comes earlier and marriage later than in former times, so it's unfair to expect sexual impulses to be checked as successfully as in the past. Older couples, widowed or divorced, may also want to shack up.

Homosexuality, Spong declares, is, "in all probability, a matter of the pre-natal 'sexing of the brain'" tampering with it is tampering with the order of creation. "All of us," Spong says in a typical passage, "should welcome the cry of 'gay pride.' It is the emotional equivalent of 'black is beautiful.' Self-acceptance, a defiance of the definition of the majority, is now a major force at work in the gay and Lesbian world." Spong is not a theologian-he's a civil-rights lobbyist.

Spong proclaims his lifelong love of the Bible, then undertakes to show up the Bible as a patriarchalist document. He assigns to Scripture approximately the same authority as to the New York Times editorial page. Less authority, in certain cases: the Times at least is semi-tuned-in to what's happening. "I stand ready," says Spong, "to reject the Bible in favor of something that is more human, more humane, more life-giving, and, dare I say, more godlike."

The Apostle John predictably prefers Freud to St. Paul (who was full of "ill-informed, culturally biased prejudices"). Spong's bibliography teems with names like Alvin Tomer, Abraham Maslow, Jean Auel, Elaine Pagels -and John Spong. Few references predate 1960. When Spong quotes the Fathers of the Church, it is in snippets borrowed from a feminist history. The bishop seems not to have thought it worth his while to read the original texts in order to evaluate context and reasoning. The Fathers lived, after all, in an antique culture, and never even visited Newark, New Jersey.

Spong argues passionately that he is trying to save the church from itself Alter its outdated teachings, and multitudes living "in sin" and apart from Christian places of worship will come surging to Sunday services. He offers not a scintilla of evidence for such a view-nor any thoughts on the unsettling effects of jettisoning two thousand years of belief and practice.

Living in Sin is moral and theological bilge. Why, then, recognize it at all? Because Spong, though far yet from converting his own church to his views, speaks for a powerful and committed body of Christian-actually post-Christian-clergymen who make a practice of belittling or challenging the faith they signed on to defend.

The problem is not John Shelby Spong. The problem is the failure of mainstream Christians to react with horror and dismay when Spong, and those like him, propound nonsense and call it gospel. The Christian community once had the happy faculty of calling a spade a spade, a heresy a heresy. They quit all that, of course; which tells us something about why an Episcopal bishop, with purple shirt and pectoral cross, now sits smiling on the Phil Donahue show, telling Christians what dumb ideas they had-up until the Age of Spong.