You are hereBishop Spong's Articles July 2010

Bishop Spong's Articles July 2010

Hendersonville, N.C.: A Church, an Organization and the Signs of Victory
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVIII: Acts III -The Story of Paul
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIX: I and II Timothy and Titus - The Pastoral Epistles
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXX: The Epistle to The Hebrews
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXXI The General Epistles — James, I & II Peter and Jude

 
Thursday July 01, 2010
Hendersonville, N.C.
A Church, an Organization and the Signs of Victory
Henderson County is located near Ashville in the beautiful mountains of western North Carolina, near where I grew up in Charlotte and into which I return every summer as if drawn like a magnet. In this county is an incredible church, together with a number of courageous clergy. The church is the First Congregational Church of the United Church of Christ; the clergy belong to an organization called "Love Welcomes All." I visited both of these entities early in June and both convinced me anew that the rearguard negativity against homosexuality inside conservative religious circles is today in the final stages of its own rigor mortis. This negativity has, I believe, become so irrelevant that it needs to be engaged no longer. The proper strategy is to ignore these voices from this moment on, wh ether they emanate from the Vatican, Canterbury or the television preachers who harass us daily through the media.
The First Congregational Church UCC is actually in Hendersonville, the major town in Henderson County, but this still means that it is part of what is a rural, conservative and fundamentalist culture. One sees words painted on the rocks and trees along the roads in and around Hendersonville announcing that "Jesus Saves" and warning those who pass by that they must be prepared "to meet your God." Three crosses are planted on various lawns throughout the area to remind the populace of Calvary. One church has even erected on its property a sign loudly proclaiming "Do not let the next time you come to church be when you are carried in by six strong men." Local radio in this area is filled with preaching voices that attack sin vigorously, elicit guilt massively and urge conversion constantly. The local newspapers cover church news regularly, printing many advertisements in the Saturday issue telling people where they can hear "full gospel preaching" on Sunday morning. One n eeds to understand this context before one can appreciate the witness made by the First Congregational Church and the organization known as "Love Welcomes All." This is their story.
Some years ago, an Englishman named Walter Ashley, an Oxford University graduate who had had a career in journalism, moved to Hendersonville to retire with his wife JoAnn, who had defied the sexism of her generation to become a corporate attorney. In this move they joined other retirees who had discovered that the gorgeous climate in these mountains made this an ideal retirement community. This couple had been married in and been active members of the Park Avenue Christian Church, one of New York City's most exciting and progressive congregations. Finding a new church home was important to both of them. That was not easy in this fundamentalist religious environment. The First Congregational Church was their choice and both of them immediately moved into leadership positions. Walter became the teacher of the adult Bible class on Sunday mornings. He explored the scriptures in this class in a way that no one in this community had heard it done before. He also introduced th e members of this class to the writings of contemporary biblical scholars well known in the academies of Christian learning. People were excited by these new insights and when news of this class spread throughout the community it began to attract many more people to this congregation. Aided by a very gifted Senior Minister named David Kelly who deeply yearned to make his church an alternative to the cultural fundamentalism of this region, it became a religious enclave for the growing number of incoming retirees. One thing then began to lead to another.
A couple in this congregation, Ann and Jim Allen, were the parents of a lesbian daughter, and they wanted to be certain their child was welcomed in their church. Inspired by their membership in Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-Flag), they agreed to head up an educational campaign to have their church declared by their denomination to be "An open and affirming congregation." That campaign was a great success and this congregation added that designation to their outdoor sign and printed it on the back of their regular Sunday bulletin. They wanted to proclaim their identity to all who had the eyes to see.
When Walter Ashley died about five years ago, Pastor Kelly and Walter's widow JoAnn decided to honor him by establishing the Walter Ashley Lectureship to be held at this church annually in which the issues of the day might be forced into dialogue with contemporary Christian scholarship. I was privileged to be the first Walter Ashley lecturer in 2006 and was amazed to find the church literally packed, with people being drawn to these lectures from miles away. Since that inaugural year, other Ashley lecturers have included Walter Brueggeman, Marcus Borg and next fall they will welcome John Dominic Crossan, possibly America's best known historical Jesus scholar. Since the first of these Ashley lectures, a number of people attending them have decided to become affiliated with this church. In the meantime, Pastor Kelly retired and a gifted and articulate new pastor, Richard Weidler from Portland, Maine, has succeeded him. The church wanted a pastor to continue their direction and Richard Weidler wanted a church that was willing to stand for the things the annual Ashley lectureship embodied.
Meanwhile, in the wider community, one of Hendersonville's large Baptist Churches began a vigorous anti-homosexuality campaign based on stereotypes that are not accurate and Bible quotations that are inappropriate. It was such an affront to both knowledge and human dignity that a few open clergy and laity from moderate congregations throughout the county and led by First Congregational came together to form an organization called "Love Welcomes All." Their purpose was to carry out a series of day long educational seminars on the subject of homosexuality that would create a very different conversation. The cultural norms were questioned and people who had once believed themselves to be alone discovered that there was another Christian voice that they had never before heard. A new challenge arose on July 18, 2009, when the religion section of the local paper carried a lead article about a new book written by the pastor of Hendersonville's First Presbyterian Church entitled, Homosexuality and the Church: Overcoming Controversy with Compassionate Ministry. Compassionate Ministry turned out to be converting homosexuals to heterosexuality through prayer, variations of the 12-step program and the work of a fundamentalist organization called Exodus, Inc. that advertized its ability to "cure homosexuals." Since none of these procedures have any credibility in medical or scientific circles and indeed are badly discredited, this article served to refocus the work of "Love Welcomes All." Their first decision was to attend a public presentation on this book by its author at the First Presbyterian Church. The delegation from the First Congregational Church, included Pastor Richard Weidler, the previous interim pastor, Barbara Rathbun, who happened to be the wife of a practicing and board certified psychiatrist, the chair of their board of deacons, Clay Eddleman, also a board certified psychiatrist and a partnered openly gay man, and the person who served as the president of the local P-Flag group. The entire audience listened quietly during the presentation, which was laced with biblical quotations about Sodom and Gomorrah as well as verses from Leviticus. The author also made derogatory claims about the American Psychiatric Association and its positive findings on homosexuality that appeared to him to "invalidate the Word of God!" He ended his speech by announcing that he had never heard of a "Christian psychiatrist!" He was about to meet or hear of two who challenged him openly and immediately in his own church. That confrontation was the talk of the town.
"Love Welcomes All" went to work in earnest to educate the community and to isolate ecclesiastical negativity. They launched an educational campaign through the letters to the editor's column in the local newspaper. No medically or scientifically incompetent material that appeared in this forum from untrained or poorly trained "Christian Counselors" was allowed to go unchallenged. Psychiatrist Clay Eddleman coolly dismantled their prejudice letter by letter. This group began to plan and carry out quarterly interfaith community worship services to show the world that being Christian did not mean being homophobic. In time they identified and called out of the shadows, 35 gay-friendly congregations in a three-county area, all of whom had previously thought of themselves as isolated and alone. They opened a website, Lo veWelcomesAll.com, that now has a growing membership, locally, nationally and, with its first member from Pakistan, internationally. A second local Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Mark Stanley, senior pastor at Hendersonville's Trinity Church has publicly written to his governing board, that he is no longer able in conscience or morality to continue to administer the law of his church regarding negativity to the gay members of his congregation. The unholy alliance between religion and homophobia is now being expelled from the Christian Church.
I had the privilege of addressing both this pioneering UCC Church and a "Love Welcomes All" service in early June. Today, both are growing in the mountains of western North Carolina. People opposing ignorance and homophobia in the Christian Church are learning that not only are they not alone, but they are a rising majority. These people understand that silence is the ally of homophobia and that confrontation with evil is not itself evil. What better sign could there be that this battle is over and that religious-based homophobia, the last bastion of this prejudice, is mortally wounded. The First Congregational Church UCC and "Love Welcomes All" have stood tall and made their public witness in a deeply fundamentalist and evangelical part of western North Carolina. Thanks be to God.
– John Shelby Spong
If you wish to write this church and thank them for their witness, please do so at fccpastor@bellsouth.net. Pastor Weidler and its members would love to hear from you. JSS 

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Katherine Barney from Worthing, Sussex, UK writes:
Can you help me to understand the movement in American politics that you call "The Tea Party"?
Dear Katherine:
I can try, but in a question and answer format it must, of necessity, be brief.
The Tea Party Movement is a manifestation of the great fear and anxiety that, today, accompanies Western politics everywhere. This anxiety is also present in Greece, France, Germany and Iceland, but since they did not have the Boston Tea Party in their national history they do not call it that.
It was born in the economic crisis that rocked this country in the last year of the Bush Administration, when the politics of greed finally brought Wall Street to its knees. It was fed by the healthcare debate, when lobbyists were paid to frighten the American public with distortions, half truths and absolute lies in an attempt to prevent the profits of healthcare companies, trial lawyers, drug manufacturers and private medical practitioners from being compromised. It also has in it an element of racism as the white Anglo-Saxon portion of our population began to see a multi-ethnic America coming into being and to feel that they were losing the power to impose their agenda on this emerging society in the way that they had always done in the past. It has within it a traditional fear of big and intrusive government, which is as old as our ancestors' reasons for migrating from Europe in the first place. The Tea Party Movement represents an inability on the part of many of our citizens to embrace our interdependent population that is now tempering the "rugged individualism" which was part of our past.
I believe that the movement will also prove to be little more than a momentary blip on the EKG chart of American history and will soon fade back into the woodwork, as the economy returns to normal, the ill-advised wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are brought to a close, the BP oil leak is finally plugged, the damage it has done to our environment is addressed, and when people finally accept the fact that a new America is emerging and that it represents a rising consciousness and a new vision of what it means to be human. This new version will then equip us to arrive at the time when we will celebrate our diversity rather than coddle our fears.
The Tea Party Movement will also almost inadvertently serve to drive us back to that biblical idea that we are indeed our brothers' and our sisters' keepers and that the humanity in each of us is ultimately dependent on recognizing the humanity in all of us. That is in fact what the Pentecost story in the Book of Acts is all about, the dawning of universalism that lifts us out of our tribal limitations.
Thank you for writing.
 
– John Shelby Spong

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Thursday July 08, 2010
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVIII
Acts III: The Story of Paul
When the book of Acts moves beyond the conflict that set Jewish Christians against Greek Christians, it is ready to chronicle the story of how Christianity became a universal human religion. From the capital of Judaism to the capital of the Roman Empire is the story line that the book of Acts follows. The hero of this phase of the Christian movement is Saul of Tarsus, who would come to be known as Paul the Apostle. We have previously examined the content of his epistles, but now in the book of Acts, Luke begins to flesh out the portrait of his life and his personality as others experienced him. How much of this portrait is historical and how much is the product of Luke' fertile imagination is often hard to determine. Luke writes the book of Acts some forty years or two generations after the death of Paul and legends about heroes do tend to grow after they have died. This fate may well have befallen Paul in the book of Acts. My rule for interpreting Paul is to follow the actual writings of Paul wherever they conflict with the much later narrative of Acts. This rule will place all of the details of Paul's conversion story on the road to Damascus into doubt as something that actually happened in history. It is worth noting that Paul never writes about his conversion. He assumes a conversion from the role of the prosecutor of Christians, but he gives us no details, making Acts seem dramatically unhistorical.
Acts does give us, however, the only cohesive picture we have of Paul's adventurous missionary journeys, which correlates well with corroborative details in the Pauline epistles. This sense is strengthened when Acts introduces in Acts 16:10, and then continues through most of the rest of the book, a section of his travel narrative that does not use the descriptive pronoun "they," but rather the autobiographical pronoun "we." It is as if Luke found a diary of the journeys of Paul written by one of Paul's companions and simply incorporated this diary into his larger work. These "we" sections of the book of Acts are accorded by many, but certainly not by all New Testament scholars, a place of greater significance and greater authority than any other part of the book of Acts so I simply call these passages to you for your attention and further study.
When I try to flesh out the portrait of the Paul of history as we have received it from ancient times, I always find the "personal notes" dropped almost accidentally into the text of the book of Acts to be enormously helpful. These notes offer a kind of unplanned access to the person. I think, for example, of that tale in Acts about an event that occurred on his first missionary journey, during which he was the number two person to Barnabas on the missionary team. In this story, the two missionaries were in the city of Lystra (Acts 14:6ff) and it gives us an insight into Paul's physical appearance. Barnabas and Paul were both mistaken for Gods visiting from Mt. Olympus. The people, looking at the two of them, began to refer to Barnabas as Zeus, the king of the Gods, and to Paul as Hermes, the messenger God. In the cultural patterns of that day, the tradition defined Zeus as tall and commanding in stature. We can, properly, I assume, suggest that Barnabas must have himse lf been a person of imposing size to have been mistaken for Zeus. Hermes, the messenger God, was portrayed as small and wiry and as constantly speaking. For Paul to have been thought of as Hermes he must have been similar in stature and above all talkative. Clearly Paul elicited that kind of image in the minds of his hearers. Paul is described in one other 2nd century apocalyptic source as thin, with dark connecting eyebrows stretched across the entirety of his face. There is some similarity in these two descriptions.
In chapter 13:13-15, Barnabas and Paul were in the town of Perga in Pamphylia and the liturgical practice of the 1st century synagogue was described just by chance, giving us the best insight we have of how the synagogue functioned on the Sabbath in the 1st century. There we learn of the priority of the reading of the Torah, which contains the books Genesis through Deuteronomy, which were attributed to Moses. In the more traditional synagogues, the Torah was required to be read in its entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year. In some less traditional synagogues, a three-year cycle was followed, but the centrality of the law, the Torah, in both was crucial. Following the Torah came readings from the prophets. The Jewish tradition meant two things by the phrase "the prophets." First, there were the "early prophets," that is the biblical books of Joshua through II Kings, which told us, as I have previously noted, the history of the Jewish people after the death of their f ounder, Moses. Second, they meant the "latter prophets," that is, those books attributed to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the book the Jews referred to as "the Book of the Twelve." This volume contained on one scroll what we call today the Minor Prophets or the books from Hosea through Malachi. Please note that Daniel was not one of the prophets since Daniel was not written until about 168 BCE and had not yet been incorporated into the sacred text. Readings from either the early or the latter prophets did not have the same gravitas associated with the law, so those lessons were read in much smaller portions over an indeterminate amount of time. Next, the members of the congregation would be invited to speak, relating their own insights gained from these readings. I am now convinced that this is where the disciples of Jesus began the process of attempting to demonstrate that the Jewish Scriptures pointed to Jesus in almost every verse. By the time the gospels are writte n, this interpretative pattern is both assumed and operative. The author of Acts relates Paul's sermon in 13:16-41 and provides us with dramatic insights into the way Christians employed the Jewish Scriptures and the way that Christianity emerged in the synagogue.
The book of Acts also chronicles in some detail the hostility that broke out over Paul and his teaching on the part of the Orthodox Jewish world. On his journeys in whatever city he visited Paul always went to the synagogue first. He never thought of himself as anything but a Jew. In these synagogues, which were always outside of the Jewish homeland, there were three distinct groups gathered for worship: the orthodox, traditional Jews who believed that the entire truth of God was embodied in the Torah and who were not therefore prepared to welcome any deviations from or additions to the traditional text; the liberal-leaning Jews dispersed, from their homeland and more and more interacting with their Gentile neighbors; and finally those people known as "Gentile proselytes," who were people drawn to the synagogue by the ethical monotheism of Judaism, but were unwilling to adopt and, some were even repelled by, the cultic practices of circumcision, kosher dietary laws and Sa bbath day observance.
Paul's message appealed to these Gentile proselytes and significantly to the liberal Jews of the Diaspora, but he drew little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party for whom any change threatened their security. So they were the primary source of the hostility toward Paul, which plagued him everywhere he went. Acts 15 describes a council of church leaders gathered to deal with this tension and, according to this Acts account, a compromise was worked out by James, the Lord's brother, who appears to have headed the Jerusalem community of Jewish believers in Jesus. In this compromise, Paul was given carte blanche to continue his work among the Gentiles and was assured that his converts did not have to comply with Jewish ritual practices. The converts were asked, however, to agree to three things: to abstain from eating meat that had been offered to idols, from unchastity and from blood from any animal that had been strangled and was thus not ceremon ially clean. Whether the details of this council are accurate is hard to say, but it did serve to set the Christian movement free from the constraints of those Jewish practices, and began its separation from Judaism which had birthed Christianity.
When Paul and Barnabas prepared for their second journey, a dispute broke out leading to a split between the two. The issue, according to Acts, was whether to take John Mark with them. Mark appears to have abandoned them on the first journey to return home. Paul then became the senior member of a second missionary team and chose Silas to accompany him. Barnabas took Mark and in this manner the movement spread.
On this second tour we learn that Paul had a dream of a Macedonian imploring him to come to Macedonia. Paul obeyed the vision and Christianity moved into what is now Europe. Paul had adventures in Greece including a debate in Athens that he clearly did not win. Paul's direction was now set and he turned his efforts toward the vast Gentile world, which increasingly aroused the hostility of the Orthodox Jews.
Paul returned to Jerusalem to bring money for the relief of the Jewish followers of Jesus there and his journey back to this holy city. His condemnation by the Orthodox party of Judaism, his appeal to Rome under his privilege as a Roman citizen and his subsequent journey to Rome by ship make up the bulk of the remainder of this book. On both the trip to Jerusalem and the trip to Rome, the book of Acts becomes an exciting adventure story. On one occasion, Paul began a sermon at midnight and preached so long that a young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in a window, went to sleep and fell to the floor as if dead. Paul revived him, but the admonition against long sermons found a scriptural basis. On his trip to Rome, we read of storms, shipwrecks at sea, surviving the bite of a poisonous viper and many other adventures. In verse 16 of the final chapter 28 Paul finally arrives in Rome and there the book of Acts closes rather abruptly saying that Paul lived there at his o wn expense for two years under very loose arrangements, welcoming all who came to him.
While the story of Paul's death is not told, Luke's purpose has been achieved. The Christian message has traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem to Rome and was now planted firmly in the capitol of the known world. As we say, "The rest is history." Is Acts accurate history? We can never be sure. The Church did, however, move with Paul into all the world.
– John Shelby Spong
 

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Dr. Larry L. Ligo, Professor of Art History at Davidson College, writes:
Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation there, but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.
I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out of print books, but have not, as of yet, been successful.
Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your up-coming speaking engagements?
Dear Professor Ligo,
Thank you for your letter. When I was growing up in Charlotte, N. C., Davidson College was the crown jewel of nearby educational opportunities. I always admired its commitment to academic excellence. What was then a very small town had a mayor named Tom Griffith, who was a dairy farmer and who was, in fact, my mother's brother and thus my uncle. Your letter brought back many memories to me.
Thank you also for your condolences on the death of one of my three major mentors in life, Michael Goulder. I hope you saw the column I wrote as my tribute to him. It came out earlier this year and can be accessed by subscribers to this column as can all of the previous columns published at this site. Michael's books are indeed hard to find. I hired a rare books firm in the UK to locate them for me. It was a fairly expensive way to build a library, but I treasure them. I suggest that you look at a major theological library to find them. I would bet that they are in the library of the divinity school of Wake Forest University.
My speaking schedule is available on my column's website at all times, giving information on events three months out. I was recently in North Carolina at the First Congregational Church-UCC in Hendersonville in late May and early June. I will be in North Carolina next, lecturing on the Monday and Tuesday nights of the first three weeks of August in Highlands, sponsored by the Highlands Institute of Theology and Religion. I realize that Highlands is about a three hour drive from Davidson, but it is a beautiful drive and I would love to see you.
 
– John Shelby Spong

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Thursday July 15, 2010
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXIX
I and II Timothy and Titus — The Pastoral Epistles
We Have the Truth!
Thus far, as we have explored the origins of the various books of the New Testament, we have not yet come across that familiar form of human religion that asserts: "We have the Truth!" "If you disagree with me, the truth is not in you." It is our "God-given duty to define truth, defend truth and impose truth." Up until this point in the biblical story, the Christian movement has basked in the wonder of the Christ experience, sought words that can convey the power of that experience to another and has dealt with conflict only in the attempt by believers to clarify what this Christ experience really meant. Since, however, religious systems almost always, devolve into a security-giving system in which "my understanding" of God is assumed to be the same as God, we should not be surprised to disc over this negativity making its appearance inside the Christian movement. When we turn to the Pastoral Epistles, the ones we have named I and II Timothy and Titus, our wait comes to an end. This mentality that suggests than any person can possess "ultimate Truth" in his or her propositional statements permeates almost every verse of these particular writings. This attitude is so apparent that it actually helps us to date these works. That, in turn, forms the data that makes us absolutely certain that Paul is not the author of any of these epistles.
The Pastoral Epistles are so clearly the product of a later period of church history, when missionaries, prophets and teachers have been replaced by hierarchical and authoritative figures called bishops, priests or presbyters and deacons — all institutional functionaries. Even more, the office of a senior bishop, elder, or archbishop has had time to develop and the primary task of this official, it seems, is to impose order on the life of the various congregations in a given geographical region and to guarantee conformity in both their worship and their teaching. From other sources, we can identify this ecclesiastical structure as reflecting the period in church history no earlier than 90 CE and possibly as late as 120 CE. While these dates alone rule out Pauline authorship, they also make us aware that enough time has passed so that Paul is regarded as a respected not a controversial figure as the Paul of history certainly was. In these works, Paul has become the sy mbol of a revered elder apostle possessing such authority that these words are buttressed by being written in his name. Timothy and Titus, the younger companions of the historical Paul, named in his own authentic letters (Timothy in Romans, I and II Corinthians, Philippians and I Thessalonians) and (Titus in II Corinthians and Galatians), have been transformed into symbols of the next generation of Christian leaders who listen eagerly to the elder Paul's advice. While the Paul of history could write his ode to love in I Corinthians 13 and speak about his own conversion in Romans 8:38, 39, the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles is only interested in order, "sound" teaching, proper obedience and the need to drive away erroneous and false teaching. In the Pastoral Epistles "orthodoxy" has been defined in non-flexible ways.
In content, the Pastorals are quite similar to the five letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written between 110 and 113 CE while he was on his way to his own martyrdom. They reflect similar church structures, similar lines of authority and issue similar warnings against false teachers, once again demonstrating that they are the products of about the same time. The chief function of a bishop in both of these sources is "to defend the faith," and to "establish orthodoxy," which simply means "right thinking." Words like "doctrine" and "teaching" are a major concern of these books that clearly favor "catholic-orthodox" formulas.
It is apparent that something is threatening this sound doctrine. Historians have identified the enemy as a group of Christians who called themselves "Gnostics." The Pastoral Epistles exhort younger leaders to protect the "true faith" by confronting evil, rebuking or silencing these false teachers who are disparaged as "imposters, unbelievers and deceivers." The battle grew quite hostile with words like "stupid, unprofitable and futile" being used. God-given authority was claimed for established church leaders. They alone were authorized to determine what constitutes "true doctrine" and they alone had the power to ordain new leaders, who in order to qualify themselves for ordination, had to take vows to be faithful to the established tradition. Those who, in a previous generation, had themselves been "revisionists" in the synagogue were now determined to allow no revisionists in the church. The language of the Pastorals is replete with familiar religious hostility. Tit us 1:13 refers to Cretans as "liars, evil beasts and lazy gluttons." I Timothy calls those opposed to sound doctrine "immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars and perjurers." II Timothy says its enemies engage in "godless chatter" and likens their talk to "gangrene." Church fights can frequently be anything but Christian! By this time in church history the disciples of Jesus seem to have moved rather far from Jesus' admonition to "love your enemies!" Yet in the midst of this rather rampant hostility we are startled to find familiar and treasured words that we might have heard, but of their origin we had no clue. I refer to such phrases from the Pastorals as: "A little wine is good for your stomach." "The love of money is the root of all evil." "We brought nothing into this world and it is certain that we can carry nothing out." Christianity so often blends good and evil.
Someone once said that Christianity probably would not have survived had it not become institutionalized and that it might not survive because it did become institutionalized. Institutions, certainly including the Christian Church, always subvert truth to institutional needs. That is why the Church developed irrational power claims like, "My pope is infallible," or "My Bible is inerrant," or "There is only one true Church" and it is mine or "No one comes to the father except through my church or my faith tradition."
These assertions always arise in religious movements when the decision is made that the wonder, truth and mystery of God can in fact be captured inside human words developed inside human minds. God and my understanding of God become the same. The power needs of the religious institutions become identified with the truth of God and the well-being of church leaders. This mentality almost inevitably produces religious wars, religious persecution, the Inquisition and the incredible cruelty that we Christian people have poured out on our victims over the centuries. It also finds expression in the rudeness frequently seen in religious debate.
Two stories will serve to make this point clear and to reveal why I have no great appreciation for the Pastoral Epistles, which not only introduced, but also justified these attitudes and helped to make them part of the life of institutional Christianity. The first story is personal; the second comes to me from another source.
I have been on a number of book tours to Australia. In the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney, Christianity has been captured by a Northern Irish Protestant fundamentalism of an 18th century variety and frozen in time in the South Pacific. The Bible to them has to be read literally, women can not be ordained or have authority over men and homosexuality is an abomination! So my presence there appeared to frighten Sydney's Anglican leaders and call them to arms against the anti-Christ. When I came on a lecture tour for my book, "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" these leaders quickly got out a fundamentalist paperback rebuttal that hit the bookstands the day my plane landed. In addition to that, they devoted a number of pages in their Archdiocesan newspaper, "The Southern Cross," to arming their people with the "facts" necessary to resist the onslaught of this non-fundamentalist, and therefore non true-believing, Christian. Finally, they appointed a "truth squad" headed by one of their bishops, named Paul Barnett, to follow me around Australia to "correct my errors publicly" lest the people be corrupted. They contacted any radio or television station on which I was scheduled to appear to demand "equal time" for "the truth." One noonday TV program decided to book us together rather than accede to "equal time." The conversation went well at least from my point of view until Paul Barnett exploded with the words, "Jack, you're nothing but a Gnostic." I responded, "Paul, the wonderful thing about that charge is that 99% of our Australian viewers do not know whether you have just insulted me or complimented me." I apparently bothered Paul Barnett as much as the Gnostics had bothered the authors of the Pastoral Epistles.
The second story came to me from a member of a book study group in a large conservative Episcopal Church in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky. This group had been meeting for some time in this church to read and discuss some popular modern religious writers like Marcus Borg, John Crossan and even Rowan Williams. The local parish clergy got wind of the fact that this group was actually discussing theological ideas that did not fit their definition of orthodoxy, so they decided that one of them should sit in on the discussion to protect the participants from "heresy." In the future, the group was informed, the clergy would pick the books the group would read, suggesting champions of yesterday's orthodoxy like N. T. (Tom) Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson. If this group would not agree to these conditions they were told that space in this church would no longer be available for their gatherings. The group immediately found another church that would welcome them and so they m oved on.
Religious leaders need to learn that ultimate truth can never be fully captured in propositional statements at any point in human history: not in scripture, not in creeds and not in doctrines. That strange and destructive idea was first introduced to the Christian movement by the Pastoral Epistles. Christianity has been compromised from that day to this.
– John Shelby Spong
 

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Mary Ann Dobrik, via the internet, writes:
I am very disappointed that the Gospel of John is not being discussed next in this series of columns. Elgin United Church book study is studying this gospel, following the question series in: John: 26 Studies for Individuals and Groups written by N.T. Wright. I do not particularly like this study book and was hoping that Bishop Spong's articles would give me some helpful guidance in refuting some of the remarkable fundamentalist claims in this study book. When will Bishop Spong reach the Gospel of John in his discussions? I need his insightful scholarship.
Will Bishop Spong be coming to Peterborough, Ontario to lecture in 2011? I hope so.
Respectfully,
Mary Ann Dobrik
Dear Mary Ann:
Your letter delighted me in that it expresses disappointment that John did not come up in my study after Luke as it does in the Bible. I appreciate the fact that you had great expectations even if you felt disappointed.
I have said from the beginning of this series that I would be looking at the New Testament in the order in which it was written. That is what I have done from the very beginning. I started with the genuine Pauline Epistles because Paul wrote between 51-64 CE. Then I went to Mark the first gospel; then to Matthew the second gospel. Next I treated Luke-Acts as two parts of the same story. Then I moved to the early, but non-authentic, Pauline letters: II Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians, all of which appear to have been written well after Paul's death, but were probably contemporaneous with the synoptic gospels. Next I will address the pastoral epistles: I & II Timothy and Titus, which are dated between 90-110 CE, followed by the general epistles: I & II Peter, James and Jude. Then I will do a column on the Epistle to the Hebrews, which I believe deserves serious treatment. Then I will complete the series with probably three columns on the Gospel of John, one on t he Epistles of John (I, II, III) and will close this series with a final column on the book of Revelation. I expect the series to be complete by September 1.
Between September 1 and December 31 of this year I will be busy with the editorial task of turning this series of columns into a book that HarperCollins will publish some time in 2011 under the title: Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.
I am sorry the John section did not reach the Elgin United Church in time for your study. N.T. Wright is more of a propagandist for fundamentalism than he is a New Testament scholar, albeit he has the capacity to use heavily perfumed and sophisticated language to preserve the illusion of scholarship. I can well imagine that you need a counterpoint.
Since my next major work will be on the Gospel of John, I have been reading books on John almost exclusively for the last year. There are some massive and brilliant commentaries like those of Rudolf Bultmann, C.H. Dodd and Raymond Brown, but I doubt if they would be good resources to your class, because of their sheer bulk and heavy footnotes. I have, however, thoroughly enjoyed two other smaller books that I happily recommend to you. One is The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel by L. William Countryman and the other is Invitation to John by George W. MacRae. Both are less that 200 pages and I have profited greatly by my study of them.
We have no present plans to return to Peterborough, Ontario, at this moment though we thoroughly enjoyed our time there twice in the past. We will be in the Lutheran Church in New Market, Ontario, in the late spring of next year. Maybe I will see you there.
Thanks for writing,
 
– John Shelby Spong

 

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Thursday July 22, 2010
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXX
The Epistle to The Hebrews
We do not know who wrote it. We do not know the date of its composition. We do not know to whom this book in the Bible was actually written. We are clear that it was not authored by Paul. It was certainly not written as a letter or an epistle. Its format is much more that of an address, a lecture or a sermon. The "Hebrews" to whom this work is addressed do not even appear to be Hebrews, at least not in a religious sense. They were, rather, Jewish Christians — that is, people of Jewish background who had become followers of Jesus. They had roamed far from the strict orthodoxy of traditional Judaism, but they were still deeply familiar with and committed to Jewish liturgical practices. They were Hellenized and breathed deeply of the Greek culture that had spread over the known world from the time of the conquest by Macedonia in the forth century BCE under the leadership, first, of King Philip II and later of his son, Alexander the Great. This letter to the Hebrews was written in Greek, not Aramaic, the language of traditional Judaism. It nonetheless reveals a deep and significant connection to the Hebrew Scriptures, but it is noteworthy that, whenever the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes these scriptures, it does so from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament done about 250 years before the birth of Jesus. Where these Greek-speaking, dispersed Hebrews lived when they received this book cannot be determined. The guesses as to the time of its writing range from the late 60's CE at the earliest to about 140 CE at the latest. The weight of opinion, however, would fix its date no earlier than the late 80's and no later than 100 CE. The Epistle of Clement, a well-known piece of early Christian writing which is generally dated in the middl e years of the tenth decade, does in fact quote the book of Hebrews. This should provide us with an outer limit, but the proposed date of Clement is itself also widely debated, though most would gravitate to around 96 CE. All we can really do is to peruse the text of this book and learn whatever we can from its content about both its author and its audience.
The atmosphere reflected in the Epistle to the Hebrews is tense. It speaks of those who are in danger of drifting away (2:1). It mentions those who have fled for refuge (6:18). It urges its hearers to hold fast to their confession of hope without wavering (10:23). It refers to those who have the need of endurance (10:36). It urges perseverance in the race or task set before them (12:1). Finally, it assures its readers that since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, their hearts should be strengthened by grace (13:8-9).
Many scholars suggest that this level of tension in the Christian community reflects the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, which ravaged the Church between 81and 96, making the latter years of this reign our best guess for the date of the composition of Hebrews.
The recipients of this treatise seem to reflect one constituency in the evolving Christian Church. While Christianity was born in a Jewish womb as a Jewish movement within the synagogue, it turned, primarily under the influence of Paul and of Paul's followers like Luke, Timothy and Titus, into being more and more a gentile religion. This fact served to make it harder and harder for some of the earliest disciples of Jesus, who were traditional Jews, to continue to live and worship inside the Christian movement. That is a reality that has been replicated again and again in religious history. Growth always marginalizes the original members who feel left behind, and thus not part of the present consensus. They no longer felt that they fitted into what Christianity was becoming. They were tempted to pull away from their Christian convictions and were tempted to return to the Judaism of their childhood. The author of this book sought to dissuade them from this step by demons trating the superiority of Christianity to traditional Judaism. The way this author chose to do that is quite telling.
A significant holy day in the life of the synagogue was Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. It came in the fall of the year and was observed with a 24-hour vigil of solemn penitence and somber mood. The liturgy focused on two animals that were brought to the high priest. Both animals had to reflect what the Jewish people yearned to be, physically perfect in body and morally perfect in mind and spirit. These two animals could be lambs or goats, or one of each, and they were gone over scrupulously by the high priest until he was assured first that they were perfect physical specimens; they could have no scratches, blemishes, scars or broken bones. Secondly, they were deemed to be morally perfect since they lived below the level of human freedom and were thus incapable of choosing to do evil. One of these animals, normally a lamb, was then slaughtered in a sacrificial, liturgical manner and its blood was smeared on the mercy seat of God in the Temple's Holy of Holies. This blood was believed to possess cleansing power. Through the blood of this perfect lamb of God, the people believed they could now stand before God on this one day despite their sinfulness. They came to God "through the blood of the lamb" that washed their sins away.
The second animal, referred to in Leviticus as a goat, was then brought into the assembly of the people and placed before the high priest who, taking the goat's horns began to confess the sins of the people. The sins of the people were thus said to come out of the people and to land on the head and back of this goat, making this goat the bearer of the people's sins. This animal was then banished from the assembly and run into the wilderness, leaving the people symbolically cleansed from their sins. This goat was called "the scapegoat" for he bore the sins of the people and vicariously endured the fate the people had earned for themselves.
There is no doubt that the liturgy of Yom Kippur was instrumental in interpreting the Jesus experience among the earliest Jewish Christians. Echoes of this connection are found throughout the New Testament. Paul uses this Yom Kippur formula when he wrote in I Corinthians 15 that "Jesus, (like the lamb of Yom Kippur) died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Mark makes reference to this liturgical understanding when he wrote (10:45) that Jesus, like the lamb of Yom Kippur, gave his life as a "ransom" for many. When John the Baptist sees Jesus for the first time in the Fourth Gospel, he called him "the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," a phrase lifted almost verbatim from the Yom Kippur liturgy.
It was this understanding that later got incorporated into substitutionary theories of the atonement, which found expression in the Protestant mantra, "Jesus died for my sins!" and is referenced when Catholics refer to the Eucharist as "the sacrifice of the Mass." The mass thus makes timeless the sacrifice of Jesus as the lamb of God, to take away the sins of the people.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews was thus writing to discouraged Jewish Christians, who no longer felt at home in predominately Gentile worshipping communities, hoping to prevent their return to the fold of Judaism. One cannot go back, he argues, to the ineffective sacrifice of the lamb at Yom Kippur, which has to be repeated annually because it affects nothing permanently. Yom Kippur, he contends, only expresses a yearning for change; it does not itself create change. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, he argues, did in fact break the power of sin that made sacrifices necessary in the first place. We can now enter the presence of God, the author of Hebrews argues, just as we are with all our warts and shortcomings visible, for in the cross of Calvary the love of God accepted the offering of the new lamb of God, embraced us in our sinfulness and transformed us by assuring us that nothing we can do and nothing we can be will finally separate us from the love of G od seen in Christ Jesus. This was the message Jesus lived because he reached out in accepting love even to those who betrayed him, denied him, forsook him, tortured him and killed him. In the death of Jesus on the cross, a once-and-for-all act was accomplished, which brought God and human kind together in a new creation. So, he concluded, if one leaves the Christian faith to return to Judaism, one is actually leaving the sacrifice that made all future sacrifices unnecessary in favor of a sacrifice that must be repeated annually. Jesus was the perfect offering for which God yearned, while the Yom Kippur animals were only a symbol of the eternal human yearning to be whole. Thus, this writer argued that in the sacrifice of Christ all sacrifices were brought to an end and all human beings can now become new creations in the oneness of God. It is to our ears a strange argument, but it resonated with the audience to whom it was first addressed.
The author of Hebrews also likens the priesthood of Jesus, not to the high priests of Jewish worship, but to the eternal priesthood of a figure named Melchizadek mentioned in the book of Genesis. His priesthood was without beginning or ending. Perhaps this is the place when the idea of pre-existence first entered the Christian story. In this paradigm, the Christ is at one and the same time both the new sacrifice and the sacrificing high priest. It was an argument based on ancient worship patterns, but it must have impressed some contemporary leaders since this book was quickly incorporated into the Canon of Christian scriptures. Yet, as the Church became more and more Gentile, the power of this argument faded. Today it sounds like another version of the old religious cliché: "My God is superior to your God!" In its day, however, it stated the essential Christian claim that all people can come into the presence of God "just as I am without one plea," which is, I be lieve, the one irreducible Christian claim. Yet, strange as it seems, some parts of the Christian Church still deny that the love of God is extended to all regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or even creed. The Epistle to the Hebrews ultimately proclaims that there are no boundaries on the love of God. That is a worthy message, even when couched in an archaic form.
– John Shelby Spong
 

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
sleahead.kerry1, via the Internet, writes:
My husband was raised in Christian Science, but was an avowed atheist all his adult life, often denigrating the faith of others. In June of 2008, a friend gave us a copy of A New Christianity for a New World. After reading this and Why Christianity Must Change or Die, my husband announced, "If Bishop Spong can write this and still be a believer, I guess I am too." I was widowed that August (2008). I shall be forever grateful to you, Bishop Spong, and your message to those of us who have been in exile.
Dear sleahead.kerry1,
I write to your e-mail identification because your letter was unsigned, but I thank you for it. I send you my sympathy in regard to the death of your husband in August of 2008. Having lost my first wife in August of 1988, I have a deep awareness of what you have been through in the last two years. Be assured that the pain does lift, and when it does the memories will grow deeper and will provide consolation.
I am pleased that your husband found help in my writings. That makes my own struggle worth the effort. There is, I am completely convinced, a reality that we call God, but none of can finally capture that reality in our words, whether they be the words of scripture, creeds, doctrines or dogmas. The great pain of organized religion is that many people see religion not as the description of a journey into an ultimate mystery, but as a formula designed to keep human anxiety in check. That use of religion continues to repel me.
Last week, for example, I received a complimentary copy of a right-wing, Midwestern Episcopal publication. I no longer subscribe to this dreadful magazine, as I did when I was an active bishop, because I no longer have to be aware of or even engage its negative and uninformed mentality. Looking over this "complimentary" issue made me deeply glad that I no longer see it on a regular basis. It carried an article by two African Anglican bishops who complained that the American Church paid no attention to the well-being of the Anglican Communion by ordaining Mary Glasspool, an open lesbian priest who has lived with her partner for many years, to be a bishop in Los Angeles. I wanted to inform these two prelates that we in America also did not pay attention to our racist members when we, a number of years ago, chose great people like John Walker and John Burgess, both African-Americans, to be our bishops in Washington, D.C. and in Massachusetts respectively. We in America al so did not pay attention to our sexist members when we chose Barbara Harris to be or first female bishop in Massachusetts; Mary Adelia McLeod to be our first female diocesan bishop in Vermont and Katharine Jefferts-Schori to be our first female Presiding Bishop and Primate. If we were not willing to be bound by racism or sexism in those days, I wonder why these African bishops think we will be or should be bound today by their rampant homophobia.
This publication also told of an American bishop who declined to participate in Mary Glasspool's ordination so that she "could keep her relationship with some African bishops intact." It is hard for me to see such an abdication of leadership, which compromises principle in order to reduce conflict with those who wish to demonize homosexual people, as a quality deserving of anything but disgust. Yet this bishop was actually offering this behavior as virtuous. She was clearly worshiping at the altar of institutional unity on which the humanity of many has been sacrificed to gain institutional well-being as if that were a noble reason. That is the mindset of our current Archbishop of Canterbury, whose abdication of effective leadership has been breathtaking and incredibly disappointing.
Finally, this publication quoted a lay leader, who is a career foreign policy expert, to say that the Bible in both the Old and the New Testaments condemns homosexuality as evil. This tired argument reveals little more than a profound ignorance of both the Bible and homosexuality. This man should either know better or seek to keep his biblical illiteracy to himself.
These are just examples of the religious attitudes that have caused people like your husband to think he is an atheist. If this is Christianity, I don't know why any thinking person would be attracted to it.
If I lit a candle in the religious darkness that enveloped your husband, I am profoundly grateful and I thank you for writing.
– John Shelby Spong

 

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July 29, 2010

 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXXI
The General Epistles — James, I & II Peter and Jude

When we come near the end of the New Testament, we run into four small books that bear the names of well-known figures in the gospel tradition. They are James and I Peter, each of which consists of five chapters; then there is II Peter with three chapters and finally Jude with only one. James is, in many ways, a counterpoint to the main thrust of the New Testament, particularly to Paul, and was traditionally thought to be the work, not of James, the son of Zebedee, or even James, the son of Alphaeus, both of whom are on a biblical list of the twelve, but James, the brother of the Lord. That is a statement that sometimes startles people who have, usually unconsciously, bought into the idea that Mary was a "perpetual virgin" and thus could not have had any other children. Yet the facts are that in Mark 6, the brothers of Jesus are named as James, Joses, Simon and Judas. Mark also says that Jesus had at least two sisters, though they are unnamed. James, the Lord's brother, also appears in Paul's letter to the Galatians as the head of Jerusalem's Christian community and as Paul's adversary. James is identified by Paul as one who is articulating and insisting on the point of view that says that the doorway to Christianity can only travel through Judaism with all its rules and with the acknowledgement of the centrality of the Torah. Paul countered this perspective in Galatians and with his whole ministry, which involved his attempt to carry out a mission to the Gentiles. At one point, James, the Lord's brother, seemed to have represented a strong option and to offer a viable aspect of what it meant to be Christian. The epistle of James seeks to present a later form of that early argument and it serves today to balance Paul's overwhelming theology of Grace. Martin Luther, clearly a direct theological descendant of Paul, called this epistle an "epistle of straw" and tried to have it expunged from the New Testament. Obviously, he failed! The epistle of James asserts that faith is insufficient without works; indeed, he says that without works faith is dead!

Like the epistle to the Hebrews, the epistle of James is more a treatise or a sermon than it is a letter, but it does represent that earliest Jewish-Christian strand of pre-Pauline Christianity. In its 108 verses, it contains 60 imperative statements about how the gospel is to be lived. It has some echoes in it of the Sermon on the Mount and it is steeped in ethical prescriptions. For this epistle, "ethics" means the demands of the law or the Torah, while for Paul "ethics" means the fruit of the Spirit. Therein is set the battle lines for the oldest fight in Christian history. This epistle is generally dated in the last decade of the first century between 90 and100 and it would appear unlikely that James, the brother of Jesus, is its actual author. It is, however, fair to say that the argument of this book supports the point of view that James appears to have held, but we must face the fact that all we know abut James comes from Paul in Galatians or from Luke in the book of Acts. There are some references in John's gospel to the "brothers of Jesus," none of which are flattering. We have no reason to believe that any of these sources were objective. I find the epistle of James to be of value, but not of great value. It has, in fact, inspired charitable work among the poor and that is its major claim to belong in the New Testament.

The epistle I Peter was written probably late in the first century and in elegant Greek that Simon Peter, the fisherman from Galilee, could never have mastered. Its purpose was to encourage Christians undergoing persecution, probably in the region of the world that we today call Turkey. It purports to have been written from Rome at the time of the persecutions under Nero, when Peter was crucified, but according to undocumented tradition his crucifixion was upside down. This epistle has thus been used to buttress the Vatican's claims that Peter became the first bishop of Rome and thus the first Pope. This idea was then augmented with the words that Jesus supposedly said to Peter in Matthew's gospel that "upon this rock, (i.e., Peter instead of Peter's faith) I will build my church." It is arguments like these that are supposed to provide us with clear evidence that Jesus intended the Christian Church to be run from Rome. Of course, there have been other such claims in history. Constantine thought the Christian Church should be run from Constantinople. The Mormons thought it should be run from Salt Lake City. The Religious Science movement thought it should be run from Boston. We ought never to confuse institutional power claims with the gospel.

There are, nonetheless, some noteworthy things in the epistle we call I Peter that merit mention. It seems to oppose the physicality of the bodily resurrection and to identify Jesus' resurrection with what later came to be called "the ascension," rather than with a resuscitated body. This would line the author of this book up with Paul and to place him in opposition to Luke where the resurrection is made to be quite physical. This fact causes me to date I Peter prior to Luke, or prior to the time when Luke's gospel gained ascendancy in the mid 90's.

It is also from I Peter that we get the phrase in the creed, "He descended into hell," a phrase that originally meant not the place of torment, but Gehenna, the abode of the dead. Peter suggests that, between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus went and preached to "the souls in prison." This text was thus used to support the argument that Christianity developed, seeking to give access to salvation to those who lived before Christ, while still maintaining the authority to make exclusive claims for the ultimacy of this new faith system. Human sensitivity always seems to find a way to lessen the horror of hostile theological rules. Creeds that many seem to believe "dropped out of heaven fully formed" in fact reveal a remarkable ability to adapt to new realities and new sensitivities.

II Peter was probably the last written book to be included in the New Testament. It is generally dated in the first half of the second century, perhaps around 135-140 CE. Obviously, this book was not written by Peter. None of the author claims made for any of these books will stand up to any real scrutiny, a fact that has been known in Christian academic circles for at least two hundred years. II Peter actually quotes from the Epistle of Jude, which we know was not written until well after the turn of the first century. It also refers to Paul's letters as if they are not only bound together in a single volume, but also as if they are already regarded as "scripture" equal in authority to any other part of the sacred text. These attitudes once again reflect a point of view and indeed a practice that did not develop until the second century. In today's world II Peter is, I fear, little noticed and seldom quoted. That is probably what it deserves for, like some of the lesser prophets, it speaks almost not at all about the concerns of today's world.

Jude is the final of the non-Johannine general epistles. It too claims to be written by Jude or Judas, also one of the brothers of Jesus. There is no suggestion that the Judas, who is supposedly the traitor, is the author of this book, but it does open us to consider the meaning of the fact that, on some of the New Testament's lists of the twelve, there are two apostles named Judas, one of whom is thought of as good. Luke calls this good Judas simply the son of James (Luke 6:16) and lists him alongside Judas Iscariot as one of the twelve. John, who never gives us a list of the twelve, does, however, refer to one called Judas, who is "not Iscariot." (John 14:22). It is Mark's gospel, once again, that refers to a Judas who is the brother of Jesus. Tradition has tried to associate one of these figures with the Epistle of Jude. To identify any biblical character with the authorship of this book is by any measure a stretch. Jude is a late first century work written well past the life span of any of the New Testament characters, a fact revealed quite clearly in its text.

The Epistle of Jude is a late treatise that reflects a time similar to that of the Pastorals. It assumes that Christianity is now a fully worked out, even codified faith system. It speaks of a Christianity that has been and can be articulated in a recognizable creedal form. It even refers to Christianity as "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints." It seems to assume that Christianity dropped from heaven in a set of propositional beliefs, well buttressed with footnotes. Some "systematic theology" books today appear to believe that this is still true. The authors of these books talk of "the deposit of faith," which reminds me more of a cow patty than it does of a living relationship with God. This attitude is part of what has created the kind of religion in general or the kind of Christianity in particular that has fueled religious wars, religious persecutions, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the activity we call forced conversions. When I wrote my book, The Sins of Scripture, this text from Jude was one of what I called "the terrible texts of the Bible." It earned that designation by the fact that it has been used throughout history to justify a variety of life-killing prejudices: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia and even the continued degradation of our environment. The book of Jude has, in my opinion, few saving graces, but one of them might be the Benediction with which the book closes (1:24, 25) that, in an adapted form, has entered the liturgies of many churches.

Not all parts of the Bible are equally holy. The General Epistles we have looked at in this column do not come close to some other parts of the New Testament in either integrity or power. They are, however, "in the book" and so, to complete our journey through the Bible, I include them. I urge you to read them once. It will not take more than ten minutes. Then you will have done it and you will never have to do it again, for, some parts of the Bible, once is enough.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

John, via the Internet, writes:

For some time now, I have been reading your weekly essays and I have read many of your books. Your understanding of the Bible and your insight into it are remarkable. I am challenged by your thoughts. However, I read a lot about what you no longer believe, but what do you believe? Regarding Jesus, I would like to see, in a page or less, what your basic belief really is. Do you believe in any of the basic doctrines that we have been taught since childhood?

Dear John,

The way you phrase your question is a familiar one that I have heard many times. I do not, however, believe I can answer it without unpacking it. It is a regular criticism made by fundamentalists and the issue is not that I have staked out a new position, but that it is not consistent with what they were taught and so they hear only the negativity. For example, I have written a 300-page book on the birth narratives of the New Testament (Born of a Woman) that reveals quite clearly that I do not believe that these stories of stars, angels, wise men, shepherds and virgin mothers are literal. Yes, I can say that in one page. The bulk of the book is, however, an analysis of what these stories meant, why they were formed, what their background sources were and what the message is that we must be prepared to hear in these stories. About 95% of this book is an attempt to say what the birth stories of Jesus are really about. Yet, I still hear people like you say to me "you don't believe in the Virgin Birth, but you never say what you do believe." I do not plead guilty to that charge. I believe that is an expression of something present in the threatened defensiveness of my would-be critic that he or she cannot admit. I want to say: "Just what part of my elaborate explanation are you incapable of grasping?"

The same thing is true about the resurrection. I have written a 350-page book (Resurrection: Myth or Reality) on what I think is behind the Easter narratives. I do not think these narratives have anything to do with a resuscitated physical body. When Fundamentalists cannot hear that, they only hear a challenge to their own limited belief system and so they experience it as negative. That is when I get a letter from them asking me to state in one page or less what "I do believe."

You ask specifically about Jesus. I respond that in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, I spelled out in intimate detail what I believe about Jesus and what the Jesus story is about. I went into the miracle stories, the differences in the gospel accounts and the role the Hebrew Scriptures played in the developing Jesus story and I concluded that book with the deepest affirmation of why I believe in Jesus and call him Lord that I know how to write. So when you request a statement about what I really believe about Jesus, I have to assume that you haven't, you can't or you won't hear what I have written.

The real problem with fundamentalism is that it narrows the brain to the only options that fundamentalists understand. When any discussion goes beyond those limits, they hear only negativity and so they begin to press for a more positive statement, i.e., one that confirms their childish Sunday school images.

So I do not think your question is really about me so much as it is an insight into where you are. I, therefore, cannot answer it in a way that would be satisfactory to you — so I cannot respond to it.

I recognize that this sounds harsh and that is not what I intend, but I have reached the point where I no longer desire to affirm ignorance as if it is a form of piety and I see no virtue in trying to respond to a question that reveals no ability on the part of the questioner to listen.

– John Shelby Spong

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