Bishop Spong's Articles September 2010

When we focus on the three epistles that bear John's name, only the first appeared to be substantial, both in length and in substance. It has five chapters, whereas II and III John have only one each. I John is a powerful treatise based significantly on the gospel and intent on drawing out its ethical implications. Its similarity to the gospel, both in vocabulary and style, has led many to the conclusion that these two pieces of writing are the products of the same person. That is not true of the second and third epistles of John, both of which indicate that they are written by one who is self-identified as "The Elder" and both reflect a time when there is a clearly defined body of truth that they feel must be defended and passed on. It is the tendency of religious people always to believe that they have in some way captured truth that is ultimate. I think it is fair to say that if II and III John had not been included in the canon of the New Testament, not much of any great significance would have been lost to the Church. It is interesting that no part of these latter two epistles that bear John's name is included in the various lectionaries for public readings at worship, a fact that speaks volumes about how these two books have been viewed historically.

That, however, is not the case with I John. This epistle has had a rich history. It is oft quoted, oft read and is frequently the subject of sermons. I John is the primary place in the New Testament in which God is specifically defined as "Love." This author states that only the person who loves can truly be said to have been "born of God." One cannot know God if one does not know love, this author argues. The presence of love, he states, is the ultimate manifestation of the presence of God. We love each other only with the love that God has given to us of God's own nature. The only way any of us can abide in God, he concludes, is to abide in love. There is no fear in this love, he states, because "perfect love casts out fear." To make this point very clear, this epistle states that "If anyone says, 'I love God' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God who he has not seen." His ultimate commandment to those to whom he writes is this, "the one who loves God, must love his or her brother and sister also." This text has been violated by the Church over the centuries, but it is so powerful that the violation has required that the object of our scorn and hatred be viewed as something sub-human. So the anti-Semitism of the ages has been accompanied by the definition of Jews as those who fall outside the boundaries of our definition of humanity. One reads the writings of some of the figures of Christian history like Irenaeus, Polycarp, John Chrysostom and even Martin Luther for documentation of this thesis. In those writings, Jews were described as "vermin" and as "unfit for life."

Women, people of color and homosexual persons have also been defined by the Church throughout history in such a way as to put them outside the boundaries of that which is fully human and thus outside of God's all-encompassing love. So women were denied higher education for 1900 years of Christian history, denied the right to vote until the 20th century and denied the possibility of ordination as pastors, priests and bishops in most churches until the 21st century. In the two largest Christian bodies in the world today, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, the ordination of women is still prohibited and that prohibition continues to be justified on the basis that a woman is somehow physically defective (i.e., not fully human) and thus cannot represent God to the people before the altars of these churches.

People of color were defined as sub-human so that they could be enslaved by Christians, segregated by Christians and denied equal rights by Christians. Only in the 1954 decision in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education was the back of segregation finally broken.

Gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual people have also been defined as both depraved and sub-human and thus have been denied equality. They have been rejected, oppressed and even killed throughout the ages by self-identified Christians. In the struggle in the United States over full equality for gay people and gay couples, the opposition has overwhelmingly been from various parts of the Christian Church, most especially from the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant wings of Christianity. The first epistle of John has been the central biblical text in confronting this religious tyranny. I'm glad this small book was included in the New Testament for I hear the "Word of God" speaking through the words of John and commanding us to love one another as God loved us.

The Bible closes its pages with the book of Revelation. It is a piece of apocalyptic or "end of the world" literature. Presumably that theme struck the leaders of the early Church, who still expected the end of the world to be near, to think that this book represented the proper way to close the New Testament. The book of Revelation has been a godsend to those who like to predict "doomsday" all of whom, let it be noted, have thus far been 100% incorrect! It is also the favorite book of those who believe that events in modern history are the fulfillment of and can be explained as the living out of biblical prophecy. In my lifetime I have heard the beast of Revelation 13 being identified with Adolf Hitler, Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Saddam Hussein, just to name a few. My mother told me that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was called the beast of Revelation during World War I. I have never found the book of Revelation to be worthy of the study it would take to open it to its own meaning and context. I have read it a number of times, but I have never been edified by it. It is all but nonsense to me. My good friend and admired colleague, Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University's department of Religion faculty, is now writing a book on Revelation. I shall read her work with delight when it is published, but I have never felt compelled personally to explore its words with any depth myself. I see this book primarily as a dated piece of first century literature and little more.

Despite this I can still say that my favorite text from Revelation is in chapter three where the author, writing to the Church of Laodicea, condemns them for being neither "hot nor cold" but "lukewarm," regarding them thereby as "wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked." As a bishop, I have known lukewarm congregations, which stand for nothing and thus have no passionate commitments. These churches will die of boredom long before they die of controversy. The love of God demands that our love go beyond our limits, confront our prejudices and call us into transformed lives. That always means that controversy is part of the Christian life.

I began this series of columns on the origin and meaning of the books of the Bible in the year 2007. It has taken me over seventy columns to complete it, interspersed as they were with treatment of the events of the day. This series has required me to go back to my library to familiarize myself anew with every book included in the sacred text, even those that I had long ago dismissed as irrelevant It has also kindled anew in me my long time love affair with this book, which began on Christmas day in 1943 when my mother gave me my first personal Bible. From that day to this, I have read it daily, going cover to cover at least twenty-five times. Some of its books I have read too many times to count. On many of its books I have spent more than a year in concentrated study. I am at this moment beginning my third year of study on the Fourth Gospel. Underneath its limited words it conveys to me a sense that all life is holy, that all life is loved and that each of us is ca lled to be all that we are capable of being. Those are the themes that I hope our world never loses.

I close this series with the words that capture my understanding of Jesus. These words come from John's gospel (10:10). "I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly." Love which breaks down all barriers of separation is the life power that I find in Jesus and that is why he is and remains Christ for me.

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear Mick,

I do not think they are contradictory statements. Matthew had all the qualities I described but he was also convinced as a follower of Jesus that the scriptures pointed us to the coming of the Messiah in very specific ways. He was also part of that first generation of Jewish believers in Jesus who mined the scriptures to find hints and pointers to Jesus as the promised Messiah. In the process, he let his desire to find texts that in his mind pointed to Jesus overwhelm his knowledge of the scriptures. Like many a preacher since, he made the text say what he wanted the text to say in order to confirm his understanding of Jesus. Matthew gave us the story of the virgin birth based on Isaiah 7:14, even though we now know and have known since the early years of the second century that the word "virgin" does not appear in that text and that text is not a predictor of a future event. The first century did not have the benefit of modern biblical textual criticism and as a result, frequently misread and certainly misinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures.

This subject is far too complex to make it clear in a Q and A format. My book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, was the place where I devoted a whole book to this thesis. I hope that you will find that book helpful and that it will clear up your present misunderstanding.

 

– John Shelby Spong

I went to China again four years later in 1988. The change was impressive. By this time, Mao Zedong had been dead for ten years and China had moved on. It was still a Communist nation, but serving the people not the revolution had become the pressing agenda of the government.

The great and disillusioning realization that I had in 1988 was in regard to how deeply my image of China had been created for me by American propaganda. The China I saw in 1988 was a far cry from what the press, the media and the government of the United States projected. I felt the same way I had felt when I learned that the Gulf of Tonkin episode that had been used to justify the massive build up of American forces in Vietnam was a fabricated event with no basis in reality. It was similar to the feeling I would have years later when high officials in the Bush administration in Washington had justified the invasion of Iraq on the basis of Iraq's development and possession of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and that had also turned out not to be true. I shall never forget Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's comment that if we did not destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the next terrorist attack would be marked by a "mushroom cloud." Most of the citizens of the United States do not travel abroad and sixty percent have never applied for a passport. So the majority of Americans are at the mercy of the way the world is interpreted to us by the policies and spokespersons of our government. Today the vehicle for communicating that perspective is the media, including three competing twenty four-hour-a-day news channels that hype every story in search of ratings. The China I saw in 1988 was very different from the China about which I had read in my newspapers and heard about on television.

This second visit to China was some 25 to 30 years after the Korean War had finally ended. In that war, Chinese soldiers had poured in endless waves across the Yalu River and they had succeeded in driving the American army, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, out of North Korea and almost into the Pacific Ocean. When the fury of this attack was over, the American forces held only a tiny defensive perimeter around the South Korean port city of Pusan. It was one of the worst defeats that America had absorbed in its history, costing huge numbers of casualties and ultimately ending General MacArthur's magnificent military career at an unprecedented low point. MacArthur blamed his defeat on the fact that the Truman administration had tied his hands by not allowing him to attack the build up and supply lines north of the Yalu River, but the fact was that in communiquéés after the dramatically successful Inchon invasion, he had informed the Truman administration that there was no chance the Chinese would enter this war. He was profoundly wrong. MacArthur was removed from his command by President Truman and a great political debate ensued in America, as always happens after a military miscalculation and a political defeat.

For President Truman, the dominant issues behind his decision not to attack China itself were twofold. First, he did not believe he should involve the American military in a land war on the continent of Asia where would-be conquerors have historically been absorbed by the conquered until they have been drained of their power. Second, he was convinced that an attack on China would bring the Soviet Union into the conflict and World War III would be unavoidable. So the Truman strategy was to recoup and resupply the army and thereby to drive the Chinese and North Koreans out of South Korea after which they would seek a political settlement. That was in fact done and it was under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower that the Korean War was finally brought to an end.

In order to perfume this defeat and to save face, however, it became necessary for this country to portray China as a significant military power. That was what became both blatantly and obviously false to me when I saw China with my own eyes in 1988. Militarily, China was a paper tiger. The China I saw was no more than a third-rate military power. Economically, it was a disaster. Its communication system was primitive. Its army had massive numbers of well-equipped soldiers, supported by Russian tanks. It had, however, almost no navy and its air force, made up primarily of Russian MIG fighters, was hardly a match for a major power. China's public streets were filled mostly with bicycles and a few motor scooters because cars were very expensive and thus extremely scarce. China's highways were largely untraveled except for dated trucks carrying produce from population center to population center. Many, if not most, houses in that year lacked both electricity and runni ng water. The highly touted "Great Leap Forward," engineered by Mao from 1958-1961, had been a colossal failure, resulting in massive starvation that cost the lives of more than forty million Chinese people. The later "Cultural Revolution" from 1966-1976 resulted in the persecution, death and displacement of millions of Chinese and the destruction of much of the artistic heritage of that country. The corporate memory of those events left the Chinese people traumatized and those memories were still present in 1988. There was nothing I saw in China then that gave any evidence of it being a "great power," let alone a military power It was important, however, to American military and economic interests for China to be viewed as a huge threat that must be contained. Led by what came to be known as the China Lobby, defending Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek from Communist aggression became the Holy Grail of the American anti-Communist stance in the eyes of such figures as Senator William Knowland of California. In the presidential election of 1960, defending two relatively insignificant islands off the China coast, Quemoy and Matsu, became the cause célèbre in the debates between Senator Jack Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. All of this kept the American "military, industrial complex," the power of which President Eisenhower had warned America about in his farewell address, going at full speed.

My second 1988 realization, derived from seeing China with my own eyes, was that from the vantage point of the masses of the Chinese people, the Communist revolution had brought great hope. American propaganda at the time made it difficult to admit that Communism was capable of anything good. China surely had a long way to go in 1988, but they had begun the march forward.

One window into that future was especially visible to me during that visit came when I saw a section of Shanghai, once known as "Millionaires Row," where the 19th century drug barons had built palatial homes with the profits from the opium trade that they controlled from the days of the Opium Wars. These huge mansions were juxtaposed to the squalor in which the Chinese poor lived. The Communist revolution literally grew out of this gap between the rich and the poor and closing this gap was a major motif of the revolution. The Communists, in their victory, had confiscated these houses to the distress, I'm sure, of their owners, turning them into buildings dedicated to the educational and artistic expression of the children of Shanghai.

One mansion was transformed into a temple for music. Here piano and violin lessons were given to China's children along with instruction in all of the other instruments from clarinet to saxophone, from viola to flute and even drums. Thus this mansion began to ring with the youthful sounds of music. In another of these mansions, it was voice and choral music that was the focus. Children as young as six and as old as eighteen were learning the music of their culture and the classics of the world and were even being heard in concert! At another of these mansions, the acrobatic arts were the focus. Today China is world renowned for its skill in acrobatics with Chinese teams roaming the world, putting on performances. Much of the expertise and success of Chinese artists and gymnasts today is a direct result of this emphasis that I noted on "Millionaires Row" some 22 years ago. I recently attended a chamber music concert in Western North Carolina in which each of the musici ans in the quartet, now in their thirties, were natives of Shanghai. A government willing to invest in its children as deeply as I saw the Chinese government doing in 1988 is a government that not only has a vision, but that also believes in the future of its nation. I was amazed and impressed in 1988 when I heard nine-year-olds playing both the piano and the violin at advanced concert levels; when I saw acrobatic feats performed by twelve-year-olds that were breathtaking, and when I listened to teenage choral groups that reminded me of Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, a reference that those of you my age will recognize. For those younger, it was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

These two things were new insights for me in 1988, but these insights were destined to pale beside the things I saw in my visit in 2010. To that story I will turn in my next column.

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear Dr. Sommerfeldt and Bill Millen,

Thank you for your words and for bringing to my attention the letter from Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center.

That letter expresses an ignorance of what Christianity is that is breathtaking to say nothing about its ignorance of Islam. It is an attitude that reeks of tribal religion in a pre–modern world; it plays on the fears and hatred that tribal religion always engenders and it ultimately leads to the dehumanization of the book burners.

Islam has been instrumental in creating some very beautiful lives, while at the same time fundamentalist Christians have frequently revealed the very attitudes Pastor Jones seems to be condemning in the Koran. I remind my readers that it was the states of the Confederacy known then and now as the Bible Belt of the South that fought to preserve slavery, then to establish segregation and finally to save segregation with fire hoses, police dogs and murderous church bombings to save segregation. Remember that the final civil rights conviction for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, MS, was handed down only a few years ago on the Reverend Edgar Killan, who was described as an ordained Baptist minister and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Christianity like Islam and every other religious system has produced members who are anything but ideal.

Pastor Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center do not understand the basic teachings of Christ, who enjoined us to love our enemies, to bless those who persecute us. Love alone transforms hatred. The kind of hatred Pastor Jones advocates never breeds anything but more hatred.

This action is an embarrassment to the Christian Church and, on behalf of many Christians, I apologize to the world and to Islam for this outrageous behavior emanating from those who claim to be the followers of Christ.

 

– John Shelby Spong

Our journey began in Shanghai, China's second largest city with 20 million citizens. Embracing the size of China's cities was the first surprise. Chongqing, known as Chungking during World War II, is the world's largest city with 30 million people and covers an area almost as large as Austria. The Chinese do not call a city of ten million a major city. They described a city of 600,000 people as a "small town," despite the fact that it was the size of Cleveland, Ohio.

The airport at Shanghai was clean, modern and efficient. As we walked through customs, each passenger was asked to vote on how politely the customs officials had treated him or her. The city itself was magnificent, modern and beautiful; lit up at night with lights shaped like flowers shining from every tree in the downtown area. Like every Chinese city we visited, there was massive building activity. The urban skylines were marked with numerous cranes as high rises seemed to grow like magic to house China's burgeoning businesses in modern office complexes and its population in modern apartments and condominiums. I was seeing the effects of the economic miracle that is today modern China. This year is an off year for the Chinese economy. It is projected to grow by only 10.3% as opposed to 11.9% in 2009! Three years ago, China replaced Japan as the world's second largest economy behind only the USA. Japan is now third with Germany fourth and the United Kingdom f ifth. Other than China, the world's other economies, including that of the United States, are today stagnant with hope for a 2% growth topping their expectations. While we were in China, the Chinese press announced that China had passed the United States as the nation with the highest annual consumption of energy.

How did this transformation happen? How widespread was it? Were the people living in the Chinese countryside flourishing as well as the urban dwellers? What was or is the human cost to this economic miracle? Is China still a Communist country? These were my questions as our journey took us to cities like Jingzhou, Wuhan, Fengdu, Xian and Beijing. During this trip I watched a Chinese-produced documentary on the Communist revolution and its leader Mao Zedong that was, surprisingly to me, anything but flattering. While giving Mao credit for the Communist victory, it portrayed him as an uncultured peasant leader who never bathed or brushed his teeth and who had a voracious appetite for young women, many of whom he apparently infected with venereal diseases. Talking to many Chinese people revealed that this documentary was not unusual. Mao is still a revered figure as the father of the revolution, but Chinese people today almost universally recognize his limitations. Th e hero of the economic miracle that marks modern China is not Mao, but Deng Xiaoping, who was Mao's bitter political enemy, purged twice, but returned three times by the party. Deng Xiaoping ultimately succeeded Mao in power and introduced what came to be called "market forces." In a telling comment, one lecturer observed that, if it had not been for Deng Xiaoping succeeding Mao, "China today would look like North Korea." Mao's major economic initiative, called "the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961)," was a disastrous failure.

Between my visit in 1988 and my return in 2010, however, a very great leap forward had occurred. China is not today the country I saw 22 years ago. In the last two decades, enormous wealth has been created and more than anywhere I have seen in the world that wealth is being invested in the well being of the masses of Chinese people. This is not to say that there is not still massive bureaucratic corruption and a rampant violation of human rights, but it is to assert that most Chinese peasants are better off today than they ever dreamed they would be.

This country is still a dictatorship. Most of us in the West would not tolerate this government's tactics, but the results are nonetheless impressive. The rise in China's standard of living has been massive; the confidence expressed in the future on the part of the common people was high and I detected almost no organized negativity toward the government.

Two things were apparently responsible for this, neither of which I believe America would tolerate, but both of which define the new China for me. First, by law, they have curbed their spiraling population growth. It has been the policy of this government for about 20 years to allow only one child to be born per family. This policy is enforced by huge fines, including loss of home and assets that could reduce a violating family to poverty, plus freely dispensed birth control and free access to abortion when birth control fails. The results are successful, and the growth of the Chinese population has stabilized at about 1.3 billion people. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are rare and generally rest on specific human situations. This policy now seems fully established and is generally not contested. The tactics used to achieve this population control may offend many in the Western world, but it is working and every developed nation will someday have to addres s its own overpopulation problem. Ultimately, genocide is the only alternative to population control. There are clearly some consequences to this policy and China is facing them today. The cultural desire for a boy in preference to a girl has caused many girl children to be put up for adoption, abandoned or "accidentally" killed. The male to female birth rate in China is now 120 boys to 100 girls, a statistic that promises much instability in the future when some 10 million males will not be able to find wives in China. On the positive side, however, the shortage of girls has begun to raise the value of females in Chinese society and the prejudice against girls is being publicly addressed.

Second, the major principle on which the Chinese government operates is that individual desires and freedoms must always be secondary to the well being of the whole society. Only a dictatorship can follow this principle in a thorough way. If the people are served well enough, however, the individuals will find their basic needs met, and this mutes the negativity significantly. The Chinese government pursues this principle relentlessly. For example, the government built a massive and efficient public transportation system long before it allowed automobiles to become widely available. Then they subsidized the system to make it inexpensive to use. In Beijing, for example, one can go by train to any part of the vast metropolitan area of 18 million people for a fare of one to two US dollars.

The government has also demolished whole cities. We met a 27-year-old man in Xian who told us that in his childhood just 15 years ago, the paths between the densely populated houses in his neighborhood could only accommodate two people walking abreast, making the possibility of escape from a fire almost nonexistent. There was one roofless public toilet for every 20 families, and only two public bath houses serving the whole community, he said. Today, all of this housing has been demolished and its inhabitants moved into high-rise apartments, all of which have indoor toilets, cooking facilities, air conditioning and running water. This transition was government-ordered and the desires of individuals were not considered. It caused great dislocation, particularly among the older people and home owners who in many cases lost their equity, but we met no one who wanted to go back to the past. The wealth of this nation is being used for the benefit of the people, even if it is based on the principle that "big brother knows best." The result is that the standard of living for the average citizen is soaring. One almost sees a new nation emerging. Everything is gleaming, modern and functional. There is still in China a yearning for personal freedom, but this lack is more than countered, for the time being at least, by the new China that is emerging. Pragmatic communism has replaced ideological communism. In fact, one could seriously question whether communism is still alive in China. It looks to me much more like a state-run and state-controlled capitalist system.

Democracy, as we know it, is simply not present in China, but the gap between the rich and the poor has been significantly diminished. Yes, there are people in China of enormous wealth, and there are also exploited workers, but, on the whole, the people appear to have bought into the idea that their individual well being depends on the well being of the whole people. The rich do not rail against the government for funds spent on the poor for housing, health care, transportation and dignity. It was also clear to me that the United States and the People's Republic of China are the only dominant economic powers in the world today. How the economic competition develops between the two will, I believe, determine our long range peace.

The Chinese people seemed happy, proud and largely content with their lives. Ninety percent of the Chinese population lives well today — or at least better than they did 20 years ago. China is today a material and technological success story like none the world has ever seen before in so short a time. China has proven that communism can bring about a major positive shift in the standard of living of the whole population.

While I returned home admiring what I had seen of China's material success, I was still troubled by the fact that I do not believe that any people can live "by bread alone," no matter how impressive that material splendor is. The battle for economic success is won, but what has happened to the soul of the Chinese people? As Western society focuses more and more on materialistic success, I wonder what has happened to the soul of the people in the West. Perhaps we need to look at that question next as I conclude this series on China.

 

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear John,

I think you misheard at the Jesus Seminar. I cannot imagine any of the Fellows making such a statement! I have a hard time knowing how to unload the various assumptions that this statement makes but let me try.

I think we can with reasonable certainty state that Jesus began his career as a disciple of John the Baptist and that he was baptized by him. The gospels spend so much time and energy trying to explain how Jesus could have been baptized by John "for the forgiveness of sins" that I must assume that it was a compelling reality that they felt obligated to explain. I also take seriously the suggestion found in the gospels themselves that Jesus moved into his public career only after the imprisonment of John the Baptist.

I do not know how to speak of Jesus "becoming divine" until we define what it means to be both human and divine. I am not a dualistic platonic thinker. I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be. So Jesus lives out the meaning of God as life, love and being rather than "becoming divine" as if that is a new status. The only way I know to enter "divinity" is to become deeply and fully human.

I recognize that if one is unfamiliar with this way of thinking, these concepts are hard to understand. When I wrote "Jesus for the Non-Religious" I addressed these issues much more fully than I can do here.

The great thing about the Jesus Seminar is that not all of the "Fellows" agree for debate there is vigorous. It is, however, a debate on a common understanding of reality. The comment you quote does not share in that common understanding and that is why I feel quite confident that no member of the Jesus Seminar said anything like that.

I hope this helps.

 

– John Shelby Spong

In all of the lectures and briefings heard while in China, religion was mentioned only once and that was pejoratively. The Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, we were told, has served only the purpose of keeping people content with their then dismal status, since Buddhism promised that by being content with their lot now, they would gain for themselves a more favorable status in the next incarnation. Religion, they said, had been nothing more than a tool of the wealthy with which to control and to pacify the masses. It was an opiate for the people, which they were eager to erase from their memories.

From time to time an allusion to religion would come up tangentially. In a presentation on China's "one child per family" policy, the government, we were told, made birth control devices, principally the contraceptive pill and condoms, universally and freely available without any protest from any religious source. In the discussion about determining the health and sex of the unborn, we were told that abortion for either a defective fetus or an unwanted gender was both government-sponsored and freely available. Once again, there was no debate, we were told, from any religious source. We also learned from background reading that during the implementation and enforcement of this one child per family policy, forced sterilization of women was widespread. When second pregnancies occurred, forced abortions were ruthlessly carried out even in the third trimester or at near term. The state's right to control the population of the people was not treated differently from its cont rolling the use of the land or engineering the growth of cattle or sheep. The goals might well be laudatory but the tactics used were frequently a violation of the most basic of human freedoms.

I met one person who admitted to being a Buddhist only to amend that statement quickly by saying "I was raised as a Buddhist." When asked what she meant, she replied, "Buddhism is an internal thing. It is no longer an external religion. No one attends a Buddhist temple or participates in Buddhist worship." The closest thing to a cultural religious celebration, she said, was the observance of the Chinese New Year. It appeared that religion had become so benign that no government energy was needed to oppose its influence. I found China to be the most secular, post-religious culture I have ever encountered.

On an earlier trip to China in 1988, I had actually felt encouraged by what I saw of the Chinese Christian movement. It was small and statistically irrelevant as a force in China's burgeoning population, but it seemed to me to possess integrity since it had shed its ties to western powers, abandoned western denominational structures and was well on its way to becoming indigenously Chinese. In that year I preached in a packed Chinese Christian church in Shanghai and visited a theological seminary where candidates for ordination were being trained. During its enforced exile, Chinese Christianity had become primarily a lay-led, largely non-institutional movement. On this trip, however, I saw no evidence of its presence. I am aware of the Vatican's continuing struggle over who has the right to name China's Catholic leaders, but while that might be a big issue in Rome it is not significant in China. The government officially is not anti-religious, but it is anti-any outside authority being imposed on anything Chinese.

Two things came to my mind as I tried to understand China's emerging future. One was a reference in Colleen McCullough's Australian novel, The Thorn Birds, in which she described the attitude of outback sheep herders toward their flocks. Australian outback ranches would contain literally thousands of acres and tens of thousands of sheep. The flocks were indeed so numerous that one individual sheep seemed to be of little value. The process of castrating the lambs to ensure their use for eating needed to be done quickly and efficiently so these herders would accomplish this task simply by biting off the animal's testicles and spitting them out. She compared this to the way pet dogs were treated in New York City where, in their scarcity, they were dressed for the weather, fed a healthy diet and cared for by a host of veterinarians. Her point was that great numbers of animals create an attitude in which no individual animal was valued while scarcity causes pets to b e treated with almost excessive pampering and caring. Perhaps the same thing is true in regard to human beings. In the west, that has only recently begun to be aware of overpopulation, the individual and individual rights have generally been respected. In a massive population like China's current 1.3 billion people individual rights can no longer be protected if they are in conflict with the needs of the whole society. Maybe it is inevitable that with overpopulation, individual rights will always be sacrificed for the well being of the whole. If that is so, the human rights violations visible in China today are simply the prelude to what the whole world faces if human population continues to expand uncontrollably, as it has done in the last century. It is a scary, even a sobering thought, but I suspect a real one.

The other image that came to my mind was the famous kitchen debate that took place in 1959 in Moscow between Vice President Richard Nixon of the United States and Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. The debate was about which system, capitalism or communism, could produce the higher standard of living for its people. It was conducted at a World's Fair that had all the most modern kitchen, labor-saving devices on display. It was also basically a materialistic debate. The goal was for each leader to tout the material splendor that provided "the good life" for the majority of its citizens. America's ingenuity was at that time clearly superior to that of the leading nation in the communist world. Certainly, at that time, the average American standard of living clearly topped that of the Soviet Union. Even then, however, the material wealth in the west was unevenly distributed. In the richest land in the world, people at the edges were still homeless and still hungry and literally millions had no health care. In the Soviet Union, the wealth at the top was clearly capped, but the poverty at the bottom was also being addressed. What worried me in that debate, however, was that free enterprise capitalism was being advocated only for its ability to create material wealth. China has today combined communist control with market capitalism to create the most dramatic rise in the standard of living of a major nation that I have ever witnessed. They might even demonstrate in time that total state control of market forces for the benefit of the people might well win the contest for material plenty. What I saw in China would never convince me, however, that the sacrifice of human freedom for material plenty represented a superior system.

It is the deepest principles of my religion that for me stand as the front line of defense against the violation of human dignity. Is self-conscious human life holy? I think it is. Is self-conscious human life made more deeply and fully human by the experience of being loved and infinitely valued? I think it is. Is the call of self-conscious human life to be all that each of us can be an ultimate value around which society must be organized? I think it is. I do not know how else the dignity of human life will ever be preserved if producing material plenty for all is the only and ultimate value affirmed by any government or any economic system. Human value rests, I believe, on a definition of human life as of infinite worth. I do not believe that value is one that can be sacrificed in the achievement of economic plenty. It is also not achievable unless the political and economic system contains a dedication to the idea of the sacredness of life.

Free enterprise capitalism has its faults. It is propelled far too often by greed and ignores the plight of the poor. It shares its wealth with the masses too unfairly, but it nonetheless does not allow the individual to be totally dehumanized by the state and treated only as a cog in a great economic wheel. It still salutes individual rights grounded in a religious definition of what it means to be human. I will fight to maintain that value even as I fight to make the economic system of the west more fair and more compassionate. If we compete with the communist world only on the basis of which system can create the most wealth, China may very well win that contest in the future. Indeed today China finances America's way of life by being the primary holder of America's debt. Yet the value, the sacredness of human life, is so central and so important to me that it should trump economic plenty every time. It is that which I believe that only a religious understanding of life can ultimately provide. This is why I am a Christian.

 

– John Shelby Spong

 

Dear Deanna,

Before I could give advice to one that you describe, I would need to know so much more. What is the disease? What is the prognosis? What is the religious background of the person? What are the resources — personal, family, spiritual and emotional — with which they deal with the life and death issue? There is no one–size–fits–all panacea for facing either pain or mortality.

All of us, however, have to do it at some point in our lives. Some do it with great courage and integrity, while others need great help and support. Most of us do not know which way it will be for us until we actually face it ourselves. What is important in the pastoral relationship is the trust that exists between the person in crisis and the one who is privileged to be pastor. There are no quick fixes. There are only long term relationships and growing understandings.

I hope the person about whom you write can find a trusted friend or a skillful pastor who can walk with him or her into this critical moment in life. Ultimately, each of us enters this world and departs from this world alone, but we are born into a family and we can walk with loved ones up to the moment of death. We are blessed when a loving family receives us at birth and when loving friends, partners, spouses or family can walk the last mile with us.

Live well.

 

– John Shelby Spong

One way he did this was to provoke a major debate each fall in his congregation about the choice of curriculum materials to be used in the Church School. Jody favored an avant garde, experience-oriented curriculum known as the Seabury Series. Vocal members of his congregation leaned toward a more content-centered, Bible-based curriculum that would introduce the children to the "historic faith."

Every fall this fight would be waged with the same results. Jody Kellerman always lost and the traditional members of his church always won. From the outside this annual rite looked very much like an ecclesiastical game, prompting me to ask him on one occasion why he insisted on fighting this battle every fall. In his answer he said, "Jack, a congregation can usually manage only one serious debate a year. So I focus the debate on a subject, the outcome of which I can tolerate either way. I fight, they win and then it's over. They then don't get upset about any other issue or anything else that I do." That was a new insight for me. People are not emotionally capable, nor do they have sufficient internal energy to do battle on several fronts at the same time or to have more than one enemy at a time.

When I was an active bishop I took a leaf from Jody's book. At the annual convention of the Diocese of Newark, to which about 800 people were in attendance, I made sure we had one major debate on the agenda, on a subject about which people had strong feelings. We advertized these issues widely prior to the convention and sometimes even got major media coverage because the media always seems to think a conflict within the church is newsworthy. Among the topics debated were: "Is physician-assisted suicide a moral option for Christians?"; "Why can women not serve as priests and bishops?" (They can now, but not in the seventies when I became bishop); "How can the Bible be called 'The Word of God' when it affirms slavery, justifies war discriminates against women and calls for the execution of homosexual people?"; "Is corporal punishment of children ever appropriate parental behavior?"; "Should the church offer a liturgical service to mark a divorce and the end of a marriage o r make the sacrament of marriage available to its gay and lesbian members?"

What people never seemed to recognize was that the Diocese had no real power and that the purpose of these debates was not to settle this issue by majority vote. What mattered was the quality of the debate, for a moving debate is the process in which the consciousness of the people was raised. When these delegates returned to their local congregations they would in turn make the debate occur again in 130 different settings. It also meant that once great amounts of emotional energy got expended in this debate almost anything else that came before this gathered assembly would pass with little or no controversy. Jody Kellerman was correct; people do not have the ability to fight more than one major battle or have more than one enemy at a time.

I have thought about this principle a great deal as I have observed our nation's political behavior in recent months. There is a sub-stratum of anger in our society today and a desire to blame someone for the perceived malaise as this nation climbs slowly out of the jaws of a very deep recession. Irresponsible political operatives, ever seeking that wedge issue which will propel them into power, have mined this anger in search of their own success. The symptoms of the problems facing this country are easy to attack. The national, state and local debt is high, brought on by two as yet unpaid for wars, the necessity of rescuing major banks, insurance companies and automobile makers from financial ruin, which would have plunged the entire world into a great depression. In addition to these traumas jobs are fragile, spendable income is down and the house valuations, in which the biggest percentage of most American's wealth is located, are today at rock bottom levels. With an xiety so high and tempers so short our politics, reflecting the national mood, have become frightening and insecurity is rampant. The national tendency is to look for victims to blame. George Bush, the target in the last election, worked for a while, but he has faded from sight. President Barack Obama is a new, convenient and available target. As the first African-American president, he is a visible receptacle into whom we can pour our still repressed racism, hiding it under the camouflage of worrying about such things as "the expansion of government" or the national debt, topics which worried us not at all in the earlier and greedier years of this century as we lowered taxes, extended drug benefits and fought wars with no consideration of what these actions did to the nation's economy. Today, however, anyone who is in power is destined to be the recipient of this anger, making it difficult for members of either party to run for office as incumbents. There is a great ne ed to project that anger outward. Adolf Hitler once rose to power during the great depression by funneling German anger into a white hot hatred of the Jews. Arab states like Saudi Arabia maintain political power in the family of the House of Saud by focusing their schools, and thus the lives of their children, on fundamentalistic Islamic fury against "the godless infidels of the west." Previous Republican administrations maintained power by hyping the color-coded alerts against "the terrorists" and when the terrorists began to fade, they began to attack "activist judges" and gay and lesbian people who were beginning to demand equality and justice. If it is true, however that one can only fight one major battle or have only one enemy at a time, these scattershot negativities were not emotionally satisfying so this nation's anger began to look for a popular enemy who could be identified as the cause of our fear and distress, around which all could rally. That is exactly wh at I see happening in the United States at this moment.

Look with me at the evidence! Homosexuality and homosexual persons no longer have much appeal as a target for our anger. Our consciousness and sensitivity on this subject has grown, making attacks on the homosexual quest for equality seem like little more than primitive ignorance, making this battle look antiquated. In recent weeks the California vote in favor of Proposition 8 was struck down by the courts. The long and detailed opinion of Judge Vaughn Walker actually ridiculed the arguments of opponents as little more than undocumentable fear and irrationality. The court, for example, discovered no evidence that opening marriage to gay couples would weaken marriage, destroy family life or that children raised by gay couples would be somehow impaired. The fascinating thing was that there was little public reaction to this opinion. Conservative political voices were almost mute, rising only to the level of whimpering. Clearly the nation has moved on. Yes, that opinion will be appealed until it reaches the Supreme Court where it could even be reversed, given the conservative makeup of that court, but it almost doesn't matter. All that reversal could do is to postpone the inevitable. That battle is over. Marriage will ultimately be declared to be a constitutional right, guaranteed to all citizens regardless of sexual orientation. Lost causes do not drain hostility!

The next revelatory moment came with the surprising announcement that Ken Mehlman, who ran the Bush campaign for the White House in 2004, was a gay man. Please remember that the 2004 Bush campaign, with Mehlman's support, put gay marriage on the ballot in closely contested Ohio to maximize the evangelical vote and thus win a second term for Bush. Now this man has indicated that he is working for gay rights and equality in marriage for homosexual people! Once again, it was a one-day story, hardly commented on even by the 24-hour news channels that maximize ratings by hyping every story to "end of the world" proportions. Negative energy is still rampant in our country, but homosexual people are no longer its target.

Where has it gone? Look at the passion aroused by the plans to build a Muslim community center two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. This project has been called by one politician "a dagger aimed at the heart of every American mother." Newt Gingrich began to campaign against "Sharia Law," as if anyone was trying to impose it on this country. Then there was the story of the deluded preacher with a 50-member church in Florida, who was going to commemorate 9/11 by burning the Quran in a public ceremony. We no longer have the time to hate homosexuals because we are busy hating Muslims and Islam. Some even try to tie them to President Obama by hinting that he is himself a Muslim and an illegal alien.

It is a scary time in American history and I hope our sanity and equilibrium will return before we vote some of this crowd of crazy politicians into office. So long as we can hate an external enemy we do not have to face such things as our own corporate greed, our insensitivity to the poor and our suppressed racism. We can have only one major battle or enemy at a time. So it is now "hate Muslims" time in America. Someday maturity and wisdom will be restored to our national discourse. We wait for that day!

– John Shelby Spong

 

Bishop Spong's Portrait Placed in Hall of the Prophets at Morehouse College

In a moving ceremony in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta the recently commissioned portrait of John Shelby Spong was unveiled. This portrait of the retired Episcopal bishop, author and passionate advocate for human justice will hang permanently in the Hall of the Prophets of the King Chapel alongside Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Thurgood Marshall, Andrew Young, Rosa Parks, Jimmy Carter and other civil rights leaders of recent history. The decision makers on the board of the King Chapel indicated that in their opinion Bishop Spong not only had been a long time opponent of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, but that he was the leading religious voice in America and around the world for ending the violence of homophobia. He has been, one of them commented, to the emancipation of homosexual people from the homophobic prejudice of the past what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the emancipation of people of color from the racism of the past.

The portrait, painted by a local Atlanta artist, was unveiled by Dr. Robert M. Franklin, President of Morehouse College and the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter, Dean of the King Chapel. Bishop Spong, in Atlanta to deliver five lectures on "Building a New Christianity for a new World," was accompanied by his wife, Christine Mary Spong, and his daughter, Ellen Spong of Richmond, Virginia as well as by a host of friends.

A copy of the official citation follows.