[Dialogue] 10/25/12, Spong: You Are Profoundly Wrong! A Response to the Archbishop of Newark and Other Catholic Leaders

Thu Oct 25 08:35:01 PDT 2012

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	You Are Profoundly Wrong! A Response to the Archbishop of Newark and Other Catholic Leaders
	The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Newark, the Most Reverend John J. Myers, has recently issued “A Pastoral Teaching on the Definition, Purpose and Sanctity of Marriage.”  In this document, which is clearly politically motivated, he urges “faithful Catholics” and other “men and women of goodwill” to vote against any candidate for public office who supports same-sex marriage.  He also states that “all Catholics, who support a candidate for elective office, who does not oppose same sex marriage, should consider themselves excommunicated, and should, therefore, absent themselves from the Eucharist at Catholic altars.
	I have never met Archbishop Myers.  I have no reason to believe he is not a good and sincere person.  When one enters a public debate, however, especially in an attempt to elect one candidate over another, one has a responsibility to be well-informed on the issues about which one speaks.  It is not sufficient simply to appeal to the authority of the magisterium of one’s church to find support for these ideas or to quote traditional religious conclusions, as if they are still viable or are still accepted in academic and intellectual circles.  This is the Archbishop’s fatal error.  His underlying definition of homosexuality is the badly dated and all but universally rejected idea that it is “deviant,” “unnatural” or even “evil.”  His definition of human life is based on the pre-Darwinian idea that life was created perfect only to fall into “Original Sin,” which then distorted humanity’s original perfection, thus justifying the negativity toward homosexuality because it is an expression of that distortion.  Darwin’s thought, which today underlies all science and is the basis of teaching in every medical school in the developed world, has also been validated by the discovery of DNA. That idea can hardly be dismissed because it is inconvenient to one’s religious doctrines.  Darwin teaches us that there never was a time of human perfection, but that we have always been evolving into our humanity.  We are, therefore, not fallen sinners, but rather incomplete human beings.  To talk, about how God established monogamous heterosexuality as the basis for all family life at the time of creation, which means that it cannot be validly set aside by any government or political decision, is to engage in pious nonsense.  It also reveals a lack of knowledge about and understanding of the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship.  To go on from that weak premise to liken homosexuality to incest and to use this argument to buttress other positions of the Roman Catholic Church, including opposition to all forms of contraception and family planning; opposition to abortion under any circumstances, including rape, incest and the threat to the life of the mother; opposition to any end of life conversations or procedures, as well as opposition to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian people as violations of God’s natural law is, quite frankly, breathtaking in both its gall and its arrogance.
	Let me try to unravel this maze of incoherent conclusions.  Did God set monogamous coupling as the original basic building block of all human society in the creation story of the book of Genesis? Of course not!  Does the good archbishop not know that the “seven-day” creation story of Genesis 1:1-2:4a is a product of the 6th century BCE?  Does he not know that the story of the “fall,” as related in Genesis 2:4b-24 is the product of the 10th century BCE?  Neither of these times is anywhere close to the beginning of human history.  Human-like creatures, called hominids, have populated this planet for at least 4,000,000 years, and self-conscious, language-using, recognizably human creatures have been on this planet, according to the best scientific estimates for somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 years.  The biblical story of creation is, thus, very recent, relatively speaking. In most of human history monogamous marriage between one man and one woman was all but unknown. The original pattern of human “marriage” and family life appears to have been polygamy and harems.  Since women were largely regarded as property in that period of time, the number of wives a man had determined his wealth and status.  A vestigial reminder of this value system is preserved in church marriage ceremonies, when one man, the father, gives the bride away to another man, the husband, as if she were a possession. When the early writers of the Bible sought to describe this period of their own Hebrew ancestry, they quite accurately portrayed their forebears, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as polygamous people.  Even the ultimate Jewish hero, King David, who was called “the man after God’s own heart,” was portrayed as the husband of many wives. His son, Solomon, in whose reign the Adam and Eve story was actually written, was famous for having had 300 wives and 700 concubines. So the suggestion that the monogamous, heterosexual marriage of one man to one woman is the original divine plan written into “natural law” and is, therefore the “basic building block of the social order” and thus not capable of being altered is both patently false and historically inaccurate. Marriage as a human institution has been and still is evolving from polygamy based on male supremacy to monogamy, based on sexual equality.  In the light of this understanding the ability to grant to same-sex couples the dignity and sanction of official marriage is simply another step to be welcomed in that evolution.
	The prelude to that new step in the evolution of marriage is the recognition, now universally acknowledged, that homosexuality is a reality among many higher mammals.  What is present in the natural world can hardly be called “unnatural” or the result of the fall!  Because an Archbishop cannot process this new insight outside his dated and antiquated theological and ethical frame of reference does not make it “evil,” it rather reveals the limitation of knowledge present in the system on which that archbishop bases his decisions. These are the facts that need to be embraced:  No reputable scientist today supports the idea that anyone chooses his or her sexual orientation; scientific data now validates the reality that the number of homosexual people in the population is a steady, perhaps fixed, percentage among all people at all times and in all places; homosexuality cannot be cured because it is not a disease and those organizations that claim to be able to do so are fraudulent; homosexuality is not hereditary and every gay or lesbian person is presumably the child of a heterosexual union, and children born to gay men or lesbians have no higher chance of being gay or lesbian than the ratio in the population. These facts mean that the moral teaching of the church, as expressed in the “Pastoral Teaching” of the Archbishop of Newark is based on premises that are no longer viable and thus cannot with credibility be used to counter the best scientific scholarship available to the world today.
	Does the Archbishop want to repeat the darker chapters of church history? Galileo was right in the 17th century even when he was found guilty by the church of heresy.  It simply took the Roman Catholic Church some 400 more years before its leaders were able to free themselves sufficiently to open their doctrinally closed minds. Charles Darwin was also right in 1859, but it was in the 1990’s before this church could acknowledge this fact in a very tepid and limited way.
	The problem is that when religious leaders issue statements, based, not on knowledge and contemporary research, but rather reflecting their comfort level inside their own closed systems of thought, all the while pretending that this is divinely revealed knowledge, they do enormous damage to people whose humanity they so badly compromise. The church supported for centuries the institution of slavery, even quoting the Bible to justify it.  The church supported second class status for women and in many places still does so to this day, once again quoting the scriptures to give this prejudice the cover of perfumed piety.  When Archbishop Myers argues, not for the equality of women, but for the “complementarity” of women, is he not doing anything other than to quote an ecclesiastical version of the old “separate but equal” argument used for so long to justify segregation?  Homosexual persons are a perfectly normal, but minority, part of the human family.  So are left-handed people, bald-headed people and red-headed people.  To call homosexual persons “deviant,” “unnatural” or “evil” is a commentary not on the gay community, but on the uninformed prejudice of the person or institution that is speaking.  The Fourth Gospel portrays Jesus as saying that his task, and thus the task of his church, is to be the giver of abundant life to all people.  Can anyone do that by calling another, who is different, “evil, deviant and unnatural?”
	This “Pastoral Teaching” reaches the height of absurdity when it suggests that homosexual partners ought to seek heterosexual unions and try to make them work.  Elements in the church well into the 20th century thought that they had to break the “unnatural” stance of being left-handed by tying the hands of left-handed children behind their backs in order to force them to be “normal.”  We now know that this was nothing but an expression of ignorance as to how the brain was organized, but it dehumanized many a left-handed child before the religious leadership got over its prejudice and began to recognize that the problem was not located in the victim that they so badly violated, but in the ignorance that fed the prejudice of the violating ones. That is exactly what is being done anew in this “Pastoral Teaching” promulgated by Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark.
	Of course the Bible reflects the prejudices of antiquity toward those who are “different.” That, however, should not be used to justify the continuation of these destructive patterns. We have, over the centuries, learned to set some parts of the Bible aside when we come to new understandings of truth.  That is what is now happening in our society as a new consciousness is being forged, based upon contemporary understanding of how human values operate.  One cannot uphold ancient ignorance by pretending that one’s own prejudice is blessed by God.  That is what Archbishop Myers seeks to do.
	His “Pastoral Teaching” will be ridiculed by the educated.  It will be ignored by those he calls “the faithful,” just as they today largely ignore the church’s teaching on birth control, end of life decisions and even abortion.  The sad thing is that the credibility of the church is compromised by the uninformed prejudice of its leaders and time ultimately will sweep this ignorance aside.  It will be the laity of this church who will dismiss it in their practice first.  Both the Pope and the Archbishop will someday discover that “truth,” which is not truth, cannot be imposed.  Only then will their minds be changed and apology will be appropriate for the pain their prejudice and ignorance, has caused millions, including many who are priests and bishops of their own church.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Edward from London, England, writes:
	Question:
	As you know, I very much appreciate your books and weekly essays, even if I may be so bold as to say I do not agree with every bit of them.  I wonder whether you have read a new book, Moral Transformation: The Original Christian Paradigm of Salvation, by A. J. Wallace and R. D. Rusk, who I believe are two New Zealand biblical scholars.  The book, backed up by copious quotations from the New Testament and from early Christian writers such as Irenaeus and Origen, throws a flood of light on Christian beliefs and practices of the first three centuries AD, which were quite simply to follow faithfully the teaching and example of Jesus in the hope of being judged by God worthy of eternal life.  There was no conflict between Paul and Jesus, no conflict between faith and works – the Greek word “pistis” and its assorted adjectives and verbs, commonly translated “faith,” really means, in 80-90% of the cases, faithfulness or loyalty, not belief in a system of ideas.  They show how the reformers of the 16th century misunderstood the point that Paul was making, largely due to this mistranslation.  If you have read the book, I should be interested in your comments on it.  If not, may I respectfully recommend it to you?
	Answer:
	Dear Ted,
	It is always good to hear from you.  You are the only Queen’s Counsel I know.  My best to your wife Rachel.
	I have not read the book you recommend and appreciate you calling it to my attention.  It is quite difficult to determine what differences there were between Jesus and Paul since most of what we know about Jesus is recorded in the four gospels that were not written by eyewitnesses, but by Greek-speaking authors, who composed them between 40 and 70 years after the crucifixion.  That would be two to three and a half generations after Jesus.  The Hebrew word, “dabar,” which was translated by the Greek word “pistis” does in fact mean trust or a willingness to put one’s confidence into something or someone.  It was only in the Greek language that this Jewish concept was changed and came to mean believing or giving intellectual assent to propositional statements.  The creeds were never written to define faith, they were written to enable human beings to trust the God they sought to capture in creedal words.  This is why the shift from “I believe” to “We believe” when we say the creed in church is a step in the right direction.  It is a corporate faith not an individual belief.
	I am still convinced that most of the difficulty Christians have today with the Bible is that they do not understand or appreciate the power of the Hebrew Scriptures that lies behind almost everything in the New Testament.  They do not understand, for example, that the story of Jesus feeding the multitude in the wilderness with five loaves and two fish was related to the story of Moses and manna in the wilderness, that the Sermon on the Mount is based on Psalm 119 and that the Palm Sunday story is based in Zechariah 9:9-12.  These were not “predictions” that Jesus somehow miraculously fulfilled, it is evidence that when the Jesus story was being written his interpreters used the scriptures to interpret and to frame his life.
	When Christians left the synagogue, they left the interpretive context in which their own gospels were written.  The time has come to recover that.
	My best,
	~John Shelby Spong

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