[Dialogue] 9/27/12, Spong: An Open Letter to Ross Douthat, New York Times Columnist

Thu Sep 27 06:59:46 PDT 2012

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	An Open Letter to Ross Douthat, New York Times Columnist
	Dear Ross,
	A few weeks ago in an op-ed piece of the Sunday New York Times, you began your regular column with these words, “In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Bishop of Newark, published a book entitled, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.”  Spong was a uniquely radical figure – during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition – but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise.  Thus their church has spent the last decade changing and then changing some more from a sedate pillar of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive bodies in the United States.  As a result, the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians.”
	I was quite honored that you gave me the credit that you did for influencing the history of my own church as well as yours.  I was also intrigued by the image of Pope Benedict XVI holding back the tide of liberal reform in Roman Catholicism.  Your column caused me to think of His Holiness standing on the shore trying to defend the land from the incoming tide.  I also appreciate having my books referred to in a widely-read, highly-respected medium like the New York Times.  As a direct result of your column, I have had interviews with other journalists from as far away as Poland.  I want to express my thanks to you for opening those opportunities to me.
	But, Ross, your column was profoundly uninformed about the developments in both biblical and theological scholarship over at least the last two hundred years.  In a free country, anyone is able to put into the public arena his or her two cents worth on any subject, but if you really want to be part of the modern theological conversation, you do have some responsibility to do some basic research into the subject about which you choose to write.  The fact that you so obviously did not do that has left you exposed as being little more than a frightened and uninformed man. You appear to mourn the fact that it is no longer the 13th century, that the world and the church are changing, and that “infallible” truth no longer appears to be infallible.
	For example, only someone totally out of touch with the tides of history could seriously object to the fact that the Episcopal Church is no longer “a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment.” You seem to regard that as a virtue.  I went to that kind of church when I was a child growing up in the Bible Belt of North Carolina.  My church taught me that segregation was the will of God; that women were by nature inferior to men; that it was OK to hate other religions, especially the Jews, and that homosexuals were either mentally sick people, who ought to be cured or morally depraved people who ought to be forcibly converted and changed.  The interesting thing is that on each of these issues, my church quoted their literal understanding of the Bible to justify those life-distorting prejudices.  I suppose they skipped over Jesus’ invitation that says, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden.”   At that time, we also sang hymns like “Just as I am without one plea, O Lamb of God, I come.”  We quoted Jesus’ summary of the law that enjoins us “to Love our neighbors as ourselves” and when Jesus was asked to define the meaning of “neighbor” he is quoted as having responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which defines neighbor to include a “half breed, heretical” Samaritan, who was the object of the deepest, prevailing prejudice in first century Judaism  So seeking to be true to this Jesus I rejoice that my Episcopal church today in North Carolina has elected a gifted African-American, Michael Curry, to be its bishop; that my church nationally has chosen a multi-talented woman, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, to be our Primate, and that my church has elected and ordained two openly-gay and well qualified bishops, Gene Robinson in New Hampshire and Mary Glasspool in Los Angeles, both of whom live with their partners in faithful committed partnerships.  I also am pleased to note that when my church  last revised our prayer book in 1979, we asked a panel of rabbis to go over it to assure us that no undetected anti-Semitism lay hidden in its words.
	My church has also removed all prohibitions in the ordination process based on race, gender or sexual orientation.  I celebrate these steps as steps into a new consciousness that refuses to denigrate or to marginalize any child of God on the basis of who he or she is.  That says to me not that the church has somehow lost its way, but that it is hearing and engaging the gospel of Jesus Christ in dramatically new and life-giving ways.  It is still breaking down barriers and making it clear that so much of what church people once called “sacred tradition” is little more than human sin perfumed by the pious pronouncements of would-be “holy” people.  Those who continue to hold what you seem to believe are the “true” patterns of the past are not seeking the “Kingdom of God” nearly so much as they are trying to protect their own power and privilege.  That is shamefully revealed to me when I see the leadership of your church, which you seem to see as virtuous, refusing to investigate and purge its culture of child abuse, but eager to launch an investigation of Catholic Nuns, who in the service of their people press for reforms in that male dominated institution.
	When you charge, as you do, that I have “dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition,” you clearly reveal that your passion and fear are running far ahead of your knowledge and understanding.  In the 17th century, the Christian Church forced Galileo to recant from his conclusion that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe.  In 1991, the Vatican issued a formal paper declaring that they now believed that Galileo was correct.  In the meantime, we human beings had begun not only to investigate, but even to travel in space.  Would it be your preference that the Christian Church spend its time defending the indefensible or that we begin to engage the vast knowledge revolution that marks the modern world?  When the Bible was written between 2000 and 3000 years ago anything its various authors did not understand, they defined as a miracle.  As human knowledge has expanded, the arena in which miracles are claimed has shrunk to non-existence.  The way we have traditionally told the Jesus story still assumes that there was originally a perfect creation from which we have fallen (into sin, that is “original sin”) and because we cannot rescue ourselves from that debilitating fall, God had to mount a rescue operation to “overcome the sin of the world.”  This was accomplished, traditional voices assert, by Jesus who in his death somehow “paid the price” or broke the power of sin and thus restored us to our pre-fallen status of perfection that had been God’s original intention.  Since death was conceived in the Bible, not as a natural stage in the course of all living things, but as punishment for the “fall,” it has also been said by traditional voices that Jesus broke the “unnatural” power of death at the first Easter.
	Well, whether you and traditional church leaders like it or not, Ross, a man called Charles Darwin, writing as long ago as 1859, challenged that entire set of presuppositions very successfully.  He demonstrated that there was no original perfect creation at the beginning, but an on-going and ever changing process of evolution.  Given that fact there could have been no “fall” into “sin’ from a non-existent perfection.  In the approximate 3.8 billion years that we believe life has been on this planet earth, we have moved from living single cells to complex, self-conscious living people.  We cannot fall from a perfection we have never possessed, we cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened and we cannot be restored to a status that we have never possessed.  Death, we now know, is a part of life.  It is not punishment for the fall and the death of Jesus on the cross cannot break either the power of death or the power of sin under which the church has asserted that life is lived.  We Christians can ignore these realities if we choose and become as irrelevant as traditional religious bodies have become in our generation.  I, however, do not see that as a virtue as you seem to do.  I think that this “new” knowledge requires that we Christians re-think and re-consider the explanations of our religious past and then re-cast the Jesus experience into language and concepts that do not require that we have to twist our brains into first century pretzels in order to worship God in the 21st century.  That is not “dismissing almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition,” it is engaging our faith and our world in a new way.
	To press this discussion a bit deeper, Ross, the Virgin Birth is not about biology.  If it were, the 18th century discovery that women have an egg cell would render such stories as both inoperative and nonsensical. Resurrection is also not about bodily resuscitation, but about transformation.  If you had ever studied Paul, or looked carefully at Mark you might know this.
	No, Ross, I and others like me are deeply committed to the Christian faith, but we are also committed to escaping the literalistic nonsense of a pre-literate world.  What we seek to do is to separate the experience of God in Jesus from the explanation of that experience that was formed in the first century.  We seek to preserve that experience from literal absurdity by finding ways to talk about it in language that people living today might be able to hear.
	This is not some effort to disturb the “faithful,” as you seem to assume, this is the work of a lifetime, the most important task of contemporary Christians.  You seem, not only not to know these things, but not even to know that you do not know them.  Denial of reality, even in the name of “traditional” Christianity, is never a doorway into the life of the future.
	My best,
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Michael Wagner from Promise Keepers writes:
	Question:
	It puzzles me that you believe we do not need a savior and that Jesus is not the same as God.  You say that the word savior refers to God, but not Jesus till later in the Bible but Jesus is God.  The Old Testament tells of the coming of a savior.  Scripture says that there is no way to the father except through Jesus, that Jesus' death upon the cross saved us from our sins and gave us the chance to know God.  Why do you think that Jesus said while on the cross: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  It is because that is when Jesus took on the sin of the world.  God cannot look at sin.  If you believe that we do not need a savior, then all I can do is pray for you, since you are missing the most important reason why Jesus came to earth.  Just because the actual word is not mentioned does not mean that Jesus is not our savior.  Of all the words used like man’s salvation and Jesus died for us all points us to see that Jesus dies so we can have a personal relationship with God, so we can have forgiveness of sins.  I can go on forever.  Psalm 22:27 says that all shall be blessed in Christ Jesus.  I pray that God will show you that we do need a savior and that through Jesus we have been given that.  I also pray that you are deceived when you say that the Devil does not exist. Even from the very beginning in scripture God warns that the Devil is a roaring lion looking for who he can consume.  Jesus is the savior we all need to help us in our daily walk and understand the temptations and to live our lives the way God wills us to.  I pray that the Spirit of God will show you the true meaning of what Jesus our Lord and Savior really means.
	Answer:
	Dear Michael,
	I wrestled long before deciding to use your letter in the Q&A section of my column.  I sense an obvious sincerity in your words and a concern for me that I appreciate.  At the same time, Michael, your letter reveals a serious lack of theological understanding and a very childlike misunderstanding of what the Bible is all about.  I have no desire to point this out to you since it is clear that you, with your level of knowledge, will not understand anything I say.  I also find no pleasure in attacking you in public, but the fact is that you made these issues public by your letter and by doing so you have opened the door to the possibility that you might be ready to grow and to learn.  On that assumption I have chosen to respond to your public letter in this column.
	Let me begin by saying that your letter makes all kinds of assumptions that are typical of those who have confused a version of evangelical fundamentalism with Christianity. I can understand why, given your presuppositions, you are puzzled that I do not need a savior.  You clearly do not understand that what I reject is a literal understanding of the ancient Hebrew myths that suggest that human life has fallen into “original sin.”  Because of this I do not think that “savior” language is either meaningful or necessary.  I see no evidence in the study of human origins that human life was ever created perfect only to fall into sin as the stories in the book of Genesis suggest..  What I do see is overwhelming data to support the idea that human life has evolved from single cell simplicity into self-conscious complexity over the 3.8 billion years that we now know that life in some form has been on this planet.  If that is so, I believe Jesus needs to be understood as empowering us to become more deeply and fully human, not as a divinely sent invader who came to save us from our sins.
	No, Jesus is not the same as God. That is biblical non-sense.  Even the doctrine of the Trinity was designed to prevent so simplistic an identification. In the gospels we are told that Jesus prayed.  Was he talking to himself?  We are told that Jesus died. Can God die and still be God? To suggest, as you do, that the Old Testament tells of the coming of the savior or that Psalm 22:27 speaks of Jesus is nothing more than a Christian misreading of the messianic hope of Israel. Only John’s gospel contains the claim that Jesus is the only way to God and for that to be used as a justification for religious triumphalism and imperialism, as you seem eager to do, is to do a grave injustice to the Fourth Gospel.
	The prayer, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” occurs only in Mark and Matthew.  These authors are actually quoting Psalm 22, a psalm that early Christians used to provide content to the first narrative of the cross, which was not written, you need to know, until more than forty years after the crucifixion.  It is not an eye-witness report. Luke and John, who wrote some 20 to 25 years after Mark, both omit that saying from the cross so that we must assume that they did not see it as Jesus taking on the sin of the world.  Each of these later gospel writers adds other sayings that were supposed to have been said by Jesus from the cross about which neither Mark nor Matthew seemed to be aware and neither Luke nor John contains a saying from the cross that the other includes.  So, given this conflict we have grave doubts that any of the words attributed to Jesus from the cross were ever spoken by him.
	I welcome your prayers for me, but your religious judgment, based on your total lack of biblical knowledge, renders these prayers as little more than pious insincerity.  Your real agenda is to affirm your own religious authority, which, based upon your limited knowledge, is hardly inspiring or impressive.
	I have been a Christian all of my life and have served as a priest in my church for 21 years and as an elected bishop for 24 years.  Yes, I have been wrong lots of times, but escaping the fundamentalism of my childhood was not one of those times.  I walk the Christ path daily and I trust it will carry me into the mystery of God, the God who is ultimately real and yet who is beyond all of the pious formulas that religious people have tried to place on the Ultimate and Holy One; and no, I do not believe that Jesus died for my sins, nor am I attracted to that guilt producing, God destroying kind of pious rhetoric.
	~John Shelby Spong

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