[Dialogue] 8/22/13, Spong: The Need for the Christian to Journey Beyond Scripture, Creed and Church

Thu Aug 22 12:30:11 PDT 2013

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	The Need for the Christian to Journey Beyond Scripture, Creed and Church
	Theology is a rational, deeply human, attempt to explain our experience with God. Theology is, therefore, never primary; it is always secondary to experience. Theological explanations can thus never be eternal. All explanations not only will change, but must change when knowledge grows and by so doing will always invalidate previous conclusions. Theology can never be infallible, unchanging or ultimately real. This, however, is a reality that quite frequently cannot be embraced by religious institutions and religious leaders.
	This means that there never has been an “inerrant Bible” or an “infallible pope.” The books of the Bible are always human attempts to explain a primary life experience, while every church hierarchy, including the papacy, is engaged in the task of trying to determine ultimate truth in a subjective, culturally relativized world. All scriptures and all theological pronouncements are inevitably time-bound and time-warped. A couple of illustrations might help us to see that no human explanation of any experience can ever be inerrant or infallible.
	Since the dawn of self-conscious life, we human beings have had the experience of watching the sun rise in the east and set in the west That is a phenomenon well documented all over the world, an objective reality. Look, however, at the various ways that this experience has been explained throughout history. The explanations range from the ancient Egyptians, who interpreted this pattern of the sun to be caused by the Sun God riding a chariot across the sky each day surveying the world, all the way to the modern scientist, who asserts that the phenomenon of the sun’s rising and setting is the result of the planet earth turning on its axis every 24 hours, as it makes its elliptical journey around the sun. These explanations obviously vary widely, but note that the experience itself is identical.
	In a similar fashion an epileptic seizure is another human phenomenon that has been observed from the dawn of time. In the New Testament an epileptic seizure was explained as having been caused by an invisible, demonic spirit suddenly taking over its victim, shaking him or her violently, hurling the victim to the ground and forcing the victim into an unconscious, trembling state until the spirit finally departed as suddenly as it arrived. Modern medicine, however, explains this same experience as a malfunction of the brain, resulting in a cascade of misfiring electrical impulses, which jump the track, so to speak, and thus create the resulting sense of seizure. The explanations are widely divergent, but once again the experience is identical.
	It is the constant temptation and the regular pitfall of religious institutions and religious spokespersons to confuse their explanations with the experience itself. The gospels, we need to state clearly, are not the dictated word or words of God, but are rather the time-bound and time-warped explanations of the Jesus experience, couched in the language and understandings of the first century. At the time the New Testament was written, no one knew that women had an egg cell, so the story of Jesus’ birth to a virgin could be used to explain the experience, which was that in Jesus they believed they had encountered something, which human life by itself was not capable of producing. In that time, we need to understand that no one quite understood what happens to the body at death. They could, therefore, reasonably assume that the death process could be reversed, if the reversal occurred within three days, after which the decaying of the body became obvious. When the New Testament was written, no one knew about germs, viruses, tumors or cardiovascular disease and so sickness was interpreted as divine punishment for sins committed. That was why it made sense to treat sickness by offering prayers and sacrifices. If we assume, as fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics still seem to do, that the gospel narratives are in fact literal renditions of what actually happened in time or in history, then religion has become idolatrous. It has invested the perfection of God in something that is in fact a human creation. By literalizing the Bible, religious people have also unknowingly literalized the world view of the first century that assumed that anything that could not be understood by first century minds must be a miracle, explained only by an appeal to the presence of a supernatural power. So the presumably “inerrant” Bible of Protestant fundamentalism and the presumably “infallible” theological doctrines of Roman Catholicism, become nonsensical in the 21st century. A Christianity based on those outdated ideas can never be compelling to 21st century people unless they are willing and able to close their minds to modern knowledge. Biblical inerrancy is therefore not just ignorance, it is a distortion of both truth and humanity. To quote the Bible to oppose equality for women or justice and dignity for homosexual people is to confuse the cultural fears of yesterday with ultimate truth. It is also to be pathetically and profoundly uninformed.
	What then about the creeds? They are fourth century attempts to codify religious beliefs that had been drawn primarily from the Bible. To insist that creeds are unchanging truth or to make creedal faith the hallmark of Orthodoxy is to state something that is absurd. It is to pretend that a quite limited fourth century, Greek-oriented world view is the same as “the mind of God.” So, when we learn that there is no all-seeing God, who lives above the sky of a three-tiered universe, who is always looking down to record our deeds in the record book of life, by which our eternal destiny will be determined, is not to say that there is no God, but it is to say that truth is always relative. Heaven as a place of reward and hell as a place of punishment have become nonsensical dated ideas. So is a Bible that contains the story of the Tower of Babel, the raining of heavenly bread, called manna, from the sky to feed the starving Hebrew people and the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven. If the story of Jesus’ ascension literally means that he went up into the sky then we need to embrace the modern reality that Jesus did not get to heaven, he got into orbit or else he escaped the force of gravity and wandered into the infinity of space. Yet, on the basis of those limited, time bound fourth century creeds religious wars have been fought, religious persecution has been carried out, “heretics” have been burned at the stake and “witches” have been hanged to keep alive the myth that human words can capture, in some unchanging form, eternal truth. So often the business of religion has ceased to be the search for truth and has become the activity of mind control.
	Christians who claim inerrancy for the first century words of the gospels or infallibility for their doctrinal understanding of the fourth century words of the creeds are quite simply delusional people, and in the name of both God and truth, they need to be resisted mightily. Yet the facts of history reveal that Galileo was condemned by the church for suggesting that first century cosmology was inaccurate and Darwin is still being roundly criticized and politically resisted for suggesting that pre-modern biology is simply incorrect. I was both startled and amazed when I read recently a widely reported poll taken in Georgia, which revealed that 73% of the registered Republicans and 53% of registered Democrats in that state still believe literally the creation story in the Bible. This is not a commentary on faith, it is a commentary on how an uninformed faith can impede and distort the educational system of one of the states of this union. To think that an electorate this deeply uninformed can still choose political leaders, who will make laws for this entire nation is frightening!
	Yet, having now said all of these things, and quite clearly I hope, I still want to tell the world that there is a difference between an experience and the culturally bound explanation of that experience. I still plumb the meaning of the Bible on a daily basis. I still gather in my parish church every Sunday and recite the creed. I do these things joyfully and self-consciously. Am I simply schizophrenic, living simultaneously in two different worlds? Am I being delusional by intention and pretending to participate in rituals in which I do not really believe? No, neither is the case. I am rather a believer, not in a literal Bible, but in the experience to which the words of that Bible point. I am a believer, not in the literal creeds, but in the reality to which those creedal words point. I view the creeds as a love song that my ancestors in faith created to help them process their God experience. I do not mind joining in the singing of their love song. I recognize my kinship with them in the history of my faith’s development over the centuries. The creeds are not for me an imposed girdle into which I have to force my flabby faith. They are not a straitjacket designed to force me to live within the theological boundaries and understandings of fourth century people. They are the dated explanations of an experience that I still believe and acknowledge as real.
	Yes, let there be no mistake, I am convinced that there is a reality to the experience of God, but I do not interpret this reality as if God is a supernatural being who does miracles. I rather see this reality as a transcendent presence that is beyond human boundaries and that calls me and compels me not to allow those boundaries to bind my humanity into less than it is capable of being. I view God as the Source of life and love, and as the Ground of Being calling me to live, to love and to be. My Christian life is thus a journey for which there is no literal roadmap. I am convinced that if I walk this journey deeply enough and faithfully enough, I will be led beyond all religious forms – beyond scripture, creeds, doctrine and dogma and into the wordless wonder of the true meaning of worship. The Christian Church exists, I believe, to point all of us beyond the boundaries of our own humanity. It is a pity that institutional religion in all its forms does not understand its own message!
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Ken Austin from Maroubra, Australia, writes:
Question:
I heard Bishop Spong speaking recently on Radio Australia about his book on the Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. The Bishop said he was a Christian, but he also said that he did not believe in the historical interpretation of scripture. He pointed out how “Christians” in history were not acting as God would have it. He said he would like to meet with people of other religions who had “experienced God” in their own faiths and to explain to them his experience of God from the Christian perspective and then to listen to their explanations of their religious experience with a view to getting a dialogue going and not saying “my version of God is right and yours is not.” He said that this is in the interest of having a peaceful world. But how can “religions” or “faiths,” if you like, agree on the nature of God when their doctrines are so opposite (actually Christianity is not a religion, it is about having a relationship with God, through the Savior Jesus, the Christ). Jews, Muslims and Buddhists don’t have this aspect going on at all. But he did not say in this interview that Jesus has said that the only way to the Father (God) is through him, I am the gate, etc. The Bishop also didn’t mention that Jesus came to take away the penalty for sin (which all humans have as part of their natures) and that the thing that separates humankind from God is sin. (God cannot be related to sin in any way and Jesus removes that barrier – other religions don’t do this at all.) Bishop Spong is clearly an intellectual type, who apparently ignores some of the most important parts of scripture in order to promote his own version of God. For what reason or purpose he does this is not clear to me. I hope I can have these questions put to him for an answer. I don’t see how Jesus’ words agree with his, especially about having a holy relationship, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, with the true and living God.

Answer:
Dear Ken,

Thank you for your letter even though it reveals a deeply fundamentalist version of Christianity that lives only in those communities that have not engaged the intellectual revolution of the last 500 years. I associate your viewpoint with that which I encountered constantly when I was in Sydney, which religiously, at least, seems to me to be little more than a hotbed of pre-modern thinking. Perhaps that is why Sydney is known primarily as a secular non-religious city. This was especially true of those who called themselves “Sydney Anglicans,” who were among the most uninformed, the most imperialistic, the most deeply prejudiced and the most ungracious people I have ever met who still call themselves Christians. This was true from the Archbishop on down, excluding only that tiny minority in that archdiocese who secretly communicated to me their embarrassment over what has happened to their church in that beautiful city. If by your question you want to be in dialogue with a different perspective then I am happy to respond.

What you call the “historical interpretation of scripture” is shorthand for evangelical fundamentalism. For the past 200 years in the Christian academies of the developed world the literal view of the Bible that you espouse has been shattered. Moses did not write the Torah. It was the product of about 500 years and the merging together of traditions from at least four schools of thought arising in the circumstances of four different periods of Jewish History. Not a word of what are called the “Books of Moses” or the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was actually written until about 300 years after Moses’ death. Moses thus did not write it down while God dictated the Ten Commandments. There are in fact three versions of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and they do not agree with each other. From your perspective we would have to believe that God was confused or perhaps that God did not quite get the commandments right the first time so God kept trying.

You appear not to be aware that miracles do not come into the story of Jesus until the 8th decade of the Common Era. The Virgin Birth does not enter the gospel tradition until the 9th decade; neither does the understanding of resurrection as the physical resuscitation of a deceased body. The story of Jesus’ ascension is a 10th decade addition to a growing and developing tradition.

The Christian movement did not separate itself completely from the Synagogue and Judaism until 55-60 years after the crucifixion, so the imperialistic idea that only Christians have the truth was a late developing idea when Christians finally achieved institutional and political power.

Can you imagine a God so limited that this God would only welcome into the divine presence those who agree with you or other fundamentalists? If Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Christians all worship the one True God as I believe we do, since there is ultimately only one God, then no one’s understanding of God can ever be identified with absolute truth. As the apostle Paul once wrote: “We see through a glass darkly.”

The claim that no one comes to God but by Jesus is a saying attributed to Jesus only in the Fourth Gospel, a book that did not appear in Christian history until the latter years of the 10th decade, or some 65 – 70 years after the end of Jesus’ earthly life. The earlier gospels portray Jesus as saying those who are not against him are for him and inviting all who are weary and heavily laden to come unto him. The only standard of divine judgment according to Matthew said nothing about proper believing, but spoke only of the ability to see the presence of God in every person including those he called “the least of those who are our brothers and sisters.”

The idea that human nature is fallen and that Jesus had to die for our sins is a result, not of some divine revelation, but of literalizing the ancient Jewish creation stories that stressed an original and perfect creation, followed by a fall into sin created by human disobedience, which in turn necessitated a rescue operation that portrays Jesus as being punished for our sins on the cross. This is a 4th century misreading of the ancient Jewish folktales and, if literalized, turn God into a vindictive, punitive monster. They would also turn Jesus into being the prime victim of divine abuse and would turn you and me into guilt-laden Christ killers. Besides that, we now know that these ancient stories are simply not literally true. Modern studies of the origin of our universe tell us that there never was a perfect creation, just an evolving process that went from physical matter, to life, to consciousness and finally to self-consciousness over a period of about 13.8 billion years. Evolution is an established scientific understanding of the origins of life that renders “original sin” as nonsense. If there was no fall into sin, there is no need for a savior, so that way of telling the Christ story is simply a product of an uninformed mentality.

All versions of God are the ideas of someone. The idea of God changes dramatically in the Bible itself. It is a long journey from the God who sent plagues into Egypt, ordered the murder of the first born male in every Egyptian household on the night of the Passover and who drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, to the God who enjoins us to love our enemies.

I guess what I really want to communicate to you is that true Christianity is vastly different from any one’s idea of Christianity and is certainly different from the type of Christianity that you seem to have experienced and unless you can step away from the narrow and even punitive understanding that you reflect, you will never be able to grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ Jesus, which Paul says is in each of us.

I have been all over Australia on many occasions. I assure you there is more to Christianity in that wonderful country than what you appear to know about. My books actually sell on a per capita basis there better than they sell anywhere else in the world. That would not happen unless someone is listening and someone is reading. As a matter of fact in September in Canberra an international gathering of progressive Christians will come together in a conference known as “Common Dreams III.” I commend it to all Australians who want to try to build what I have called “A New Christianity for a New World.”

I wish you well.

John Shelby Spong

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