[Dialogue] 5/23/13, Spong: Lectureship that Challenges What is, in the Name of What Can Be

Thu May 23 07:54:23 PDT 2013

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	Lectureship that Challenges What is, in the Name of What Can Be

	The Third Annual John Shelby Spong Lecture was held at St. Peter’s Church, Morristown, New Jersey, near the end of April. A crowd of people, numbering around 400, according to the ushers’ count, came from near and far to participate in the event. We had members of the faculty and student body from nearby Drew University. We had a visitor from Columbia, South America, here on a student’s visa, who was returning home soon. He had been raised in a traditionally Catholic home but, in his later teenage years he had been affiliated with Pentecostalism. Now as a young adult, he felt at home in neither and had become a seeker after a God still unidentified by him. We had one man who drove up from Baltimore to attend the lecture. We had a significant number of St. Peter’s congregation, but more importantly, we had a large number of those for whom organized religion of any sort had become a turnoff. To this assembled audience, Professor Elaine Pagels, author and a faculty member of the Department of Religion at Princeton University, spoke on the book of Revelation. This is the book with which the New Testament now closes and, throughout history, it has also been the favorite biblical resource of those who like to talk about and even to predict the end of the world. The book is not regarded in academic circles to be of high value, so it was not surprising that during the question and answer period, someone in the audience asked Dr. Pagels why this strange book had captured her fascination in the first place and just when that fascination was born. “It was,” she responded “when President George W. Bush quoted this biblical text to support his invasion of Iraq.” “Shock and Awe” was justified with quotations from the Book of Revelation. That answer did much to put this Book into a modern perspective.
	It was my privilege to introduce Professor Pagels and in that introduction to put the “Spong Lectureship” into perspective. This lectureship was launched three years ago by a group of my friends who were concerned that Christianity was not being properly challenged from within; that is, from those who identify themselves as Christians. This challenge from within had been the focus of both my priestly career and my writing career and these friends did not want this focus to die when I finally decided to fold my tent and enter the quietude of retirement. I actually did retire as the Bishop of Newark in 2000, at age 69, after 24 active and exciting years serving my church in this capacity, but I am still actively engaged in the task of speaking to my church as one of its resident, yet devoted, critics. So in my introduction of Dr. Pagels, I placed this lectureship into the context of the crisis facing contemporary Christianity.
	“Christianity,” I began, “is a faith system whose scriptures are the product of the first century, which inevitably means that those scriptures reflect the world view of first century men and women. These scriptures assume that epilepsy, mental illness and muteness result from demon possession. They assume that sickness is a manifestation of divine punishment. They assume that God is a supernatural being, who lives somewhere external to the planet earth and that this God invades human history periodically in supernatural, miraculous ways to accomplish the divine purpose. These scriptures also assume that whatever could not be explained within the first century frame of reference must be regarded as a miracle. This of course means that people today, who want to literalize the scriptures as the ‘inerrant’ words of God, inevitably literalize a world view and a series of assumptions that no modern, educated person could possibly believe.”
	I then noted that the creeds of Christianity are products of the 4th century and refer to a 4th century view of the world. One clear creedal assumption is that the earth is the center of a three-tiered universe, with hell being beneath the earth and heaven being above the sky. They reveal a picture of a divine escalator moving up and down amid the three tiers.
	The creeds also assume the literal and biological accuracy of what came to be called the Virgin Birth in which Jesus is conceived by the operation of the Holy Spirit. This idea is of special interest because one of the earliest forms of the Christian creed came to be called “The Apostles’ Creed” suggesting that it in fact reflects the beliefs of the apostles themselves. The fact is that neither Paul, the first writer of the New Testament (51-64 CE), nor Mark, the author of the first of the gospels to be written (ca.72 CE) ever mentions the Virgin Birth of Jesus. Paul says simply that Jesus was “born of a woman,” like every other human being and “born under the law,” like every other Jew. Mark portrays Jesus as a perfectly normal adult human being, who comes to be baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist at which time the Holy Spirit falls on him and he becomes a “God-infused human life.” The first narrative of a miraculous or Virgin Birth for Jesus does not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade of the Common Era in the writings of Matthew, who wrote long after most, if not all, of the apostles had died. A second and very contradictory version of the story of Jesus’ virgin birth is then added to the developing tradition by Luke about a decade after Matthew. The virgin birth story assumes that the woman is not a genetic contributor to any new life, for the idea that a woman had an egg cell was not discovered until the early years of the 18th century! Clearly the belief system of the apostles did not include the concepts found in the “Apostles’ Creed.” So, if the creeds are literalized along with the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian Church, which are based on those creeds, what happens is that the three-tiered universe and long-abandoned biological assumptions are also literalized thus making the creeds nonsensical in the modern world.
	Most of the liturgical forms still used to some degree in all Christian churches are the product of the 13th century. This means that we are still forced to make 13th century assumptions if we want to continue to worship God in the 21st century. The all-seeing God who plays the role of a judge is certainly apparent when we pray, “Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.” Not surprisingly it seems appropriate to say “Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy” to this 13th century view of God. Salvation is assumed to be a gift from this God above the sky, who comes to rescue us from the fall from our original perfection and who pays the price of our sins in the death of Jesus. That is the context in which we say, “Jesus died for my sins!”
	In our post-Darwinian world, however, there is no original perfection. There is, rather, an ongoing and ever-evolving process carried out over billions of years from single cell life to the complex self-conscious creatures that we are today. If there was no original perfection, there could never have been a fall from perfection, so “original sin” is also non-sensical. If there was no fall into “original sin” then the idea of a divine rescue from a fall that never happened loses all of its meaning. Is there any reason not to understand why 21st century people find the liturgies of our Church to be so meaningless?
	21st century Christianity is thus wedded to the world view of its 1st century scriptures, its 4th century creeds and its 13th century liturgies. Consequently Christianity presents itself to potential modern believers encased in a series of doctrinal and liturgical forms, undergirded by a theological point of view that communicates almost nothing to those people who gather in church to worship. Why is there any surprise that the number of worshipers is in steep decline? Modern Christianity offers only two alternatives. The first is to close our minds to the explosion of knowledge in order to build a protective fortress around the religious formulas of antiquity. We then surround these formulas with the claim that they are supported by an infallible or inerrant tradition. Such a stand offers people the security of the delusion that they possess the ultimate truth of God. We call these who think this way “fundamentalists” and they come in both a Catholic and Protestant variety. So from this perspective the church’s invitation is to “believe this or leave.”
	Those who elect this second option today are legion! People are abandoning “institutional religion” in droves. The Church Alumni Association is now the fastest growing organization in the Christian West. As religious conviction fades secular humanism becomes the only viable alternative. The tension between a religion tied to antiquity and secular values quite divorced from that religious heritage today marks not only church life, but our national political life. We seem to be gridlocked between both a religious and political past that some want to impose on all and a religionless future the nature of which no one finally understands.
	These sterile alternatives are the reality to which the “Spong Lectureship” at St. Peter’s, Morristown seeks to respond, This congregation, under the brilliant leadership of its rector, Janet Broderick, has installed an adult education hour into the heart of Sunday morning. In this class, the Bible is taught in the same way as it is taught today in the finest academic centers of this land. No one seeks to protect the Bible from the insights of modern knowledge. Also, in this class the historical critics of traditional Christianity are engaged. It looks at the challenge brought to Christianity by Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, just to name a few. It studies modern prophets who have challenged Christianity from outside, ranging from Baruch Spinoza and Franz Kafka to Malcolm X. The traditions of the Christian faith are thus forced into dialogue with the intellectual breakthroughs of the ages.
	To supplement this ongoing congregational program, this annual lecture series brings to this church and to its community the best Christian minds of this generation. That makes St. Peter’s unique, but is this not the place to which all Christian churches must come? I believe it is. Death by boredom or attrition is the only alternative.
	~John Shelby Spong

	Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Mary Linn Crouse  from Helena, Montana, writes:
Question:
Is there a good Bible study book you would recommend for a group of lay people to use that is not agenda riddled? I am looking for one that looks at the Bible within its cultural and historical background in which each individual book was written and leaves room for an open-ended discussion of the universal ideas that are inspired in those texts.
Answer:
Dear Mary,

>From your question I get a picture of the kind of Bible study you might have endured in your lifetime. A “Bible Study book” is almost always the product of an evangelical- fundamentalist mentality. The reason I say that is that the phrase a “Bible Study Book” assumes that one can embrace in a single study guide a minimum of 66 books, not including the Apocrypha, that were written over a period of about one thousand years (ca, 1000 BCE – ca.35 CE), by a variety of authors, and in at least two different languages. A study group wishing to use such a book will tend to do so only for the few weeks that the group will meet. A class organized this way simply does not plan to engage the Bible seriously. One should not expect anything good or significant to come out of such a study. Most Bible studies in churches using that kind of material, amount to little more than the corporate pooling of common ignorance, which is then under-girded by a study guide that would embarrass almost every biblical scholar in the world. Given that format, my conclusion is that there is no such thing as a single volume Bible study book.

There are, however, thousands of volumes on the individual books of the Bible written with competent scholarship by competent scholars that will take you through and into the meaning of each of the books of the Bible. The problem with most of these books, however, is that they were not written for the average reader and thus are considered too difficult, too complex and even too involved for most people. Groups using such books get discouraged quickly.

Readers of this column might recall that in recent years, through most of 2008-2010. I did a series under the title: “Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.” That week-by-week series began with columns outlining just how the first books of the Old Testament were actually formed and it ended with a brief analysis of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. I put each book of the Bible into its cultural and historical perspective and analyzed briefly its message. All of these past columns are available online at www.johnshelbyspong.com to subscribers in the archives thanks to my publisher, ProgressiveChristianity.org. Subscribers may access them at any time online. That material was then gathered, edited and published as a book in the fall of 2011 by Harper/Collins under the same title: Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. That book, reflecting its own origins, was written, as I hope this column and all of my books are, not for the minds of theologically-trained seminary graduates, but for searching, educated lay men and women who do not have theological training. Indeed, I know of instances in small town America where a particular church subscribes to this column and then reproduces it for use each week in teaching adult Bible classes. I get reports back from them from time to time on great debates that have issued from those gatherings. So I recommend that resource to you for consideration.

If your group wants to go into depth about a single book in the Bible then a volume written by a competent scholar on that particular book can be studied with intensity. My coming book (June 11, 2013 from Harper/Collins) on John’s Gospel, entitled The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic is written with exactly that purpose in mind.

I hope this helps. My great ambition in life is to leave the Christian world a little more biblically literate than I found it.

~John Shelby Spong

	Announcements

	Full Review of Bishop John Shelby Spong's new book: 

	The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic 

	By: Rev. Fred Plumer, President of ProgressiveChristianity.org

	Over the years I have wondered if Christianity would have been better off today if the Gospel of John had not been made part of the canon. Ever since the fourth century, this Gospel has been used to support some of the most exclusive and divisive religious creeds in history. In my opinion it has had far too much influence on the development of modern Christianity. 

	I must admit, however, that I am truly excited about recommending John Shelby Spong’s newest book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. At times this book feels more like a detective novel than a scholarly work. Spong starts with his desire to figure out how this unusual book came to be, who was its author and why it was written. Like a “who done it” mystery, it is almost impossible not to be drawn into his investigation as he sorts through the clues. 

	Spong wonders why both the issues and focus change as one reads through the chapters of the Book of John. He concludes that this Gospel must have been written in stages, with different layers by different authors over a 30-year period. The question he poses here is why? Spong believes the text follows the stages the Johannine community was going through as it moved from a Jewish community into something new. He carefully tracks the development of what must have been a difficult transition for these Jewish followers of Jesus and concludes that ultimately they “had to learn how to live apart from Judaism.”

	He is very clear, however, that the Gospel of John is overwhelmingly a Jewish work and it can only be understood through the Jewish context in which it was created. Spong writes “My study has convinced me, first, that the gospel of John is a deeply Jewish book, and second, that by reading it through the lens of Jewish mysticism, our generation is given new doors for understanding this gospel.”

	Spong carefully tracks the changes the community was forced to deal with as the Jesus followers were confronted with their changing Greek world. In the process, we are not only given the opportunity to learn more about this first century Jewish mystical movement, but as we read we gain a greater understanding of the times in which it struggled.

	Possibly the most exciting thing for some will be the recognition that at least one important part of the initial Jesus movement was focused on an early form of Jewish mysticism. Spong makes it clear that this community did not think in Greek dualistic ways. Therefore Jesus was not an “outside invader from another realm” but rather was the defining human life, “bringing together into oneness the human and the divine.” It was through a new consciousness that Jesus was able to achieve a mystical oneness with God without the barriers that bind us.

	I believe this book will not only dramatically change our perspective on the Fourth Gospel, but it may very well alter our understanding of our Christian roots. For some it may even change the way they feel about their own Christian path. Finally this book may provide a model for change for disenchanted Christians or followers of Jesus. I am excited about this book and highly recommend it.

	~Fred Plumer, President, ProgressiveChristianity.org

	Pre-Order The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic Today!

Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support at johnshelbyspong.com or 503-236-3545.

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