[Dialogue] 7/28/16, Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XXIX - The Ninth Thesis, Ethics (continued)

Thu Jul 28 09:56:26 PDT 2016

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Charting a New Reformation
Part XXIX - The Ninth Thesis, Ethics (continued)
One of the ways the demise of yesterday’s religious power can be determined is to notice that things, once held to be ultimately sacred, now appear in jokes that cause people not only to laugh, but also to deal with the loss of the security of yesterday’s religious symbols at the same time. When James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior in the cabinet of President Ronald Reagan, told a racial joke, he was summarily fired. Yet the racist content of that joke had been commonplace in the social practice of this nation twenty-five years earlier. Consciousness had grown. One does not make fun of something so evil as racism, was the new rule. The reverse of this consciousness-raising illustration is observed when one discovers that one does and can laugh at what were once regarded as “the eternal laws of God.” One politician came to the defense of the “inerrancy” of these laws by saying: “The Bible calls them the Ten Commandments not the Ten Suggestions.”
There was also the good news, bad news joke about the Ten Commandments. Moses, returning from Mt. Sinai said to the people of Israel: “I have good news and bad news.” “Give us the good news first,” the people demanded. “Well,” said Moses in obedience to their request, “I negotiated them down to ten!” “What is the bad news?” the people demanded to hear. To which Moses responded, “Adultery is still in!”
Finally there was the message on the church’s lawn sign where people received their “word for the day.” This sign boldly advertised: “This week’s special! Observe any seven of the Ten Commandments.” Humor about the Ten Commandments clearly reveals a demise in the power once attributed to this code of ethics.
The other clear indicator is that the form the commandments possess becomes more important than the content. Early in my career as a bishop, I went for my annual Episcopal visitation to a congregation in Hudson County, New Jersey. On this Sunday we had about 100 worshipers gathered to greet and welcome their bishop. When the time came for the sermon, I stepped out of the pulpit and walked into the nave, the body of the church. This was going to be an informal sermon. When they were settled in their pews and adjusted to this new sermon position taken by their bishop, I began by asking: “How many of you believe that the Ten Commandments are still important?” Every hand in the church went up. No one actually in a church on Sunday morning wanted to be caught suggesting that this ancient code of conduct was not of great significance, authority and power. I took note of their unanimity. “That is good to see,” I said, in effect congratulating them on their moral judgment. Then I continued: “Since you all agree on their importance, who would now like to stand up and recite the Ten Commandments?” Every hand went down; there was not a volunteer among them. I did enhance the corporate guilt felt in that moment in a rather shameless way by saying: “You mean that you believe that the Ten Commandments are important, but none of you can tell me what they are?” I allowed that discomfort to be felt for just a moment before moving to dissipate it. “Well, let’s see if all of us together can come up with the Ten,” I suggested. There was an almost audible sense of relief. No one was now on the spot. “Who would like to begin by telling us what any one of the Ten Commandments is?” Hands went up quickly “Murder” and “adultery” were immediately mentioned. They are almost always recounted first. That was followed by another embarrassing pause. Then another hand went up, but when I recognized this person, I noticed that the commandment she referred to came out as a question: “Honor your father and mother?” Yes, I responded assuringly, that is commandment number five. I thought her tentative manner meant that it was a guess, but when it turned out to be successful, others were encouraged. Next the commandment to “observe the Sabbath” was offered. “Number four,” I declared it to be and continued to wait for more. That was when plenty of other commandments were mentioned like: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I allowed that those two were very fine rules, but they had never been part of the Ten. Finally, we got” stealing,” number eight; “false witness,” number nine, and “coveting,” number 10. No one could actually define coveting, but that was not required by this exercise. The fact was slowly and somewhat painfully being revealed in an unmistakable way that these hundred or so worshipers could not, all together, name the Ten Commandments, which they had universally proclaimed that they believed to be still very important. I have little reason to think that this congregation would be much different from one in any other church on any other Sunday. This exercise revealed to me that if the average churchgoer does not know what the Ten Commandments are, then they can no longer claim, with any sense of real conviction, that the commandments themselves are still important. For me it was a sure sign of the erosion in the modern world of any real objectivity still present in the field of ethics. It also indicated to me very boldly that eternal rules designed to govern human behavior simply will never again be written in the permanence of stone, and that none of us, who claim to speak for the church, can continue to pretend that these ancient laws still provide the ethical basis on which anyone today lives. The suggestion that moral absolutes could ever be codified for all time actually violates our experience. The rules that must govern any real debate on ethics no longer appear to be obvious. Context always modifies judgment. Life is never static. No rule, no ethical norm is ever eternal. We all make our moral judgments based on the situation in which we find ourselves living, whether we can admit that or not.
Who was it who proclaimed in the first place that the Ten Commandments were the voice of God speaking? At this point, we are driven to probe the mythology that has been built up around that code. Mythology is always designed to remove the subject from being discussed, questioned or getting lost in relativity. Once we understand mythology’s purpose, we can ask and access just how accurate this mythology is. “Not very” is our conclusion, after we begin to engage just the slightest bit of biblical study.
In many ways I must confess that I was unfair to my New Jersey congregation, because the fact is that no one can name the Ten Commandments! This is normally a shocking statement to which people react when they first hear it. It does not jibe with what most all of us have been taught for so long. The fact is, however, that the Hebrew Scriptures have three versions of the Ten Commandments and they do not agree with each other. They cannot be rolled into a consistent ten! Tradition alone has dictated that the version found in Exodus 20 is the official version. A brief analysis of this Exodus list, however, will reveal that it is quite different from anything that Moses might have received. How do we know? Because the commandment regarding the observance of the Sabbath in the Exodus 20 list has been edited to bring it into conformity with the seven-day story of creation with which the Hebrew Bible opens. That Genesis chapter, we now know, was one of the last parts of the Hebrew Scriptures to be composed. It is the product of the Babylonian captivity that ended near the end of the 6th century BCE. The first version of the Exodus 20 list of the Ten Commandments seems to be primarily a product of perhaps the 9th century BCE. So we have to conclude that a later writer, thought to be a member of the group now known as the “Priestly” or “P” writers, had later incorporated the recently composed seven-day creation story into the Sabbath Day commandment. The reason given, requiring the people to rest on the Sabbath was to emulate God who, on the seventh day of creation, had rested from all of the divine labor and had enjoined that Sabbath day of rest on the people as a sign of their Jewishness. It is interesting that the version of the Ten Commandments found in Deuteronomy 5, which was written during the latter years of the seventh century BCE, also calls for the Sabbath to be observed, but justifies this practice on the fact that the Jews were to remember that they had once been slaves in Egypt and that even slaves, to say nothing of the cattle and other beasts of burden, deserved a day of rest.
The third version of the Ten Commandments found in the Hebrew Scriptures is in Exodus 34. It is far more cultic and less ethical in its scope. The background to this narrative is that God has been forced to rewrite the commandments because Moses had smashed the original tablets of stone on the ground in disgust when, on returning from Sinai, he found the people worshiping a golden calf. This Exodus 34 version began by defining God as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” One is not to imagine, however, that these writers have made God soft or easy to manipulate. The text in Exodus 34 goes on to say that this God will not sit idly by when evil needs to be punished. God would, rather, visit “the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation.” God then goes on to promise to drive out all the current occupants of the “Holy Land.” Only then are the rules of the covenant stated: Israel is to have no other God, the Sabbath is to be observed and the sacrifices are to be done properly. The last commandment in this group of ten states: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I must confess that I have never even been tempted to violate that commandment!
We can safely conclude that the Ten Commandments were never themselves meant to be an eternal code. They changed in history; they were edited. The ethical life has always been an adventure. The subject of ethical relativity is now open. We will pursue it in depth as this series unfolds.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Keith via the Internet, writes:

Question:
I’ve just started reading your book Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World and I’m finding it to be fascinating. I’ve always suspected that the Bible was a combination of folklore and revisionist history. Could you tell me how it is that you found that the virgin birth, the miracles and the ascension were all added 70-100 years later? Do you believe Jesus was the son of God or do you believe that this assertion was the product of years of embellishment? If you believe him to be the son of God, then do you think it’s possible that there were other sons and perhaps daughters of God?
Answer:
Dear Keith,
When I read your letter, I want to say slow down, my friend. The questions you raise cannot be dealt with so summarily. Jesus lived between 4 BCE and 30 CE according to the best guess of the scholars. The first gospel, Mark, was written about 72-73 BC. The Virgin Birth story enters the tradition with Matthew in the middle years of the 9th decade (82-85 CE). The Ascension story enters the tradition with Luke about a decade after Matthew. Those dates can be pretty well demonstrated by internal references to such things as the fall of Jerusalem to the armies of Rome, which we know occurred in the year 70 CE.
Yes, I believe that God was in Christ, to use St. Paul’s words, but that does not mean that the external theistic God, who lives above the sky, somehow entered him and took over his humanity. Rather I think that his humanity became so full and so complete that the meaning of God could find expression in him. I think all human beings have that capacity. I deal with these and many other questions in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, but it took over 300 pages to do so. There is no shortcut to discovering the truth in, behind and through the Bible, but the God is real, I believe, that we always find at the end of our study.
My best,
John Shelby Spong

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