[Dialogue] 4/27/17: Wolsey: Is Jesus the Only Way?; Spong revisited: The Word Of God?
Ellie Stock via Dialogue
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
Thu Apr 27 13:49:43 PDT 2017
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<div style="color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;text-align: left;"><h1 style="color: #003d4a;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 34px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">Is Jesus the Only Way?</h1>
<h3 class="aolmail_null" style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 26px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">By Roger Wolsey</h3>
<p><a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=76d610fe07&e=db34daa597"><img align="left" alt="roger_wolsey copy" class="aolmail_wp-image-49773 aolmail_alignleft" height="156" style="border: 0px;width: 115px;height: 156px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" width="115" src="https://johnshelbyspong.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/roger_wolsey-copy.jpg"></a>As a progressive Christian pastor and author I frequently receive critical pushback from conservative and fundamentalist Christians who adamantly declare that <em>the only</em> way to experience salvation is by giving intellectual assent to certain specific truth claims about the life of Jesus. Scratch that, they don’t generally care about his <em>life</em>, their focus is primarily upon Jesus’ <em>death and his resurrection</em>. Their message boils down to <strong>“Unless you believe that Jesus died for your sins and that he physically rose from the grave, you are a heretic, and will go to hell when you die.”</strong></p>
<p>There are numerous problems with this line of thinking from a progressive Christian perspective. <strong>1.</strong> The lack of emphasis upon Jesus’ 30-33 years of <em>life</em> – his way, teachings, and example. <strong>2.</strong> Reducing the faith to a cerebral matter of what individuals accept as accurate information. <strong>3.</strong> The view that salvation is largely a matter of where we’ll go when we die. <strong>4.</strong> The idea that it is Jesus’ death on the cross that allows anyone to experience salvation. And <strong>5.</strong> The notion that hell is even a Christian concept – it isn’t.</p>
<p>I addressed all of these matters in full and in depth in my book <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=fc03c50b92&e=db34daa597"><em>Kissing Fish</em></a>. I’ve frankly avoided addressing these matters as a blog as they are complicated and require, and are worthy of, much back-story, nuance, and sophisticated discourse. However, it’s become clear that there’s a need for a briefer synopsis. So the following is my attempt to put this all into a nutshell.</p>
<p>Here we go. Re: points 1 & 2, <strong>It’s a damn shame and tragedy that so many Christians focus on Jesus’ death and not on his life.</strong> Mel Gibson’s movie <em>The Passion of the Christ</em> is a keen example of this distortion of authentic Christianity. The idea that simply accepting X, Y, and Z about Jesus’ person, death, and resurrection is what matters – and not focusing on his <em>teachings</em> in the Sermon on the Mount, and looking at his actual <em>ways of practicing</em> his religion in <em>interacting with and relating to</em> people – is missing the forest for the trees (and only a tiny number of trees at that). It’s an epic adventure in missing the point. <strong>One can <em>believe</em> “all the right things” and not be able to love their way out of a wet paper bag. It’s <em>loving</em> that matters.</strong> (<a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=72e4792348&e=db34daa597">1 Corinthians 13</a>)</p>
<p>Re: 3 & 4, in Hebrew, <em>salvation</em> means healing, wholeness, and well-being. To remind us, Jesus was a Jew who practiced Judaism. Yet conservative Christians disregard (don’t even seem to know) that and instead distort salvation to believing or accepting certain intellectual assertions. Jesus saved (provided salvation to) numerous people long before he was killed – it’s right there in the Gospels, <em>read</em> them for gosh sake. This reality clearly undermines the conservative premise that no-one is saved but for Jesus’ blood shed on a cross. In the Gospels, salvation is experienced when someone accepts God’s healing, grace and love and responds in ways that show it. Jesus also referred to this state of being as experiencing “abundant/eternal life” and living in “the kingdom of God.”</p>
<p>Conservative and fundamentalist Christians subscribe rigidly to the <strong>substitutionary</strong> or <strong>penal theories of the atonement</strong> – that Jesus died as our proxy/substitute and took on a the violent death that each of us should receive, and/or that Jesus received the punishment that’s intended for each of us “wretched sinners.” First of all, there has never been a Church Council that has declared that any one theory of the atonement is “the one, true, right one.” Second, the theology that is associated with those theories of the atonement posits an angry, judgmental, wrathful, blood thirsty God & understands humans as incapable of anything but sin and evil. Put me on record as rejecting that pagan god – 100% percent. Yes, I’m aware that there are parts of the Bible that might suggest such a view of God. To which I’d remind us that a) God didn’t write the Bible, b) it consists of 66 books, written by many people over many years, and c) not a few of the verses within some of those books contain bad theology that reflect pagan influences of the cultures that surrounded those ancient peoples (e.g., Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman).</p>
<p>Finally, there are numerous other theories of the atonement that are biblically based and have been embraced by Christians since the very birth of the faith. Most progressive Christians tend to embrace the Christus Victor or the <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=e2037ebad5&e=db34daa597">Moral Influence</a>/Moral Exemplar theories of the “at-one-ment.” I prefer the latter, i.e., that Jesus is our model who shows us how to truly live a Godly life and thus experience and know salvation wholeness and abundant/eternal life here and now – and beyond. It is by loving others and receiving their love; forgiving others and receiving their forgiveness; by treating others justly and receiving their just treatment; and by being reconciled with others – that we know and experience salvation. <strong>Salvation is a Divine-human co-creation that we receive and participate in.</strong></p>
<p>What prompted today’s essay was coming across the following image/meme on social media. It reads “CONTRADICT They can’t all be true. – John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="john 14 6" class="aolmail_wp-image-49848 aolmail_size-medium aolmail_alignleft" height="120" width="300" style="border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;height: auto;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" src="https://johnshelbyspong.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/john-14-6-300x120.png"></p>
<p>The person who posted that meme went on to add: <em>“All the religions of the world are true because they’re all basically the same.” This refrain, commonly repeated by people, reflects a fundamental ignorance of the world’s religions. The religions are not the same because their core beliefs contradict each other. Here are a few examples: -most Hindus believe in the existence of an atman (i.e. soul) that is reincarnated after death; Buddhism denies this – Islam teaches that Jesus Christ never died on a cross; Christianity teaches that if Jesus never died and rose again, the whole Christian faith is worthless (1 Corinthians 15) -Hinduism affirms (or permits) the worship of many gods; Judaism strictly prohibits this and requires that only one God be worshiped. Given the contradictions in the world religions, all of them cannot be true. The most important question then becomes which, if any of them, accurately describe the true nature of reality?”</em></p>
<p>That person runs an evangelical “apologetics” platform which seeks to defend and explain “the Christian faith” to non-believers. The short description on their About page humbly states “A place to explore the ultimate questions of life from a Christian worldview.” Fair enough, it is *a* Christian worldview.</p>
<p>And yet, the page’s true colors come out in the General Description “…defense of the Christian worldview.” Yep, he thinks he’s championing THE Christian perspective. Not so humble – or accurate. Okay, let’s address the points made in his post. Yes, there are some factual differences among and between the major world religions. The points chosen to highlight are tellingly ones that reflect his idealized Christo-centric priorities — what various religions teach that pertains to Jesus’ death and resurrection. Sure, Muslims don’t think Jesus was killed, and Buddhists and Hindus don’t believe in resurrection. And Hindus have many gods to worship and Jews only one. So what? Those are hardly what Jesus and his message are all about. In other words, <strong>the things that conservative Christians tend to think are the essential foundations – aren’t. Christians are called to follow the religion of Jesus – not the religion <em>about</em> him.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="coexist" class="aolmail_wp-image-49849 aolmail_size-medium aolmail_alignleft" height="110" width="300" style="border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;height: auto;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" src="https://johnshelbyspong.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/coexist--300x110.jpg"></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The graphic featured is one that is an obvious play and attack on the many variations of the symbolic COEXIST slogan featured on bumper-stickers across the land.</p>
<p>Such bumper-stickers are meant to convey a sense of appreciating the diversity of world religions and a deep valuing of all of them – including the common ground among them. They’re an invitation to remind us of a higher calling to “pray well with others.”</p>
<p>The meme at hand, however, seeks to convey that the members of the various religions are at odds with each other and can’t play well in the sandbox of life together. Indeed, he’s saying that they’re “contradictory and in opposition to the Truth.” And yet, many of us who live in the 21st century know full well that seemingly contradictory things can both be true – at the same time. It’s called <strong>paradox</strong> – something that conservative and fundamentalist Christianities can’t fathom due to their still operating via the mindset of the modern era.</p>
<p>Light, for instance, can be understood as being a particle — or as a wave. Both perceptions are true – at the same time – even if they seem contradictory. Similarly, one can see that each of the major world religions are true, and one can understand that famous/infamous passage where Jesus is presented as saying <strong>“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”</strong> (John 14:6) as celebrating the uniqueness and distinctiveness of Jesus *and* also celebrating the universal common ground that exists among many religions.</p>
<p>Progressive Christianity is the post-modern-influenced evolution of historic mainline Liberal Christianity. While not to be equated with postmodernism, it honors contemporary people’s capacities to see and honor multiple truths at the same time.</p>
<p>One might say that <strong>from a progressive Christian perspective, Jesus <em>is</em> “the way, the truth, and the life,” and all who follow Jesus’ way, teachings, and example — <em>the way of unconditional love, of radical hospitality, of loving-kindness, of compassion, of mercy, of prophetic speaking truth to power, the way of forgiveness, of reconciliation, and the pursuit of restorative justice</em> – by whatever name, and even if they’ve never even heard of Jesus, are fellow brothers & sisters in Christ and his Way.</strong></p>
<p>To the extent that other world religions are about instilling, fostering, and nurturing those universal values – we see Christ in them. This is also true for secular NGOs. We might also say that <strong><em>on a surface level, all of the major world religions are the same. On a deeper level, all of those religions are very different. And on a still deeper level, all of those religions are the same.</em></strong> That said, we’re rather enamored by the uniqueness of the Jesus story and we invite others to join us in sharing in that specific life-giving journey — even if we feel no dire need to convert anyone. It is this non-exclusive approach to our faith that many young adults find compelling. So <strong>progressive Christianity is evangelistic even as it’s not.</strong></p>
<p>Evangelical platforms such as this one seem to be motivated by anxiety. They’re concerned about many of the people “going to hell” and they’re concerned about Christianity dying.</p>
<p>Progressive Christians, instead, invite us to simply be as faithful as we can <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=4ab0af64df&e=db34daa597">and not worry about “the Church dying.</a>” We have no fear of death for we follow a savior who gave it all up for the sake of others – and who invites us to pick up our cross and follow him – and be willing to die. Indeed, if we do anything to “attract” people out of desperation on our part, it’ll be fruitless. It’s like dating someone who is insecure and anxious — not attractive.</p>
<p>Let’s just boldly (and paradoxically) be who were are — and maybe even more so — yes, more so.</p>
<p><em>~ Rev. Roger Wolsey</em>, Director, Wesley Foundation at University of Colorado – Boulder</p>
<p>p.s., In my book <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=06dc8c885f&e=db34daa597"><em>Kissing Fish</em></a>, I stated that <strong>“each of the major world religions are like wells, and if you go deep enough into any of them, you’ll hit the same aquifer and Source.</strong>” I firmly believe that. However, I’m particularly drawn to the well of Christianity. I don’t literally think that all religions are *<em>exactly</em>* the same. German, English, Korean, or Swahili are all valid, effective, languages, but they aren’t exactly the same. The same is true for the major world religions. There are differences to be sure among the religions – but to the extent that they each seek to foster increased love, compassion, justice, mercy, etc – they’re doing the same work and helping people connect with themselves, each other, and beyond.</p>
<p>That said, IMO, those various religions have differing capacities and histories in doing those particular things. Christianity, at its best, is a particularly effective vehicle for helping people become more loving and just. One of the key reasons that I’m a Christian is because of its long history of prophetically speaking truth to power and seeking to challenge and change unjust social systems. Many of the Asian religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) have tended to avoid saying that there is right and wrong or good or bad. Such a philosophy can reduce personal suffering via letting go of certain mindsets. That said, they also tend to result in moral quietude in the face of mass injustice and end up fostering increased social suffering. Case in point, the many centuries of the oppressive caste system in India.</p>
<p>However, Buddhism does have a strong vein of fostering compassion and, like Thomas Merton before me, I’m a better Christian by seeking to weave in the best of Buddhism into my practices. Christians would do well to humbly concede that Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on compassion, loving, truth, or justice – and indeed, there are many, many places where the Church as shown noted patterns of falling far short of our aspirations.</p>
<p>The meme discussed here presents <strong>a polarized either/or perspective. It’s the sort of non-spiritual, non-mystical, unrealistic, and dysfunctional mindset that progressive Christianity seeks to help people place in the dustbin of history.</strong></p>
<p>Read the essay online <a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=0c0d070c28&e=db34daa597">here</a>.</p>
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<p><span style="font-size:18px">Georgina of Leland, Lancashire, U.K. writes:</span></p>
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Question:</h4>
<p>"How can I help other people have the experience of a living relationship with God?"</p>
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<p><a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://"><img alt="Gretta Vosper" class="aolmail_wp-image-49753 aolmail_alignleft" height="144" style="border: 0px;width: 116px;height: 144px;margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;float: left;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" width="116" src="https://johnshelbyspong.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gretta-Vosper-copy-242x300.png"></a>Hi Georgina,</p>
<p>The most enduring challenge faced by those who want to help others have the experience of a living relationship with God is our utter refusal to come up with a succinct definition of god that everyone will agree upon. Further complicating the challenge provided by the sheer number of ideas we are left with about the god we call God, is our assumption that everyone else shares the same idea we have. I think it was Peter Jennings, in a convocation address to Carleton University, who named our penchant for assuming that even people we know nothing about believe exactly the same way that we do, “the Vanna White Syndrome”.</p>
<p>I don’t usually think in terms of a relationship with God; rather, I would consider relationships to either increase the god in the world or destroy it. My beliefs about god are wrapped up in that which, by virtue of my humanity, I am compelled to create in the world. It is the goodness that is mine to bring about, the delight that is mine to share, the healing that is mine to commence, the justice that is mine to demand. When I do these things, I create god in the world. The relationship aspect of it is what is built between me and myself, another person, the planet, or a generation I will never live to meet. When what we create in relationship with one another or ourselves is sacred, by which I mean something so crucial to the dignity of our humanity that we cannot risk denigrating or losing it, then we have created god. Relationships that honour the beauty and human dignity of the other are relationships that increase god. And, goodness knows, we need more of those relationships.</p>
<p>It isn’t too hard to figure out what the opposite of those relationships would be like. Any time we refuse to bring love, caring, compassion, we refuse to create god in those relationships. It may be that you cannot be compassionate with someone else because being compassionate with yourself is the priority at that moment. Honour that. But when we choose to use someone for our own purposes or put someone down because they are not like us, then, using my definition, we reduce the god in the world. Or, in secular terms, we reduce the good in the world. We can ill afford to diminish good in the world.</p>
<p>Living beauty, goodness, and truth into all the relationships you possibly can would, in my opinion and experience, be the perfect way to provide a living – in a very real sense – relationship with God for another. The strength of what you create together will provide lasting benefit to you both in situations you may never realize. It is a win win situation for both of you. And the world. A win, win, win!</p>
<p>I don’t use the word “god” with many people in my life anymore. I’ve mostly added the extra “o” and moved onto the use of “good”. It makes it easier to explore, especially when understandings of what constitutes good diverge. When they do, we are much less sensitive about exploring our different understandings than we are when those differences are couched in ideas about the god called God.</p>
<p>I would encourage you, Georgina, to continue to place goodness – god, if you must – in your relationships but carefully consider what the consequence of demanding that your family, friends, or acquaintances think and speak and order their universes as do you. Have a vibrant conversation about what good might be, but let that enrich your relationships without the requirement of language that discomforts many people. I think that, if you do, you will not only witness the strengthening of “go(o)d” in your own world, you will witness it strengthening the lives of those around you.</p>
<p>~ Gretta Vosper</p>
<p>Read and Share Online <a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=eac086154e&e=db34daa597">Here</a></p>
<p><strong>About the Author</strong></p>
<p>The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best selling books include <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=c0fbcfbc78&e=db34daa597"><em>With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe</em></a>, and <a style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=dadd26edaa&e=db34daa597"><em>Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief</em></a>. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.</p>
<p>_________________________________________________</p>
<p> </p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:28px"><span style="font-family:georgia,times,times new roman,serif"><strong>The Word of God? </strong></span></span></p>
<p> </p>
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<p>“This is the word of the Lord”</p>
<p>That is the liturgical phrase used in Christian churches to mark the end of a reading from the Bible. It is a strange, even a misleading, phrase. Yet Sunday after Sunday it is repeated, reinforcing in the psyches of worshipers a rather outdated attitude toward Holy Scripture.</p>
<p>In many of its details, the Bible is simply wrong! Epilepsy is not caused by demon possession. David did not write the Psalms. The earth is not the center of the universe. On other issues of great public concern, the Bible is no longer even regarded as moral. Its verses have been used to affirm war, slavery, segregation and apartheid. It defines women as inferior creatures and suggests that homosexual persons be put to death.</p>
<p>Church people try to ignore or suppress these biblical deficiencies, but when the Scriptures are read to a listening congregation the response is increasing incredulity. Still they respond, “This is the word of the Lord.”</p>
<p>Outside the church, this presumed authority of Scripture is generally ignored. Secular people live in a post-religious world where the idea that a literary work, written between 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E., can be “the Word of God,” is simply too far-fetched to believe. This obvious ecclesiastical power play is no longer even passively accepted as benign. One has only to chart the evil and pain that many people have endured in history because someone regarded the Bible as the “Word of God.” That claim is no longer regarded as valid.</p>
<p>In a series of essays that will appear periodically over the next few months in this column I will examine some of the more frightening examples of these tragedies. My purpose will be quite specific. I will be seeking to call the Christian Church in all of its forms to look closely at what it is, overtly and covertly, teaching its people about the Bible and at the enormous gap that exists between what biblical scholars know and what the leaders of the churches actually say to their congregations. If our clergy do not really believe what they are saying, and if our liturgies affirm things that the scholars universally reject, then something is clearly amiss in contemporary Christianity that does not augur well for a Christian future.</p>
<p>First, we need to state some basic biblical facts.</p>
<p>The people who wrote the books in the Bible did not think they were writing “The Word of God.” That is a quite elementary but singularly important place to begin.</p>
<p>In regard to the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or the Books of Moses, scholars have known since the 19th century, that they are not the work of a single hand. They are rather a compilation of at least four strands of Jewish writing that were composed over a period of some 500 years. Those strands were first, the Yahwist document, written in the tenth century B.C.E. and sometimes called the Hebrew Iliad, which reflects the national history of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The second was the Elohist document, written in the 9th century B.C.E. and sometimes called the Hebrew Odyssey, which reflects the national history of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.</p>
<p>After the fall of the Northern Kingdom to the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E., these two national stories were woven together into a single narrative. The third document was the product of one known as the Deuteronomic writer, composed in the late 7th century B.C.E., and consisting of the book of Deuteronomy and a general editing of the newly merged national Jewish story. The fourth source of the Torah was not so much a document as it was an expansive editorial commentary applied to the entire faith story by those called the Priestly Writers and written during the Babylonian Exile somewhere between 586 and 450 B.C.E. That is the process, briefly described, that produced the oldest part of the biblical story.</p>
<p>One can identify the places where these versions of the story were woven rather inexactly together, producing many of the conflicting details in the Torah itself. The Sabbath day law, for example, developed during the Exile, is read back into the manna in the wilderness story to make sure that the miraculous food was not gathered on the seventh day in violation of the Sabbath. The ritualistic laws governing sacrifices were used to alter the Noah story so that during the 150 days on the ark, Noah could offer the proper sacrifices without destroying that species.</p>
<p>Finally, there are three versions of the Ten Commandments in the Torah. The oldest one, from the Yahwist document, is found in Exodus 34. The version with which most of us are familiar, found in Exodus 20, comes from the Elohist document but was significantly doctored by the Priestly Writers. The third version is in Deuteronomy 5 and though close to Exodus 20 has some revealing differences. The Deuteronomic version of the 4th Commandment makes the reason for rest on the Sabbath, not that God rested from the work of creation and thus hallowed that day, but that the Jews should remember that they were once slaves and that even slaves need a day of rest. The seven-day creation story, with which the Bible now opens, was written by the Priestly Writers well after the Deuteronomic document had been completed.</p>
<p>The idea that the Bible came into being in some sort of miraculous way and is either the literal dictation of God or even the “inspired message of God” is simply not supportable on its face. The Bible is a profoundly human, deeply flawed, tribal history that has created as much pain as blessing in our world.</p>
<p>Moving on to the Hebrew prophets, this analysis produces a similar difficulty. The prophets tended to explain every disaster that befell the chosen people as the direct result of their laxity in obeying God’s laws or in their inability to worship God properly. God seemed to have little more to do than to organize the whole universe so as to teach the chosen people how to be faithful or to demonstrate the dreadful price that unfaithful ones would have to pay.</p>
<p>When we turn to the first part of the New Testament to be written, we need to register the fact that Paul’s letters were just that, letters. They are time bound and time specific. They express irritation at and praise for the behavior of the actual recipients. They were composed in a dialogical manner in order to address real issues bothering real people in real time. When Paul wrote in anger, “I hope those who bother you will mutilate themselves,” was that the Word of God? Surely it was nothing more than the word of Paul!</p>
<p>Similarly, when Paul suggested that a woman’s head must be covered in public worship, he was expressing a cultural norm not a universal principle. When Paul said, “I forbid a woman to have authority over a man” or when he suggested that those who do not worship God properly would have their sexual identities confused, does one really want to suggest that this badly dated bit of human ignorance is to be reverenced as the voice of God?</p>
<p>Later the Gospel writers would violently twist out of context the writings of the prophets to prove such things as the literal accuracy of the Virgin Birth or to demonstrate that the ancient prophets supported the doctrinal and creedal development of the 4th and 5th Centuries of the Common Era. Jerry Falwell, in a published book, has suggested that the divine nature of Jesus is “proved” by the fact that he fulfilled in a very specific way, the messianic expectations of the prophets. That attitude, however, has been revealed by modern biblical scholarship to be nothing less than profound ignorance. The idea that a God, living somewhere above the sky, would drop hints into the texts of writers, some 800 years before the birth of Christ, determining exactly what Jesus would do in the 1st century, is fanciful enough. But when one adds that God would need to guard these divine hints through the centuries when these texts were copied by hand, protect them from destruction in war and guide the minds of Jewish decision makers centuries later to include these prophetic works in the Jewish Canon of Scripture, the elements of miracle and magic become heightened to incredibly superstitious levels.</p>
<p>Next, one needs to understand, that contrary to the way Christian theology has interpreted the Gospels from the 2nd century on, Jesus did not miraculously live out these prophetic expectations. It was exactly the other way around. The story of Jesus was crafted some 40 – 70 years after that earthly life came to an end, to make it conform to the biblical expectations! Micah, for example, did not predict that the birth of Jesus would occur in Bethlehem. That was the way that later Christians interpreted Micah. Jesus’ birth, which probably occurred in Galilee, was shifted to Bethlehem in order to make the birth of Jesus fulfill this expectation.</p>
<p>The story of Jesus’ crucifixion was, likewise, deliberately and liturgically shaped by their authors who had Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 in front of them as they wrote the passion narrative. We forget, conveniently I would suggest, that the earliest Gospel, Mark, says that when Jesus was arrested, all of the disciples “forsook him and fled.” Jesus died alone with no eyewitnesses. The Gospel writers later wrote the story of his death to “reveal the fulfillment of Scripture.”</p>
<p>A great part of the crisis in faith today derives from the fact that the authority once claimed for the Bible cannot and should not be sustained in the light of modern knowledge. How important then is this traditional view of the Bible to the future of Christianity. Can this view of Scripture be abandoned without Christianity, as we have known it, not also collapsing? That question remains to be answered but it will be the present in the background of many columns written during the coming year. Stay tuned!</p>
<p>~ John Shelby Spong
Originally Published July 16, 2003</p>
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