[Dialogue] 8/26/18 at aol.com, ProgressingSpirit: Sandlin: True Blue Miracle?; Spong revisited

Thu Jul 26 06:24:13 PDT 2018

True Blue Miracle?

Column by Rev. Mark Sandlin
July 26, 2018

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that reports of bonafide miracles seem to have gone the way of dinosaurs about the time cameras came along – maybe doubly true since video cameras were invented. (Of course, during the early days of Photoshop we did see a bit of a revival.)
I mean to the thinking person in an age of science, miracles like the ones we read about in the Bible are just a difficult concept to buy into. It only takes a quick Google search to find an expert debunking what someone has claimed to be a true miracle. As a matter of fact, it’s easier than that. Netflix currently has a show entitled, “Derren Brown: Miracle.” The thing is, Mr. Brown is an atheist, mentalist, illusionist, pop philosopher, and debunker of scam artists and mediums.
Throughout the show he presents “miracles” that look very much like those one might find at a tent revival or from certain televangelists. He’s remarkably skilled at replicating the miracles. Possibly the most intriguing section of the show is the faith healing that takes place. Brown fully takes on the persona of a faith healer, shouting, “We give you the glory, we give you the praise,” and “Hallelujah.” And he proceeds to heal people of what ails them – from vision problems to back problems. For good measure, he even tosses in a palm to the person’s forehead and folks falling over backwards just like you’ve problably seen on TV.
The thing is he thinks the whole thing is a bunch of hooey. Throughout the show, he talks about how we are constantly telling ourselves stories. Those stories, he says, impact what we can and cannot do. The full reality behind his miracle healings is, of course, much more complicated than that, including heightening a person’s adrenaline as well as a few other tricks. But, the thing that struck me the most was the demonstration of how powerful the stories are that we tell ourselves.
Bishop Spong’s latest book, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today is put together in a series of theses. Thesis 5 is on miracles. He opens the section saying, “In a post-Newtonian world, supernatural invasions of the natural order, performed by God or an ‘incarnate Jesus,’ are simply not viable explanations of what actually happened. Miracles do not ever imply magic.”
Considering that a typical Christian would probably tell you that the Bible is chock-full of miracle stories and would associate some degree of magic with them, what do we do with Spong’s statement?
Well, let’s start with the reality that the Bible isn’t actually filled to the brim with miracle stories. As Spong points out, the miracle stories are mostly limited to three sets of people throughout the Christian Bible. The first two sets are in the Hebrew Bible, Moses and his successor Joshua, and Elijah and his protege Elisha. Pre-Moses/Joshua? Not so many miracles. Post-Elijah/Elisha? Nope.
Which brings us to the Christian Bible and the miracles that we are most familiar with, those performed by Jesus and then his successors, the disciples.
What is important to note here is that these are some of the pillars of our faith. These folks are meant to be understood as larger than life. Not only that, the recording of their lives only happened after being passed down verbally for quite some time.
Even though the Gospels come first in the New Testament, they are not the first recordings of Jesus. As a matter of fact, most of the places where Jesus is referenced in the rest of the New Testament actually predate the Gospels. An intriguing reality is that they just don’t mention Jesus doing miracles.
It’s a bit odd, don’t you think? I mean, if the person you are forming your religion around is capable of performing actual miracles, don’t you think you’d probably want to mention it from time to time? Obviously, if you look to modern Christians who believe that Jesus performed miracles, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”
But, our earliest recordings of Jesus simply do not. They definitely seem to be late additions to the stories of Jesus.
Even more curious is that the miracles that were ultimately credited to Jesus are remarkably similar to those of Elijah and Elisha, and the miracles of Elijah and Elisha are remarkably similar to and build on those of Moses and Joseph. So, what is going on here?
As Spong points out, it’s important to understand that in the Jewish tradition these miracles were meant to be understood as “expressing the reality of [an] invasive, supernatural power designed to meet human needs.” They “were never intended to be supernatural stories of divine power operating through a human life.”
He goes on to say, “Perhaps we have been defending an idea that even the biblical authors never intended.” As Derren Brown tells us, the stories we tell ourselves are powerful. It stands to reason then that stories as important to us as biblical stories are all the more powerful. For that matter the stories of the largest heroes are probably particularly important. Important enough to tell them in a way that clearly communicates how much larger than life they were. Important enough to even add symbolic meaning to them to ensure we don’t underestimate their importance in our religious heritage.
I find Spong’s conclusion to this section of his final book particularly strong and would like to include it fully in his words, “After centuries of laboring to understand stories that made no sense to us, we now discover that the problem was that we did not know how to read those stories. With this insight, our ability to chart a new reformation has passed another huge obstacle!” He goes on to remind us that, “The miracles were interpretive signs.”
So, there’s no such thing as miracles? Let me share an answer from one of the wise women in my congregation. We have a feedback time after my messages and on a recent Sunday she spoke of the miracle of the rescue in the Thai cave. She talked about being amazed at the sheer number of people that had to come together to make that rescue happen. For her, that was the miracle – the coming together of so many communities with a focus on rescuing those boys.
Frankly, I’m with Albert Einstein on this one, “There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.” I tend to lean toward the “everything” on this one. After all, everything we experience is part of our story and stories are powerful things.
~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
Click here to read online and to share your thoughts

About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin

Question & Answer

Q: By Brandon

I came across a video of Bishop Spong saying he doesn't believe in hell. He believes in some kind of life after death, but it doesn't have a thing to do with reward and punishment.

The indoctrination of Heaven/Hell has been around as far back as the creation of Zoroastrianism, maybe further. It's all through the bible, whether you pay attention to Hell being mistranslated as Sheol/Hades/Tartarus or Gehenna. Or if you find only that those who won't spend eternity in heaven will only be completely erased from existence. To me, this paints God as either an Ogre that was willing to sacrifice his own son in coercion for your belief in them, or as an infinite being who would give up on you after a single lifetime.

I want to ask you, what do you believe will happen in the afterlife? Are we as the human race going to be okay? Should I worry about what's going to happen to me after death? My girlfriend who believes in God but struggles with what to believe in exactly, is she going to be okay? I’m terrified right now, and as one of the very few looking past religious Dogma, I need your help, or at least some insight into what I should be doing, praying for, anything.

A: By Rev. Irene Monroe

Dear Brandon,
Various religious and folkloric traditions speak of an afterlife. One belief in the afterlife refers to an individual’s soul or spirit living beyond the life of their physical body. It is the belief that one’s moral choices and actions in life can result in their soul residing -based on divine judgement - in a place of reward or punishment, known as Heaven or Hell respectively, in Christianity. A soul like Socrates, however, lives in an eternal destiny of Limbo. Because Socrates was born before Christianity, he’s deprived of the purported benefits of Christianity, like the salvific advantages of having faith in Christ. And, according to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a soul can reside in Purgatory, a temporal punishment for sin, representing the penitent Christian life.

You’re correct in stating that Spong doesn’t believe in Hell. In the chapter “Life After Death-Still Believable?” in his new book Unbelievable Spong lays out a cogent argument about the inutility of the concept.

“I have no use for life after death as a tool or method of behavior control. …The one thing which we are certain, even as we begin this quest, is that the liberalized post-death images of our religious past cannot be resurrected. There is no hell, no heaven, no limbo, no purgatory, no lake of fire, no milk or honey. Those concepts no longer mark our lives.”

Spong understands that many religions create theologies with elaborate and fictive narratives of reward and punishment systems as a form of social control, like the human-made Christian concept of Heaven and Hell. Like Spong, I don’t think after death one is likely to go to Heaven or Hell in an afterlife. I do, however, believe in a living hell created by crushing setbacks, grinding poverty, racial, gender, sexual discrimination, and religious profiling (to name a few), that many Americans, like myself, confront and navigate daily.

I also concur with Karen Armstrong, a prolific British religion writer and former Catholic nun, that beliefs of an afterlife can distract attention from and to important issues. For me, the belief in an afterlife can create complacency and/or indifference to present social justice issues and crimes against humanity like the Holocaust, American slavery, lynching, and the immigration crisis presently at the U.S. - Mexico border.

In the case of enslaved Africans, the belief in an afterlife was passed on to my ancestors as an intentionally Christian theological concept as a form of social control to maintain the status quo of perpetual servitude. The indoctrination of an overjoyed and jubilant afterlife wasn’t to make them better Christian but instead obedient, subservient and God-fearing slaves.

For African American slaves, however, the belief in an afterlife was a coded critique of an unfulfilled life denying them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this life. The belief in an afterlife functioned as an eschatological hope and aspiration that their future progenies would indeed have a fulfilled life that they could only supposedly experience in death.

There is a plethora of material supposedly proving the afterlife, like the New York Times bestseller “Proof of Heaven” by Harvard-trained neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, MD. I feel, however, the concept- real or imagined- can potentially deprive you of living fully present in this life - missing small miracles, random acts of kindness, and the beauty of a sunrise and sunset in a single day.
~ Rev. Irene Monroe
Click here to read and share online

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) - Detour
Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe.
Monroe stated that her "columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College's research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Bias Against Women in the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on November 23, 2005

Last week I began an exploration of the origins of that incessant religious negativity toward women. I located its deepest root in the evolutionary process where survival becomes the ultimate self-conscious value that dominates the human psyche. I suggested that part of this survival process involved the definition of the stronger and faster male as superior to the smaller and slower female. It was a definition based on observable biology since women, especially in the last stages of pregnancy and the period of child nursing, had to be dependent. So the primitive tribe organized its life around this observable reality.
Since it was not part of the defined role of the woman to think, education for women was not encouraged, which helped to develop the image of the woman as a less intelligent creature who should not be allowed to participate in the decision making processes of the tribe. The woman’s role, in the tribe’s quest for survival, was to be the supporter of the males who protected them. That God created her only for breeding and the ancillary domestic roles became an ingrained idea. In time sacred stories were composed to demonstrate that these realities were in accordance with the will of God, making it inappropriate for any human being to seek to change them. When feminist rebellion against this stereotype finally arose it was perceived to be a rebellion against God. That is what set the stage for most religious systems to be not just anti-female but to be specifically against any attempt to assert woman’s equality. To continue this analysis, I now seek to look at how this bias found expression in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Bible begins with two contradictory accounts of creation. The opening story of the six-day creation is actually the younger, written in the 6th century BCE while the Jews were in exile in Babylon. In this account human life is made as the final act on the sixth day before God’s Sabbath of rest began. Its primary purpose was to establish for the Jews, the custom and authority of the Sabbath, which was one of the barriers erected to avoid amalgamation with the Babylonians. The second and much older creation story by some 300 years is in Genesis 2:4 – 3:24. It features Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden. The major reason this became the primary creation story in Christian history was that Paul quoted it, making it part of the tradition that was destined to become the dominant religious system in the Western world. It behooves us, therefore to look at this account in detail in order to discern in it the tap root for Western Christian patriarchy and sexism. It is surprising how few of us really know the details.
In this account, God created first the heavens and the earth. God also created separately every plant and herb before God put them into the earth since that was not yet possible because, as the text says, it had not rained and there was no man to “till the ground.” However, God remedied that problem by causing a mist to rise from the earth, enabling God to create the first man out of the dust of the earth now made pliable by the mist. The picture in this text is not unlike that of a child making a mud pie. When the man was fully formed, he was still inert but God came down upon that creature in an act of divine mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, breathing into the nostrils of this lifeless form the very breath of God. Since God’s breath, according to this story was the source of life; this was the moment in which the man became “a living soul.”
Next God fashioned a garden in a place called Eden into which God placed this newly formed man. Out of the now moist ground, God then made trees to grow. Some were pleasant to look at. Others produced food to eat. God also placed into the midst of the garden two mysterious trees: one was the Tree of Life; the other was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Four rivers watered the garden, two of which were named the Tigris and the Euphrates, which means that the writers located the Garden of Eden somewhere in present day Iraq. The garden also had within it both gold and onyx. It is not clear why the man needed either gold or onyx but whoever wrote this story knew that gold and onyx were valuable so felt that both must be present in the Garden of Eden. This being done, God placed the man in the garden to till and care for it with permission to eat of the fruit of every tree save one. On pain of death, the man was not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That, this story asserts, is how human life began. It was very male at its origin,
However, the story continues, God perceived that the man was lonely. Perhaps the man complained about that with great frequency, so God decided to “make him a helper fit for him.” God then inaugurated an almost hilarious process of trial and error seeking to fashion a proper friend for the man. No matter how many creatures God made, none appeared to satisfy the man’s yearning for a friend. One gets the sense that God became frustrated with the divine inability to satisfy the man’s wishes. That explains, according to the author of this story, why there is among the animals and birds so much variety. Some creatures were big like elephants. Some were small like cats and rabbits. Some had straight tails, others had curly tails, and still others had no tails. No matter how many varieties of beast and bird God fashioned, none satisfied the man. Adam, demonstrating the human claim to dominance, defined each creature by naming it, but among them all, the Bible asserts, was not found “a helper fit” for the man.
This primitive and obviously imperfect God must have said something like: “Adam, you are very hard to please!” To which Adam must have responded: “But, God, how can I describe what I want if I have never seen it?” So, the story says, God reverted to another plan. This time, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, probably using an anesthesia that would not be discovered for thousands of years. With Adam thus out of it, God opened his chest, removed a rib and then closed the patient up. What kinds of sutures were used was not disclosed. With that rib, God fashioned the woman. As one feminist biblical scholar observed, “it was childbirth as only a male who had never had a baby could have imagined it!”
God stood this newly formed woman before Adam displaying all of her charm and feminine pulchritude, while gently bringing Adam out of his deep sleep. One gets the impression that Adam’s eyes bulged out of his sockets as if on coiled springs at his first viewing. The King James Bible records Adam as having said, “This is now bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.” It is a rather calm translation for what was in Hebrew a slang expression. It might have been more accurately rendered, “Hot diggety, Lord, you finally did it.” The Bible closes this ancient story by saying that the man named the woman Eve demonstrating male authority over the woman and accepted the divinely appointed destiny to grow up to the point where he will leave his parents and cling to his wife. In the King James English, the woman was designed by God primarily to serve the man, to meet his needs. Unlike the man, the woman was not thought to have been made in God’s image. She was higher than the animals but always meant to be subject to the authority of the lordly male. That is the oldest and most influential definition of a woman in the Bible.
Because she existed for the man’s pleasure, she soon came to be thought of as his property. Polygamy in the Bible was justified on this basis. A man could have as many wives as he could afford. Harems were nothing but a sign of wealth. Even the Ten Commandments carried with them this degrading definition of women as property. The 10th Commandment ordered the people not to covet their “neighbor’s wife (Ex. 20:17).” Note there is no injunction in any book of the Bible against anyone coveting a neighbor’s husband! That appears to be proper; one just cannot covet another’s wife. Husbands were not property, but wives were and this commandment was about property rights. The neighbor, who is clearly a male, has his property listed in order of its perceived value: his house, his wife, his slaves, his ox, his ass and his other possessions. One wonders if those who want to put the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms realize that, literally interpreted, 50% of the human race would become the property of the other 50%. Religious emotion covers up so many facts of history.
The same definition of women as property is reflected in the 7th Commandment against adultery. People need to realize that the style of marriage present when the prohibition against adultery was promulgated was polygamy. A man could have as many wives as he could afford. Some 300 years after Moses was said to have received the Commandments on Mt. Sinai, King Solomon had one thousand wives. What does adultery mean when one man owns a thousand women? If with a thousand wives you still have some need to commit adultery, you do have a problem! I suspect it is not even a moral problem. When one couples this with the fact that a sexual liaison with an unmarried woman was not considered adultery but rather a crime against the property of that woman’s father, the operative biblical definition of a woman becomes clear. Her journey out of this biblically imposed definition was destined to take centuries.
The echoes of this “God imposed” prejudice still are heard in Christian churches in the 21st century. Those churches that still refuse to allow women to become priests and bishops do so, they say, because a woman cannot represent God before the altar. The woman is defective in that she is not created in the image of God. Other churches will not allow women to become senior pastors since the Bible, they say, forbids a woman from having authority over a man. How long, one wonders will a new generation of women tolerate this sexist ignorance? When will some appropriate person say: “What the church calls a ‘sacred tradition’ is nothing more than a lingering prejudice that no living institution in the 21st century can continue to tolerate. Where do we go from here? Stay tuned.
~  John Shelby Spong

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