[Dialogue] 9/13/18, Progressing Spirit: Forrester:Terrifying & Terrible Texts: Knowing the Difference between Study and Liturgy; Spong revisited

Thu Sep 13 08:16:06 PDT 2018

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Terrifying & Terrible Texts: Knowing the Difference between Study and Liturgy

Column by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
September 13, 2018

“I’m in Pain”
Quite recently, a dear friend and colleague within a spiritual group in which we both participate raised a question, a heartfelt concern, about a book we were asked to read. This particular text, written in the middle of the last century, is a psychotherapy book that explores an energetic understanding of how the mind and body are interconnected. The book has much to commend it. However, my friend was in pain over the blatant homophobia in this piece and was wondering how I and others were experiencing the text and whether it was even appropriate for our study.
I responded that I appreciated the soulful pain of which she was speaking. (In truth, my heart ached as her words landed upon me.) I found the author’s homophobia sharp as well as blatant. Why then continue reading this text? I offered that as a teacher I feel a particular need (even a responsibility) to know what have been the veins of theory upon which our teaching has drawn to take the shape it has. I would also like to understand as fully as possible how these theorists have been appropriated – what has been incorporated and shaped our teaching and what has been left, and why. I know that these are questions of mine, and I believe they will be questions asked of us and others who are spiritual teachers.
Study & Liturgy
It is also true, that while we are expected to study and understand these texts because of the impact they have had upon the unfoldment of psychotherapy and spirituality in the west, we would never offer these texts within the context of meditation. There are texts for study and there are texts for liturgy. Although there is much to commend it, the New Revised Common Lectionary does not fully appreciate this important distinction. As a result, too often liturgy continues to assault the hearts, minds, and bodies of those who have gathered to be guided and soulfully nurtured. (I’m focusing here on biblical texts used in liturgy. But this assault pertains equally to the inherent violence of atonement-based collects and eucharistic prayers recited each Sunday.)
I raise this matter because I have lost count of the times members of my congregations and spiritual seekers with whom I work have implored why they must read aloud for liturgy the texts offered by the institution’s authorities. Although such homophobic and misogynistic verses as Rom. 1.26-27 and 1 Tim. 2.11-14, respectively, are now omitted, they continue to hear passages, which to their ears disturbingly proclaim tribal slaughter (Zeph. 1.17-18) and violence (Jer. 20.7-13), all in the supposed name of the divine. These are oppressive texts (and there are more) – painful to read and wounding to hear – and all, as a matter of course, are read as declarations of  “the word of God,” for which they are told to offer “thanks.”
These terrifying and terrible texts continue to compromise the capacity of Christianity to offer a meaningful message in the 21st century. A chasm is created between spiritual seekers and the truly boundless love of Being, because the dominant tradition is beholden to liturgical custom that cultically enshrines a tribal deity whose prejudices, penchants for reactive retaliation, and wholehearted embrace of violence are celebrated in the many pages of the stories regularly proclaimed as purportedly revealing the true nature of Being. Liturgy is neither the time nor the place for preachers to consistently be pressed into the act of deconstructing biblical texts so as to minimize the harm done to those desiring to hear words of life.
Evolutionary Context
We have yet to fully appreciate the evolutionary historical context of the cultures that produced the biblical texts which are read within our liturgies. Texts are products of human beings within specific cultural periods. Sacred texts are those for which the authors and communities make the claim that they reveal qualities or aspects or dimensions of the true nature of Being. But we must always remember it is we human beings who are making the claim for the revelatory capacity of the texts.
The question we need to ask ourselves is whether any particular text is a Wisdom text – does it have the capacity to foster the soul’s growth or unfolding, helping her to realize that she is an utterly unique expression of Being that is boundless love? If not, the text isn’t suitable liturgical material. For liturgy – no longer appropriately understood as the worship of a distant tribal deity – is essentially itself a spiritual practice, wherein we gather together to experience becoming embodiments of Being in the present moment.
Who makes the decision about the suitability of a text? We do. We draw from the best psychological, sociological, philosophical, theological and spiritual wisdom we have. We acknowledge the clear truth that not all biblical texts, not all scriptural stories, embody and speak to the boundless love, boundless freedom, boundless wisdom, that is Being. We acknowledge that as a species we are evolving and maturing. We realize that our ancestral tribal peoples produced these overwhelmingly tribal texts with their tribal deity. But simply the fact that they have been the community’s “canonical” texts in the past, does not warrant their use as liturgical texts for spiritual seekers today.
Humans of Being
There is nothing sacrosanct about the “canon” from which Sunday liturgical texts are drawn. Canon simply means texts which past authorities have given their imprimatur. Times change. Contexts change. To paraphrase the wise spiritual teacher, Richard Rohr, we do not see Being as Being is but as we are. And who are we? We aspire to no longer be a tribal people guided by a vengeful tribal deity. We aspire to no longer be a homophobic people. We aspire to no longer be a misogynistic people. We aspire to no longer be a racist people. We aspire to no longer be a vengeful people. We aspire to be simply and fully humans of Being.
Terrifying and terrible texts can do terrific damage to human beings. Now is the time to distinguish between texts for study and texts for liturgy; between stories that sustain the soul, and stories (and prayers) that sunder her heart.
Within liturgy, we need to hear texts that remind us of our better angels. We need stories that land upon our souls as nourishment for transformation from beings utterly captive to our survival drive, to humans of Being. There are times when authentic nourishment can be hard to swallow. Our egos are inherently defensive and resistant to dissolution – no matter how seemingly minor. There is a substantive difference, however, between a challenging text with which our souls must inevitably wrestle (like that of Jacob in Genesis) and a terrifying and terrible text. There is a proper season, a suitable place, for study of terrifying and terrible texts. But that is not within our liturgies. Within our liturgies we come to sit and receive nourishment for our hungry souls. As a nondual spiritual path at its authentic core, Christianity is an invitation to taste and know belovedness as the very fabric of existence.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

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About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“.

Question & Answer

Q: By Eleanor Kerfoot

Some while ago Dr. Spong replied to a message from me in which I stated that possibly there could be some thought devoted to the idea that, “God” is both within a person and everywhere. This makes sense to me and I have been living this understanding successfully.

The concept of a “Deity” or of “Deities" is well-known, documented and practiced as well as awareness of knowing truth within us. There is room for tolerance. Why are we pursuing Christianity when Jesus himself did not?

Does Dr. Spong’s book “Unbelievable” take us this far?

A: By Lauren Van Ham

Dear Eleanor,
Yes, I believe Bishop Spong’s, Unbelievable, does explore some of what you are asking. Perhaps you have already seen some of this featured here recently, in the reflections offered by Progressing Spirit’s team of authors.
Some of this response may feel like a game of semantics, but it is very important to create some distinctions around how Christianity is being defined. Jesus did not pursue Christianity, but Christianity happened as a response by those who wanted to practice what Jesus modeled. And most particularly, they wanted to practice with others! Christianity was, first and foremost, a way for practitioners to study together, to pray together, to struggle, and grow and serve together. Jesus insisted upon it! He included everyone and stressed the importance of eating together, working together and being in the great grappling of Life, together.
What happened after this – and we recognize it well having seen it happen many times, in many ways throughout history - is what every worthy spiritual teacher has resisted. We tried to codify it. Teachings were interpreted in different ways and used as attempts to contain and control. In the book, Spong directly questions, “Is behavior control really the purpose of the Christian faith?” And a few sentences later he writes gravely, “Christian history surely reveals that Christians of the world can be and have been prodigiously evil.”
So, why pursue Christianity? It all depends on the Christianity we mean when we act, and breathe and move in the world as embodied practitioners. Spong instructs that Christianity in the time of Jesus and today (if it has any chance of surviving), is a call to universalism. A call for every one of us to go beyond our biological or self-ascribed boundaries, NOT to convert “others” to a battery of lessons and formulaic answers, but rather, in Spong’s words, “to accept them as they are, to call them to live fully, love wastefully and be all that they can be in the infinite variety of our humanity.”
This can be hard work, and it will almost always be challenged. This is why spiritual community is so important. The teachings aren’t easy, but the instructions are very simple. In our togetherness, we return to the simplicity of Life and Love, Awe and Forgiveness. We provide consolation and encouragement in the face of disappointment or defeat. And we hold one another accountable, reminding everyone that we are part of one inter-related family, one interdependent planet, one Love that tries and fails to teach us this again and again and again.
~ Lauren Van Ham

Click here to read and share online
About the Author
Lauren Van Ham was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest; Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute.  Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Her passion and training in the fine arts, spirituality and Earth’s teachings has supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief and loss, and sacred activism.  Lauren’s work with Green Sangha (a Bay Area-based non-profit) is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of environmental activism taking place in religious America.  Her essay, “Way of the Eco-Chaplain” appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women.  Lauren tends a private spiritual direction practice and serves as Dean for The Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley, CA.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Jesus for the Non-Religious, Part I

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
February 15, 2006

Most Christians seem to assume that the details of their faith system dropped out of heaven in a fully developed form. Nothing could be further from the truth. The creeds began as baptismal formulas in the 3rd century and did not receive the shape we now recognize until the 4th century. Doctrines like the Trinity and Incarnation were still being formed in the 5th century.
Moving closer to the life of Jesus, scholars now suggest that miracles were added to the Jesus story only in the 7th and 8th decades of the Christian era. The Virgin birth and the suggestion that resurrection meant physical resuscitation are products of the 9th decade, and the account of Jesus” ascension enters the tradition only in the 10th decade. Perhaps the biggest gap in our knowledge of Jesus, however, occurs in those years between 30 C.E. when Jesus” earthly life came to an end and 70 C.E. when gospels began to achieve written form. Today, by lining up the gospels in chronological order with Mark first (ca. 70 C.E.), then Matthew (ca. 80 C.E.), Luke (ca 90 C.E.) and finally John (ca 100 C.E.), we can see how the miraculous was heightened; the details become more graphic and supernatural activity more pronounced. If the story could grow as dramatically as it did from 70-100 C.E., is it not reasonable to assume that it also grew from 30-70 C.E.? Yet with no written sources, entering that time of oral transmission is a problem. For the past year that forty-year oral phase of Christian history has been the primary focus of my study. In a series of columns not necessarily on successive weeks, but as a theme to which I will return often during the next six months, I want to begin to share this study with my audience under the general topic of “Jesus for the Non-Religious.”
How can we gain access to an oral period of history when by definition no written records exist? Is that not a dead end for research? These are valid questions, yet studies of the gospels yield numerous clues that lead us into these primitive moments in our faith story.
The obvious fact is that the story of Jesus was passed on or we would not have it today. So the questions are by whom, how and in what context. Was it simply personal? Did parents convey the Jesus story to their children? Did it pass from person to person in the marketplace? The context of the gospel narratives appears far too complex and patterned to have been handed on in that personal and individual way. We need to search for a better explanation.
The gospels make it clear that before the story of Jesus was written a heavy dependency on the Hebrew Scriptures was already evident. That could not have happened accidentally. Mark, for example, opens his gospel with two quotations from the Hebrew prophets, one from Malachi and the other from II Isaiah. He then builds into his narrative of Jesus image after image from the Jewish scriptures. Matthew seems to imply in his gospel that everything Jesus does is in fulfillment of the words of the prophets. He retells a story of the birth of Moses as if it actually happened to Jesus (see Exodus 1:15-22, Matthew 2:16-18). He patterns the Sermon on the Mount (Matt.5-7) on Psalm 119 portraying Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew and Luke both provide us with genealogies of Jesus that relate him to both Abraham and King David. They both quote Jesus as using texts from the Hebrew Scriptures to ward off the attacks by Satan in the story of the temptation. Luke models the life of Jesus frequently on the life of the prophet Elijah. On two occasions Luke says the role of the resurrected Jesus was to open their minds to understand the scriptures as the way to make sense out of his death. The Fourth Gospel opens with a hymn of praise to the “Logos” or the “Word” that John believes he has discovered in Jesus. This hymn was patterned on a hymn to wisdom from the book of Proverbs. John constantly has Jesus invoke the name of God, “I am,” given to Moses at the burning bush as part of his own divine claim. One cannot read the gospels without confronting the Hebrew Scriptures on every page. These facts point powerfully to the source of the oral tradition.
The only setting in which this interweaving of the Jesus story with the Hebrew scriptures could have occurred was in the synagogue, since that was the only place where people heard the scriptures read and interpreted. In the first century no one owned books since few people could either read or write. There was no Gideon Society to place the sacred scriptures in hotel rooms. The books of the Jewish Bible had to be copied by hand on great scrolls. They were enormously expensive. They were the treasured possessions of the whole community, kept in the Tabernacle of the Synagogue and brought forth with great solemnity to be read aloud in public worship on the Sabbath. They were always read in order. One does not skip around with scrolls. The handles of the scrolls were laboriously turned as they were read and the male reader began the next Sabbath where he had stopped the previous Sabbath.
The next problem in this interpretive process is that most people today have no idea what the liturgy of the Synagogue was like in the first century, so they have no way of imagining this setting. Fortunately, a brief description of synagogue worship included in the Book of Acts (13:13-16), gives us our next clue in this probe of the oral period of Christian history.
Synagogue worship consisted of long readings from the three major sections of the Hebrew Bible. The first was a reading “from Moses,” that is from the Torah, that included the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. It was a requirement of first century Judaism that the entire Torah, as the most sacred part of the Hebrew Scriptures, be read in public worship in the synagogue over the Sabbaths of a single year. This would mean that just the first lesson “from Moses” would last at least thirty minutes each Sabbath.
The second reading came from what the Jews called “The Early Prophets,” which included the books from Joshua to II Kings. There was no compulsion to complete the reading of this material in any specific time frame; hence this lesson was much shorter. The early prophets were simply read in order until completed and then the process would begin again.
The third reading came from what they called “the Latter Prophets,” which were four in number: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and what was called the Book of the Twelve. Today Christians refer to this Book of the Twelve as “the minor prophets,” and list them separately as the books from Hosea to Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament. In the Jewish world, however, these twelve books were all on a single scroll and treated as a single work. Thus the four scrolls of the “Latter Prophets” tended to be read over a four-year cycle at the rate of approximately a chapter a Sabbath. One year would therefore be the Isaiah year, one the Jeremiah year, one the Ezekiel year and one the year of the twelve. In the liturgy of the Synagogue these three major readings, interspersed with prayers and Psalms would constitute the core of the worship experience. After the final reading, the leader of the Synagogue would normally inquire, as happens in Acts 13, whether anyone had a message to bring that would illumine the morning’s readings. This became the setting in which his followers told stories about Jesus, recalled the sayings and parables of Jesus and remembered and shared the developing Jesus tradition. In this fashion, over the years, the Hebrew Scriptures were wrapped around Jesus and through them Jesus was interpreted. The content of the memory of Jesus was thus organized by the liturgy of the Synagogue. To recognize this connection becomes a major breakthrough into the oral period of Christian history.
By the time the gospels were written the memory of Jesus had been so deeply shaped by the Synagogue context that it is impossible now to separate history from scriptural interpretation. That is what makes the perpetual quest to find the Jesus of history so difficult. The conclusion of the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, for example, was that only 16% of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels are actually authentic, accurate portrayals of what Jesus really said. The other 84% are words read into the Jesus of history by an interpreting community during the oral period. Much of what the gospels call the acts of Jesus fall into a similar statistical spread.
For example, was Jesus really born in Bethlehem or was the Bethlehem birth story an attempt on the part of people during the oral period to claim for him the messianic status of being heir to the throne of David? Did Jesus really feed 5000 people in the wilderness or was that an attempt to portray him as a new Moses who also fed a multitude in the wilderness with bread called manna? Did Jesus really march triumphantly into Jerusalem on a donkey or was that an attempt to identify him with the figure of the Shepherd King in the Book of Zechariah, who also came to Jerusalem, humbly riding on a donkey (9:9-11)? Did Jesus really drive out the moneychangers from the Temple and reclaim that place as “a house of prayer for all people” or was this an early Christian attempt to show that what the prophet Zechariah said about the Messiah had been acted out by Jesus? That prophet had written that when the Day of the Lord comes, there would no longer be a trader in the House of the Lord (14:21). Did Jesus really pray for the soldiers who crucified him, as only Luke records, or was this story developed to identify Jesus with the Servant of II Isaiah (53:12), who made “intercessions for the transgressors?” On and on we could go, posing this same question in literally hundreds of different ways about hundreds of familiar stories.
At the very least, this study begins to give us a glimpse of who Jesus was before gospels were written, creeds formed or doctrines developed. If we are willing to journey to this place with openness, I think we can be assured that Jesus will look very different. As this series develops I hope to show you this Jesus. Perhaps in the words of my friend Marcus Borg, we might “see Jesus again for the first time.”
~  John Shelby Spong

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