[Dialogue] 3/23/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers: Blaming Progressives for the Death of the Church; Spong revisited

Thu Mar 23 04:27:16 PDT 2023

   By Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers  
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Blaming Progressives for the Death of the Church
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
March 23, 2023
Tim Keller has written a scathing account of why the church is dying.  It is the fault of progressives in the mainline tradition who have watered down the supernatural certainties of Christianity and blended them impotently with secular, individualistic, and apologetic ethical systems that leave God out of the equation, not to mention the cross.

If you have not read it, you should:  https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/tim-keller-decline-renewal-american-church/ When you read it, keep a pencil handy and see what counterarguments you are prepared to make, because this is theological gaslighting at its best, and simple-minded scapegoating at its worst.  He begins by recalling the zenith of American religion, the post-WWII generation that flourished in the suburbs and made babies and went to church and knew that the Ten Commandments were not the Ten Suggestions.  We couldn’t build enough new Christian education wings in those days, and everyone knew the difference between right and wrong.  God was in His heaven, and you didn’t make up faith as you went along.  You submitted to it—which meant you agreed to believe fervently in things Jesus never talked about and did not seem at all interested in.

Then the trouble began in the 1960s, as people challenged the authority of everything, including the Bible, which Keller said was now thought to be “unreliable.”  Churches began to shrink, led by the mainlines, not because a new generation caught the stench of hypocrisy, or because they questioned the authority of a profoundly Patriarchal and fear-based religious empire, but rather because they rebelled again the whole idea of transcendent truths.  Without supernatural authority, the church lost both its power and its reason for being.  Sex, drugs, and rock in roll was not just the pendulum swinging away from a suburban hellscape of rigid conformity and female captivity, but a sign that we could make up life as we went along, and if it felt good it was good.

Seminaries began to teach a modern critique of the Bible, said Keller.  “The Bible was never allowed to critique modern thought or popular opinion but only to mirror it.”  This was news to me, since as a seminarian from the 70s, I found the scripture to be scathingly critical of greed, selfishness, and injustice.  But to be fair, I also found it to be a product of its time.  I had no intention to let its embrace of slavery critique emancipation, or to allow it to define women as the property of their fathers until they became the property of their husbands.

Keller quotes the critiques of two theologians, Dean Kelley (Why Conservative Churches are Growing, 1972), and J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism, 1923), who regard the death of church as the abandonment of orthodox Christian teachings.  Kelley says that only those teachings that give life “large-scale” cosmic meaning will sustain the church.  Now it’s just “I’m OK, you’re OK, but the System Sucks.” 

He goes on to say that we have rejected the idea of literal miracles and reduced religion to an ethical system undifferentiated from modern philosophical and psychological theories.  Perhaps the situation is more nuanced.  The miracles, for example, were often performed on behalf of God’s chosen, or offered as proof of the divinity of Jesus.  The parting of the Red Sea, for example, and the subsequent genocide of Egyptian soldiers, is a great story if you are the mother of a Hebrew son who is escaping bondage, but a terrible story if you are the mother of an Egyptian soldier.  Then as now, many claims of the miraculous are little more than someone’s self-interested claim that God loves everyone, but especially me.

Nevertheless, writes Keller, mainline churches dropped traditional Christian ethical strictures around sex and money.  Really?  Or is it the case that a whole generation saw how fearful and obsessed the evangelical church was with human sexuality, how fervently it sought to control it, and still seeks to control it.  As for greed, it’s not the mainline church that is obsessed with what other people are doing in bed  Or, when it comes to greed, it is not mainline churches that preach the so-called “prosperity gospel,” name-it-and-claim-it, or blab-it-and-grab it.  Me thinks Keller doth protesteth too much.

He also blames progressives for identifying too much with one political party and its policies.  Good point.  That is indeed misplaced faith.  But evangelicals have done the same, and most evangelicals would now return to power the vilest human being ever to be president--a man who is the answer to the question, What Would Jesus Not Do?  Looking for a political savior is indeed dangerous, but so is assuming that all political systems are created equal, and that all policy is equally Christian.  If it was, Jesus would have debated the corruption of the Temple Dove Selling Business outside on the steps, instead of going inside to turn over tables and drive out the merchants with a whip.

Keller says that too many of us regard the Bible stories as “legends.”  That’s an interesting word with a certain derogatory Hollywood flavor.  We regard them as myths containing truths too large to be reduced to what did or did not actually happen.  But at the core of Keller’s argument is that the church would be restored to greatness if only we went back to believing the fairy tale instead of deconstructing and reconstructing it.  In other words, true faith is about believing things you know are not true to get rewards that you doubt are available. 

Strangely, this critique of the death of church as spawned by progressives is really another way of saying that we failed to remain intellectually dishonest about how we got the Bible, what it means to call it our flawed but irreplaceable Story of Origin, and what scholars have now shown us about the enormous gap between faith as developed doctrine and faith as discipleship--a commitment to being followers of Jesus, not worshippers of Christ.  We may be a lot smaller, but like leaven in the loaf, we may also be more subversive.

What the article overlooks is the fact that since our supposed heyday in the 50s, ALL organized religion is now in decline, including evangelicalism.  So perhaps it has something to do with how poorly we all performed in meeting the real challenges of our time.  If “By your fruits you shall know them,” then perhaps the bananas look rotten, and the peaches bruised beyond recognition because nobody is buying.  Surely no one thinks that if we just returned to supernatural orthodoxy, the world’s problems would be solved because then only some people would go to heaven while everyone else burns in hell.  Rampant and even narcissistic individualism is indeed a problem in our time, but how does orthodoxy make us more communal?  Conformity is not community.  It is religious authoritarianism. 

Finally, I’m tired of people saying that progressives are just do-gooders whose Bestie is Jesus.  There are few things I can think of that are more selfish, or more profoundly narcissistic, than believing that God sent Jesus to die just for me before I was born and without my doing anything to earn it.  This is not how you build community around transcendent values.  It’s how you train true-believers and negate the ethical imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount.  It’s how you hang on to your own power. 

There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the death of church.  But perhaps this is exactly what is supposed to be happening.  The gospel truth is that all reorientation is preceded by disorientation.  Read the parables of Jesus. 

The church as we have known it is indeed dying.  We have indeed become the Disunited States of America.  But not because we stopped believing.  Rather, because so many of us stopped believing in the unbelievable.

~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC, Norman, Oklahoma, and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church, Oklahoma City.  He is currently a Professor of Public Speaking and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University.  He is a fellow of the Westar Institute and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion:  A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.  A feature-length documentary chronicles his work on behalf of Progressive Christianity in Oklahoma (americanhereticsthefilm.com) and more information is at RobinMeyers.com
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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

How does the death of Jesus 2000 years ago save me? What is the substitutionary doctrine of the atonement?

A: By Bishop John Shelby Spong

Dear Reader,

Your question lies at the heart of what I believe is the need for a radical reformation in Christian thought. The substitutionary doctrine of the atonement makes several pre-suppositions - 1) People were created good, whole and perfect. 2) The human race fell into sin through an act of disobedience and from this fall they are not able to save themselves. 3) God had to become the rescuer so God chose Abraham, gave the law, sent the prophets and finally, when all of these rescue operations failed, had to take on the role of the savior personally. Jesus was the form, which the divine rescue took. The Cross was the place where the price of this fall was paid. The Cross was said to be timeless. Through the Eucharist (in Catholic Christianity) or through the experience of "accepting Jesus as my personal Savior" in the Protestant tradition, every believer can appropriate the fact that God substituted Jesus for each of us and laid the punishment for our sins on him. So the phrase, "Jesus died for my sins," has become a sort of Christian mantra.

In a number of varieties this theory became the doctrine of the atonement which simply means to be made "at one" with God. Most people do not grasp the fact that the roots of this Doctrine are in Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when a lamb was slain for the sins of the people and the blood of this lamb was sprinkled on the people as a cleansing agent. When Christians refer to Jesus as the Lamb of God "who takes away the sins of the world," they are using Yom Kippur language.

This doctrine has serious problems and I believe must be rejected in the New Reformation that is upon us. Let me enumerate those problems quickly:

   - What kind of God is it who requires a sacrifice and a blood offering before this God can forgive?
   - What kind of God is it who delights in human sacrifice?
   - Was there ever a time when human beings were perfect and fell into sin? Since Charles Darwin's understanding of evolution emerged in the 19th century, we have come to see life as having evolved from a single cell to Homo sapiens over a 4 1/2 - 5 billion year time frame. Where is the 'fall' in that process?
   - Does human evil arise from a fall that never happened metaphorically? Or is evil a manifestation of the baggage of our evolutionary fight for survival that made human life radically self-centered in the struggle to stay alive?
   - Must salvation take the form of a rescue from our sins or can it be portrayed as the empowerment to evolve into a new humanity, that will somehow learn to live for others?

I believe we need to start with a new definition of human life and then move on to re-think the person and work of the Christ. Unless that occurs, I do not believe that these traditional but still primitive ideas will be able to sustain the Christian faith in the 21st century.

~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
Read and share online here
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Part VIII Matthew: What is the Meaning of the Virgin Birth?

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 21, 2023
It is difficult for most Christians to imagine that the story of Jesus’ virgin birth was a late developing tradition in the Christian faith, yet it appears to have been totally unknown until it is introduced in the middle years of the ninth decade in the writings of Matthew.

Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth is the oldest nativity narrative in the New Testament. Yet, strangely enough, it is not the most familiar. That designation goes to Luke primarily because most of us get our knowledge of the birth story of Jesus by attending annual Christmas pageants. The story line in almost all pageants follows Luke’s narrative with an annunciation by the Angel Gabriel to Mary in the village of Nazareth and an account of the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem to be enrolled for some taxation purpose in compliance with an order issued by Caesar Augustus. Then there is the scene where they are told there is no room at the inn, so when the baby Jesus is born, he is wrapped in swaddling cloths (not clothes but cloths) and placed in an animal’s feeding trough or manger. The scene then shifts to hillside shepherds, to whom angels, breaking through the midnight sky, bring the announcement of Jesus’ birth. This then prompts the shepherds to go to Bethlehem to find the baby. When this task is accomplished they depart, leaving Mary to ponder these things and their meaning in her heart.

This is where Luke’s story ends, but in the typical church pageant another scene is tacked on to this narrative. This final scene features a star in the east, the journey of the Magi who follow that star, their arrival at a house in Bethlehem and the presentation of their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. This merger of separate and incompatible stories is a nightmare for biblical expositors, but churches have never allowed biblical scholarship to get in the way of a good pageant!

Matthew’s story is, by a minimum of ten years, the first account of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament. From where, we must wonder, did Matthew get the idea of a virgin birth and the narrative details with which he surrounds it? There are supernatural birth stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, but the miracle there is either a post-menopausal pregnancy, as was the case of Abraham and Sarah in the birth of Isaac, which is recorded in the book of Genesis, or the overcoming of what the Bible called “barrenness” and the ability to conceive after much prayer and fasting, as was the case with Hannah in the birth of her son Samuel. So the first thing we need to establish is that the idea of a “virgin birth” for Jesus is quite outside the normal boundaries of Hebrew thought.

There is certainly no evidence of a “virgin birth” tradition in any Christian sources prior to the writing of Matthew. There are two written sources that we are certain are pre-Matthew, namely the epistles of Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64, or some 30-40 years before Matthew introduced the idea of the virgin birth, and Mark, the first gospel to be written that appears to be some10-15 years earlier than the writing of Matthew’s gospel. There are also two writings which some scholars like to date early in Christian history: they are the Q document and the gospel of Thomas. I do not wish in this column to get into the debate about the dating of these two documents or even about the accuracy of the Q hypothesis. Let me simply state that I have never been convinced of the existence of the Q document and I see no reason to date the gospel of Thomas earlier than the first years of the second century. If, however, both Q’s existence and an early date for both Q and Thomas could be established beyond reasonable doubt, the fact would still remain that there is no mention of a virgin birth for Jesus prior to Matthew’s introduction of this idea in the middle of the ninth decade. Paul says only two things about Jesus’ origins. He first claims that Jesus was descended from King David “according to the flesh.” That in itself was neither a dramatic nor a special claim. David lived a thousand years before Jesus and had an unspecified number of wives. We know he had many children. In the thousand years, or approximately 50 generations that separated David from Jesus, the direct heirs of David would have included almost every Jew since there would have been about a billion direct heirs! Paul’s second claim is quite mundane: “He was born of a woman,” said Paul. Nothing unusual about that! That is the story of us all. Then Paul adds,” He was born under the law!” That was the reality of every Jew. Paul had clearly never heard of a miraculous birth tradition, primarily, I believe, because such a tradition had not developed prior to Paul’s death.

The same thing appears to be true of Mark. Mark includes two narratives that point to the fact that he had never heard of a miraculous birth tradition. First, there is Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism with which he opens his gospel. Jesus in this narrative is a completely normal human being who comes to John the Baptist to be baptized. It is in this baptism that the Spirit of God enters him and it is at his baptism that God is said to have proclaimed him: “my son.” If the baptism was the moment of the God-infusing of Jesus, then clearly there is the assumption that his birth was routine and ordinary. The second revealing note in Mark is that in chapter three the mother of Jesus is reported to have responded negatively to his public ministry and to his notoriety and to have moved to “take him away.” The text says that his mother and his brothers thought he was “beside himself,” or out of his mind. That is hardly the response of a woman in whose virginal womb this Jesus was found. Mark gives no evidence that he had ever heard the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth, primarily, I believe, because it had not yet been developed.

Matthew is its originator. It was a ninth decade addition to the developing Jesus story. If that is so, as I am convinced it is, then we need to ask why a miraculous birth was an appealing idea to Matthew. Here we can only speculate, but at least these speculations are educated.

There appears to have been an attack made on Jesus’ legitimacy, probably by the enemies of the Jesus movement. A popular line of attack against religious change agents in the first century was to raise suspicions about their origins, to question their paternity. Religious troublemakers were all thought to be base born people. The reason we can be fairly certain that these attacks were abroad is that two of them appear in the texts of the other gospels. The first is found in Mark. After an impressive sermon in the synagogue in his home region, Mark says that the crowd began to question from where it was that Jesus had gotten such wisdom. In that context anonymous voices in the crowd began to question his origins. “Is not this the carpenter?” they asked. Then they continued this probing of his roots by saying “Is not this the son of Mary.” This was the first time in any written Christian document that the name “Mary” is used for the mother of Jesus. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that in first century Jewish society, to refer to a grown man as the son of a woman was to raise public questions about his paternity and thus about his legitimacy. The charge of illegitimacy was surely around in that period of time when the life of Jesus was being portrayed.

The second illustration of this same thing comes at a somewhat later date. It is recorded only in the eighth chapter of the gospel of John. Once again a crowd is discussing Jesus’ origins. He cannot be the Christ, they assert, because no one will know the origins of the messiah, but “we know where this man (Jesus) comes from.” Later, a voice in the crowd is quoted as saying to Jesus: “We were not born of fornication.” The NRSV translates this text: “We were not illegitimate.” The clear impression is that Jesus was. I suspect that these attacks on Jesus’ origins and the questions about his paternity were so prevalent that Matthew decided to defend him against these charges. For this purpose, he developed his narrative of the virgin birth, which covers Jesus with legitimacy by asserting that Jesus was conceived and born without benefit of a male agent. He was “the Son” of God.

To buttress his story, Matthew found a text in Isaiah (7:14) on which he could base his story, thus portraying the virgin birth as the fulfillment of the scriptures. He proceeded to interpret that text so that he had it read, “Behold a virgin will conceive.” The only problem with this interpretation was that this is not what the text actually said at all. It said rather, “Behold, a woman is with child.” Those two things are clearly not the same! Nevertheless, Matthew used it and he wrapped around it the mythology of celestial bodies that announced this wondrous birth and guiding stars, which brought Gentiles to pay him homage with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, each of which was highly symbolic. This child is holy, Matthew was proclaiming, this life is the child of Almighty God.

Did Matthew recognize how weak his argument was? I think he did and that is why he opened his story of Jesus’ virgin birth with 17 verses dedicated to Jesus’ ancestry in which he has included the four sexually-compromised women.

What Matthew was saying is that Jesus is of God. His is a holy life, but his holiness lay in the fact that he was born of the Spirit, not that his flesh was divine. By the time the Fourth Gospel was written, to be born of the Spirit had very different connotations from the suggestions that the Holy Spirit was your biological father. Matthew is also saying that even if you are not convinced by his supernatural argument, God can still raise up a holy life even if God has to work through the incest of Tamar, the prostitution of Rahab, the seduction of Ruth and the adultery of Bathsheba. That is why Matthew begins his story of Jesus’ birth with the “shady ladies” of the genealogy. Do you see how rich this story is when the text is not literalized and when one dares to read it with Jewish eyes?

~  John Shelby Spong
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