[Oe List ...] 4/14/16, Spong: Charting A New Reformation, Part XVII – The Fifth Thesis

Thu Apr 14 08:07:12 PDT 2016

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Charting A New Reformation 
Part XVII – The Fifth Thesis

“The Miracles Stories of the Old Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Darwinian world as supernatural events performed by an Incarnate Deity.”

I wonder how many of my readers are aware of the fact that miracles do not enter the Jesus tradition until the 8th decade. Paul, who wrote between the years 51 and 64, never once suggests that miracles were associated with the memory of the Jesus of history. There are some scholars who postulate what they believe is a lost document called Q. According to this point of view, this document would have to be earlier than Matthew and Luke, since both of them are said to be dependent on Q. Some like Dr. Robert Funk, who founded the Jesus Seminar, have suggested that Q might be as early as the fifties and, therefore, would pre-date Mark. I disagree with all of these Q theories since I am convinced that Q is nothing more than Matthew’s redactions on Mark and that Luke had both Mark and Matthew before him when he wrote. That, however, is not an argument into which I have any desire to enter in this series. I simply want to note that even if Q does turn out to be real, rather than a fantasy source, all agree that it is only a book of the sayings of Jesus. It does not recount any miraculous occurrences. So the Q hypothesis, whether true or not, still affirms my suggestion that miracles are not part of the primitive memory of Jesus.
There are also some scholars, and once again I am not one of them, who assert a date even earlier than Mark for the gospel of Thomas, discovered in the 1940s among some ancient manuscripts at a place called Nag Hammadi. I see Thomas, along with the rest of the documents found in that same discovery, indeed in the same container, as gnostic documents that can be dated no earlier than the first quarter of the second century. Even if I am wrong, however, and Thomas is someday demonstrated to be our earliest gospel, I find it of interest that it attributes no supernatural acts to the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. So I feel safe in asserting that, contrary to what most people think, miracles were not connected with the memory of Jesus for at least two generations following the crucifixion. Hence the divine nature of Jesus in primitive Christianity never rested on the claim that he performed supernatural or miraculous acts. What then, we need to ask, is the meaning of such narratives as Jesus feeding a multitude with a limited number of loaves and fish? These feeding stories occur in no less than six versions in the four gospels. What are we to make of stories, told only in the Fourth Gospel, of Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee or of Jesus raising from the dead a four-days-dead and buried Lazarus? What are we to make of the other two stories found in the synoptic tradition of Jesus raising the dead; one the daughter of Jairus found in Mark, Matthew and Luke, and the other the only son of a widow in the village of Nain, which is only told by Luke? What do we do with the gospel stories depicting Jesus as being able to manipulate nature in supernatural ways? Did Jesus really still the storm or walk on water? How are we to understand the healing stories in the gospels, which assert that Jesus had the ability to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to speak to the mute and the ability to walk to the crippled and paralyzed?
In most of my years in the church, I assumed that these clearly supernatural acts were literally true because Jesus possessed supernatural power. Most people either still think this way and call it “faith,” or they reject biblical supernaturalism as a vestige of a believing age before people learned about how the world operates, a position that leads many to a dismissal of the entire Jesus tradition. In this series I search for a third perspective.
First, let me say I am not interested in a world in which miracles can or do occur. That would mean that the world is in the hands of a capricious deity and that the task of religion is to manipulate this God so as to gain favorable treatment for ourselves. That is little more than the remains of a superstitious understanding of life, which was widely believed before the insights of Isaac Newton led us away from miracles and magic. I want to live in an ordered universe in which divine power is not at the ready to rescue us from the exigencies of human nature. Miracles, however, have always been part of our faith story. Can Christianity survive if miracles, understood as supernatural acts, are removed or if they cease to be believed in a literal way? That is now a question that modern Christians must address. So in our hope to create a New Reformation, we turn to the question of what do we do with the whole concept of miracles.
I start this quest by pressing the issue raised in the opening paragraph as to just how original the miracle stories are to the memory of Jesus. Perhaps an even earlier question would be when did miracles become part of the whole biblical tradition?
First let me identify the place of miracles in that story. Most people think that some miraculous event must be on every page of the Bible. That is their impression, but that is simply not so. Miraculous tales occur only in certain cycles of the Bible’s stories involving Jewish heroes. The prophets never talk about miracles. Isaiah might record some supernatural signs that accompanied his call to be a prophet, but dramatic stories of vocational calls are accepted and generally understood as subjective experiences. No one seem to want to objectify his or her call. The Wisdom literature in the Bible, including Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Psalter and the Song of Songs, is devoid of miraculous stories. Most of the Torah, once we get past the supernatural signs that accompanied both the Exodus and the delivery of the Torah to Moses by God on Mt. Sinai is free of any miraculous content. So the idea that the Bible is filled with miraculous occurrences is simply not so. Indeed a careful study of the Hebrew Scriptures will reveal that in these sacred pages miraculous power is attributed rarely and always to special heroic figures. The people to whom these miracles are attributed also seem to come in pairs, the hero and his immediate successor. The Bible contains only three of these pairs.
The first one of these heroes is Moses. Miraculous signs are present in his life. In the desert God calls him from a miraculous bush, which is filled with flames, but which is never consumed. Then Moses is equipped, the narrative says, with a series of supernatural acts, designed to convince his enemies that he speaks with the voice of God. Some of these stories are absolutely bizarre!
In negotiations with the Pharaoh and his advisors, Moses is able to cast his staff to the ground and watch it turn into a snake! That is a pretty good trick. We are told, however, that the Pharaoh’s magicians could duplicate this trick so suddenly there were snakes slithering all over the floor. The superiority of Moses’ power was then demonstrated by the fact that his snake could and did swallow up all of the snakes of the Pharaoh’s magicians. This narrative was used to prove that God’s power in Moses was greater than the magic of the magicians. Moses could also stick his hand into his tunic and then pull it out revealing it to be leprous. Then he placed it back into his tunic a second time and on this occasion pulled it out clean. It was a second negotiating trick in which Moses was able to demonstrate that he had God on his side.
This is the place in the Bible where miracles are first introduced into the sacred text unless one treats the pregnancy of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, at age 90 as a miracle. It looks rather like a tale being told to show that God was involved in keeping the divine promise to make of Abraham a great nation.
Once miracles are introduced into the Moses story, they are developed as a major part of that cycle, but we must remember that all of the Moses stories in the Bible were written some 300 years after his death. Moses was empowered regularly to initiate plagues to force the hated Egyptians to free the Hebrew slave people from bondage. The Nile River was turned into blood and the fish in the Nile died. Subsequently, all the water supplies in Egypt — creeks, ponds and pools — became blood. This too, however, turned out to be an act that Pharaoh’s magicians could do, so Pharaoh remained unimpressed. This narrative was clearly a tribal folk story.
Then came the plague of frogs covering the land of Egypt. Pharaoh’s magicians once again replicated that power. When these first plagues did not work to free the people of Israel, Moses and Aaron brought on a plague of gnats. Finally, the magicians failed to match Moses’ power. When Pharaoh still did not relent, the plague of flies came. Then all of the Egyptian cattle became sick and died. (The first instance of Mad Cow Disease?). This was followed by plagues of boils, hail, locusts and darkness. Finally there came the most terrifying plague of all; it was still a supernatural act. God would in this plague send the angel of death throughout the land to slay, shall we say to murder, the first-born son in every Egyptian household. Hebrew homes, we recall from this story, were protected by the blood of the “Paschal Lamb” on their doorposts. This was the plague, the Bible asserts, that finally won the release of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. Supernatural acts thus make their appearance in the Bible in the story of Moses and the Exodus. God was portrayed as working through Moses. Having been introduced to biblical miracles, we will now trace the rise and the limits of supernatural, miraculous power in the Bible. At the beginning, as was the case with Moses, we note the fact that miracles had to do with affecting nature; but that limit was destined not to hold. So stay tuned.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Christer Hugo from Stockholm, Sweden, writes:
Question:
I am a Lutheran pastor in the Church of Sweden, Diocese of Stockholm. I first started to read your work around the turn of the century. I was first very encouraged by the postings entitled “The Bishop’s Voice.” Next I received and read your exciting autobiography, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality and reviewed it for a church periodical. When you first visited Stockholm, I listened to your extraordinary presentation at Sofia Church. Since then many things have happened in my life. At various points, I have thought I would have to leave the ministry and the church in order to be intellectually honest. I couldn’t stand or handle the claims of theism anymore — I was fed up with religion, to put it bluntly. Rediscovering your work and reading Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World meant that a road was opened to me, which made it possible to continue my ministry and stay in the church. I’m not sure what label to put on myself right now; definitely non-theist, perhaps atheist, perhaps natural pantheist, but certainly I still struggle on almost a daily basis with the religious language of my tradition. Even in a liberal church like the Church of Sweden, theistic language and presuppositions are all but omnipresent. I just want to say a warm and heartfelt THANK YOU for your untiring work! Just recently I read your letter to the moderator of the United Church of Canada in defense of Gretta Vosper – and I was once again encouraged and felt hope for the church. I wish you joy and continued strength in days to come.
Answer:
Dear Christer,

Thanks so much for your letter. It is pastors like you and Gretta Vosper in Canada, to whom you refer, that keep the church alive and struggling to walk forward. It is also pastors like you who are constantly marginalized by institutional Christians. You should not be alone in Sweden. You had great predecessors in such people as the Rev. Marianne Blom, who pioneered progressive thinking in Sweden prior to her death; Krister Stendahl, who taught at Harvard for most of his career, but who also served as the Bishop of Stockholm near the end of his life; K. G. Hammar, who was the primate of your church, when he and I did a dialogue in the Uppsala University auditorium before a capacity audience, and Hans Ulfvebrand, who was the pastor of the Sofia Church when I gave lectures there, just to mention a few. All of these people were great, open, progressive leaders. You walk in a noble tradition. You also speak for numbers of Swedish Lutherans, who no longer attend church. They need to hear that what they experience in church is in so many instances not what Christianity is. So I hope you recognize that your life, your role in the Lutheran Church and your ministry are of the utmost importance.

Leaders like you must be public and visible. I know that is not an easy role to play for when you disturb the security systems of the majority of religious people, their anger can be overwhelming. I have received sixteen death threats in my life. None came from an atheist or a Buddhist; they all came from “Bible-quoting, true-believing Christians.” Perhaps they never read the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Your public voice will give confidence to the voices of those who find no meaning in the words the Christian Church continues to use. God is so much greater than our human perception of God.

Stay in touch with me. You are not alone.

John Shelby Spong

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