[Oe List ...] 5/11/17, Felton/Spong: Marking the 100th Anniversary of Fundamentalism in America by Bullying Religious Minorities: Spong revisited: Terrible Texts III

Thu May 11 08:40:03 PDT 2017

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Marking the 100th Anniversary of Fundamentalism in America by Bullying Religious Minorities
 By David Felten

 How a “Fact or Fiction” Campaign Continues the Tradition of Betraying the Message of Jesus

The Back Story
Right after Easter in 2015, I arrived at church as a fellow staff member was going out the door saying, “I’m going to get a picture of one of the banners.” “What banners?!” I’d come in the back way to town and hadn’t seen that down the main street of Fountain Hills, eight churches had posted large identical banners overnight: “Progressive” Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”
The next day, those same eight churches (that’s a lot in a town of only about fifteen churches!) – the fundamentalists, break-away evangelical Lutherans (LCMC), and Presbyterians (ECO) – also published a half-page newspaper ad in the local Fountain Hills Times and arranged for both an article and an OpEd piece to appear in the paper.
Hailed as a “landmark series” and an “unprecedented step” that demonstrate[s] in a very real way the unity of the ‘body of Christ’, the effort was the work of the “Fountain Hills Ministerial Association,” a group of churches whose pastors had already publicly condemned Progressive Christianity in general as “one of the tools the enemy"  and me in particular as a heretic, apostate, and liar.
The local Presbyterian pastor confirmed that the six-week series of coordinated messages were meant to push back against the progressive Christian movement. “Frankly, we think Progressive Christianity is misleading a lot of people,”  he said.
As Pastor of the then only openly “Progressive” Christian Church in town, (welcoming of LGBTQ folks, embracing of science, in dialogue with other religions, etc.) and author of a popular book on the “Wisdom of Progressive Christianity,” it seemed clear who the series was aimed at.
Friends of The Fountains like best-selling author Diana Butler Bass (and others who keep a finger on the pulse of the national religious scene) said that they’d never seen anything like this before: a coordinated smear campaign/attack by a majority of the churches in one town against a single other church.
It was a sensational and unusual enough event that the local Fox 10 News reporter even came out to do a story – which propelled the affair into the news cycle around the country. Soon it was being podcasted about and blogged about across the internet and written about in news outlets from The Christian Century to the secular media around the world.
One of my favorite blog posts was by author John Shore, who dubbed the other churches the “Gang of 8.” He observed that this was more mature than what he wanted to call them in the first place, which was “Churches Rallying Against Progress” (C.R.A.P.).
The content of this anti-Progressive Christianity sermon series was nothing new, drawing directly from the well-established Fundamentalist playbook: inerrant Bible, Virgin Birth, physical resurrection, and a six-day creation, among other threadbare claims. And while the proponents of this dogma would like to imply that their doctrines are original to Jesus himself, it turns out that they’re based in a controversy barely 100 years old.
The Back Back Story
Just over a hundred years ago, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth was published and distributed all over the world. Consisting of 12 volumes, The Fundamentals contained 90 essays written by 64 authors from several denominations. Union Oil Founders Milton and Lyman Stewart (also founders of the fundamentalist BIOLA University), financed millions of volumes being sent out free of charge to pastors, evangelists, Sunday school teachers, and missionaries around the world. What began as a not-so-anonymous vanity project became an all-out movement to save conventional Christianity.
The Fundamentals was compiled and distributed in the run-up to war with Germany, when suspicion and fear towards all things German was running high. Physics in the hands of Germans like Einstein and the alarming new science of psychology advanced by Austrian Sigmund Freud posed what seemed a very real threat to the status quo of not only culture and religion, but reality itself. For religious conservatives, liberal German theology and its “Higher Criticism” was the primary concern. Unleashing elements of the scientific method on the Bible posed a threat to the simple souls of the American faithful.
A major flashpoint in the developing controversy between the “Modernists” and those who would come to be called “Fundamentalists” was a debate in the New York Presbytery of the Presbyterian church over the doctrine of the literal Virgin Birth. Several candidates for ordination were hesitant to affirm their full embrace of the historicity of the doctrine. So, in 1910, legislation was passed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church declaring that five doctrines were “necessary and essential” to the Christian faith:
         1. The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the
              inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.
         2. The virgin birth of Christ.
         3. The belief that Christ’s death was an atonement for sin.
         4. The bodily resurrection of Christ.
         5. The historical reality of Christ’s miracles.
These five propositions would become known as the “Five Fundamentals” and, no surprise, were at the heart of the six “essential” beliefs lifted up by the Fountain Hills “Gang of 8” (the main addition being that “Christ is the only way” and that non-believers are going to Hell). So, just over a hundred years later, the “Five Fundamentals” and The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth , are still playing a central role in the task of what Fundamentalists consider to be “drawing a line in the sand” regarding their faith – a faith noticeably lacking in any emphasis on Jesus’ teachings or example (but I digress!).
So, out of fear over changing cultural norms and contemporary understandings of Jesus’ life, eight churches in Fountain Hills decided to do exactly what Jesus would have wanted them NOT to do: gang up on people who are different and demonize them as heretical, apostate, and dangerous. As blogger John Shore wrote,

And if there’s one message the Gang of 8 is successfully communicating, it’s that they’re feeling threatened. Threatened they are, and threatened they should be. For the Christianity they represent is, in a word, ruinous. It holds that the “unrepentant” LGBT person is destined for hell, that wives must be subservient to their husbands, that Christians alone can enjoy a heavenly afterlife. The Christianity they preach and teach feeds off fear, exclusivity, anger and victimizing “the other.” And right now, in Fountain Hills, Arizona, that “other” is The Fountains UMC.”

In the end, the bottom line at issue here is fear. Well, and bigotry. As The Fountains shares its facilities with a Reform Jewish congregation, works with the nearby mosque, and sponsors a monthly PFLAG meeting, it shouldn’t be surprising that trying to discredit The Fountains hit the bigotry trifecta. The thinly-veiled anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Homophobia of conservative Christianity could all be conveniently concentrated and camouflaged in the garb of pious theological moralizing.
And the go-to solution for many who are feeling threatened? Bullying, plain and simple. But the good news is that the bullying backfired. The unanticipated consequences of the “Fact or Fiction” campaign included a sincere interest in the principles of Progressive Christianity by seekers who had never known there was an option to the fundamentalism of their birth.
The Just Desserts
I was already pretty used to accusations from my fellow clergy, having already been referred to in OpEd pieces in our local paper as, among other things, a vicious liar, hypocrite, and reprobate (it was my first “reprobate”!). But the congregation was a bit anxious at first. While it seemed like all the “respectable” voices in town were ostracizing us, it didn’t take long for them to hear themselves being called “worse than Satan,” “Like a computer virus that needs to be wiped out,” and compared to the Nazis for them to come around and say, “Now Hang on a second! Who are these people to be saying such things? Fellow Christians? Seriously?”
In the end, the congregation was galvanized in a way it had never been before. Add to that the biggest summer attendance we’ve had in anyone’s memory, the story being picked up literally around the world and, by the end of the summer, being recognized by a national United Methodist organization with their annual “Voice in the Wilderness” Award, and it was hard to imagine anyone NOT wanting to be shunned by their Fundamentalist neighbors.
We really could never have afforded that kind of advertising otherwise!
But in the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity department,” let me close with two anecdotes from that summer:
The first was on the launch Sunday of the anti-Progressive Christian sermon series. The Fountains had a record-breaking crowd including United Methodist Bishop Bob Hoshibata and his wife, Greta, several LGBTQ groups, two Muslim groups, Buddhists, Jews, and even atheists. And then, across the back row, all lined up in their immaculate suits and ties, the Bishop and his elders from our neighboring LDS ward. The Mormon Bishop and I were laughing with one another that if anyone should have theological differences, it would be us. But we had gone out of our way to include our Mormon neighbors in our interfaith events and our youth groups had met together – and when they saw we were being ganged up on in a way that was all too familiar to them, they were there to support us. This simple act of solidarity was not lost on the congregation.
The second happened later in the summer. A woman came to The Fountains and introduced herself after church as being from one of the “Gang of 8” churches. She said, “The more my pastor preached against Progressive Christians, the more I realized I was a Progressive Christian.” She had never really known there was an option – she didn’t know that her doubts and uncertainties were shared along with compassionate, thoughtful people who shared her hopes and hunches about the world.
An Intellectual Contagion
Harry Emerson Fosdick famously preached that “stagnation, not change is Christianity’s most deadly enemy.” But the stagnation of the status quo continues to hold generations of people in its grip. Fear of the intellectual contagion of Progressive Christianity continues to motivate otherwise kind and compassionate people to betray the message of Jesus, excluding who their pastors tell them are “unclean” and blemished.
In the final analysis, it was the support of fellow Progressive Christians and the encouragement of those who had faced similar exclusion that strengthened the members and leadership of The Fountains to not only persist, but flourish in the face of controversy. So in a world where Fundamentalist Christians seem to dominate the secular public’s impression of Christianity as anti-intellectual, bigoted, judgmental and reactionary, the more important it becomes for Progressive Christians to come together, networking with one another and establishing relationships that strengthen us for the moments when we find ourselves being dismissed or bullied.
There are countless people out there for whom the message you and I share would be like a breath of fresh air – but they just haven’t heard it. And when they do, they just can’t believe there really is a movement that welcomes all people, that respects other religions, that works for justice, that seeks to confront racism and prejudice in all its forms, and works to heal the world.
As Progressive Christians, we have the freedom to loosen our grip on the obsession with certainty and work together to adapt our understandings, our language, and our goals toward embracing the core value of expanding our spiritual horizons. Together, we can go deeper, ask the tough questions, and explore the ways we can be a catalyst for new spiritual directions. Despite the noisy critics, we can make the world a better place.

~ Rev. David M. Felten

Read online here

About the Author
David Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.

Question & Answer
Mark from Cheyenne, WY writes:

Question:
If you do not favor conversion activity, how do you interpret the Great Commission?
Answer: By Matthew Fox

I think there is a big difference between favoring conversion activity and preaching good news. Now what we call the "Great commission" is found differently in all four gospels and many Biblical scholars believe these are add-ons to the gospels that reflect more the goings on and practice of the early Church and its liturgical rites than the exact words of Jesus after the Easter event. Be that as it may, I recommend sitting down with all four versions of this injunction to get a feel yourself for the diversity of tone and words and meaning found therein.
For myself, I most appreciate the Markan words because they take us beyond the human and they emphasize the "good news" while saying nothing about conversion. Says Mark: "Go out to the whole world" (this theme is found in most all the other pericopes as well so it shows this injunction very likely followed the early church's expulsion from the synagogue) and its going out to the gentile world and beyond to "proclaim the good news to all creation." This raises the obvious question: What is the good news that all creation is eager to hear? Mark certainly sets Jesus' teaching and ministry into a more-than-human context, a cosmic context therefore. And clearly it is not about converting so much as "proclaiming good news."
The "whole world" is a big place (today we know our universe is made up of two trillion galaxies!) so there is plenty of space to roam in. While Matthew's "Great Commission" talks about teaching the commandments Jesus has taught, at the heart of these are love of God and love of neighbor and vice versa. Our neighbor is not restricted to the two-legged ones, but all creation deserves to hear that humans are busy loving all creatures--not destroying other creatures in narcissistic fits of greed and violence that end whole species while endangering human generations that follow with a depleted earth.
Whether the story of the Good Samaritan or the teaching of Matthew 25 that others, especially the needy, are other Christs, it is clear that Jesus' teaching is indeed trying to stretch our meaning and practice of love and compassion. That's the Great Commission and the Great Commandment(s).
~ Matthew Fox
Read and share online here
About the Author
Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 60 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the FleshTransforming Evil in Soul and Society, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Terrible Texts:
Be Fruitful and Multiply and Subdue the Earth – Part III 

Subdue the earth! It is an enemy to be conquered not a home to be treasured! Life is an eternal battle for survival between the human creature and the hostile environment. These are the assumptions that shape the primary religious tradition in the Western world. Today we are paying the price of those assumptions. It is as if the environment has launched a counter attack against its abusers. In many areas of our life the limits of abuse seem to have been reached. The prospect of the human species surviving for thousands of years is today an open question. The human future seems to be no more than an even bet.
Sometimes just the attempt to raise human consciousness to the dangers now confronting our common environment is rejected as nothing more than “doomsday preaching.” Those whose vested interest lies in not facing reality continue to live in denial. It is an ultimate expression of that sickness that thinks that the comfort of homo-sapiens is the only value to be served. “Subdue the Earth” is accepted among fundamentalist Christians as a divine command since it appears in a book that these believers insist, contrary to massive data, is “The Word of God.”
The biblical setting of this “Terrible Text” calling us to “subdue the earth” enters the sacred narrative in the seven-day creation story. Written by the priestly writer during the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th Century B.C.E., it is one of the newer parts of the Old Testament. This story makes no bones about the fact that every beast, every bird, every fish and everything that “creeps on the earth” is to be subjugated to the domination of human life by the commandment of God (Gen 1:28-30). It is overtly anthropocentric.
This relatively recent narrative was then merged with the older stories about Adam, Eve and the Garden, which tell the story of the fall from grace plunging the human being into a struggle with the hostile environment. Prior to the act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden, all human needs were filled. But that cosmic act of violating God’s single command to refrain from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil resulted in expulsion from that paradise. The punishment handed out to the woman included pain in childbirth, and for the man the constant need to scratch from the earth a meager living. The divine words used are quite harsh: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you
Is there something about Western religion itself that predisposes its adherents to environmental disaster? Do such texts as “Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth” arise out of something far deeper and more basic in our faith tradition? Why is it that among non-Western religious traditions, the concept of having a religious duty to subdue the earth would be considered a strange and alien idea?
In many Eastern worship traditions God is envisioned as a universal spirit or divine presence that cannot be separated from the world. This God is a life force flowing through every living thing, not a distant ruler or a great chief in the sky, who is somehow separate from the world of human experience. Perhaps this distinction might open our eyes to a significant clue, which seems to be so deep in the western religious tradition, that violating the environment and exhausting the world’s resources have become realities that we still seem to think are blessed by God.
In Buddhism, for example, God is not an objective presence standing over against the world perceived as subject. Buddhism seeks wholeness or at least a sense of harmony with the whole. That is quite different from seeing human life as called to subdue, to conquer and to exercise authority over the world.
In the biblical tradition the claim is made that we know God by divine revelation since God comes to us from outside. Through the sagas of the Bible, God’s divine name is changed from time to time. Yet this distinction always remains. Yahweh became the dominant name for God after the conquest of Canaan and was defined against the fertility cults of the Canaanites and their God who was called Ba’al. Perhaps the most dramatic Ba’al story is the conflict on Mt. Carmel in which Elijah; the prophet of Yahweh first stood down and then slew the priests of Ba’al (I Kings 18:20-40). Contemporary readers of this narrative need to understand that this was a conflict between Yahweh, an overwhelmingly male deity, who lived above the sky, and Ba’al, a deity identified with the agricultural fertility cycles and thus one who was perceived as far more a part of the life of the world.
Ba’al actually began his divine career as the consort to Astarte or Asherah who was a fertility goddess. It was only as the concept of the deity as feminine declined in the ancient world that Asherah was de-emphasized and the male consort Ba’al emerged as the primary Canaanite deity who was locked in a mortal struggle with the God of the Jews. While Ba’al was identified with the cycles of nature Yahweh was understood as a deity who invaded history. Yahweh may well have begun as a kind of supernatural tribal deity, but later evolved into being the chief ruler over the entire world. In the Judeo Christian tradition, it was in this image of God that human life was said to have been created. Human beings were said to be the God look alike, to whom was assigned the divine task of exercising dominion over all living things.
Israel’s God was said to have created all things out of nothing. This made the world both subservient and answerable to this external divine power who lived in a sphere located beyond the sky. As the Scriptures unfolded, in addition to a heavenly dwelling place, God established a symbolic dwelling place in the midst of the people. First, it was in a mobile tabernacle that was carried by the Jews during their days in the wilderness. That was symbolized by the fact that the tabernacle was connected to heaven by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The tabernacle was in effect a colony of heaven. When the permanent temple was built and dedicated the Shekinah – God presence, perhaps God’s spirit or even God’s light – was sent as the sign of God’s willingness to make that place the earthly home of the Holy One. This God remained, however, primarily the all-powerful creator who viewed the world from outside it. God could fill the world but was never to be identified with it. The world was a creature that neither possessed its own holiness nor participated fully in the holiness of God. So the idea was born in this religious tradition that we human beings, like God, were not really part of this world. We were made to rule the world in God’s name, to have dominion over it and ultimately to make sure that it served our needs as those made in God’s image. This was the attitude, I submit, that enabled the anthropocentricism found in the Bible to be developed. Out of this anthropocentricism, I believe, there arose the insensitivity to and destruction of our common environment, and the human unwillingness to curb our breeding practices. Only a deity who was not part of the world could order the human creature to be fruitful and to multiply and subdue the earth as if the earth was an enemy.
I call this definition of God “Theism.” God is a supernatural being, external to the world, who periodically invades the world in a miraculous way. Theism is the dominant definition of God in the Bible and, through the Bible it has become the dominant definition of God in the Western world today. The proof of that is seen in our language, which defines a theist simply as one who believes in God, and the only alternative is to be an a-theist.
A theistic God can be thought to manipulate the weather to create the great flood, to engage in political conflict by slamming the Egyptians with plagues and then splitting the Red Sea during the Exodus. This God shapes morality by dictating the law at Mt. Sinai. This God raises up prophets in Israel to speak the divine word. This is also the God, who, in the “fullness of time,” invaded the earth in the person of Jesus and lived among us. So powerful was this “external to the world” God image that it captured the life of Jesus. Jesus came to be seen not as a God infused human being, but rather as a divine visitor who came from heaven. As a divine visitor, Jesus needed a mythological landing field, which is how the miraculous birth tradition of the virgin entered Christianity. He also needed a launching pad in order to make his exit. That is how the story of Jesus’ cosmic ascension became part of the tradition. Between his miraculous entry into the life of the world and his miraculous exit from it, this Jesus was said to have done other God-like things, like walking on water, stilling the storm and expanding the food supply, all of which can be shown as God attributes in the Old Testament. There was also present among the Jews, the hope that when the Kingdom of God dawns in human history, the signs of that kingdom will become apparent. The prophet Isaiah (chapter 35) described those kingdom signs as the blind seeing, the deaf hearing and the lame walking. Therefore, it was quite natural that stories about these kingdom signs would be attached to Jesus and even expanded to include “the dead rising.” The dominant theistic understanding of God shaped the way this “god life” of Jesus was remembered. It was Charles Wesley who, in his 1739 Christmas carol, captured this meaning best when he wrote that far from being human, Jesus was a life that had been “veiled in flesh,” so that we could “the Godhead see.”
It is this theistic understanding of God that allows us to view the earth as profane, even secular. This theistic God who is imaged only in human beings has literally drained the holiness out of the life of this world, rendering it an enemy to be subdued. This theistic God allows us to pretend that, like God, we too are separate from this world, that we are the only creatures who are holy and that the world and all that is in it was made for our benefit. One can dominate and subdue a world that is not holy. One can view all life as created for human benefit only if you assume that holiness is external to this world. The theistic understanding of God opens the door to separating the world from holiness because the God, who is the source of holiness, is separated from this world. So long as we view God through the lens of theism, we will see the world as an object, even as an enemy, against which we must struggle to survive. Ideas do have consequences and we are living today with the ecologically disastrous consequences that derive from an anthropocentric view of human life based on a theistic understanding of God and creation. If we are going to overcome our looming environmental holocaust, then the proper place to begin might be to jettison the theistic understanding of God. For most Western people that is an almost unthinkable possibility. Yet I believe it is the essential first step toward both a theological reformation and a realistic hope for a human future.
Can the theistic understanding of God be abandoned? The answer to that question is yes but it will mean that we must engage and overthrow the powerful vested interest that religious institutions have in preserving the theistic God who is the source of their authority. The only place I know where we can begin this task is to return to the scriptures to see if theism is the only way there is to envision God. Are there minority voices hidden in our religious past that have been all but drowned out by the claims of the theistic organized religion? Perhaps the environmental crisis that is upon us will be the catalyst to force us to enter this new and radically different understanding of God. If we are successful in this effort, we will inaugurate a reformation so radical that the whole superstructure of organized religion in the Western world, with its intricate authority claims will crumble before our eyes. That means many will vehemently resist it but without it I am more convinced that there is neither a Christian nor a human future.
In my next column, I will attempt to lift out of the scriptures a different portrait of God, a God beyond theism. It is a minority view which I believe must soon become a majority view or we have no future. My hope is that it will lead us to a new vision of what it means both to be human and to live in harmony with the world.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally Posted September 2003

Announcements

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