[Oe List ...] 8/11/2022, Progressing Spirit: Brian D. McLaren: Thanks, Presiding Bishop Curry; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Aug 11 07:43:08 PDT 2022
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Thanks, Presiding Bishop Curry
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| Essay by Brian D. McLaren
August 11, 2022The Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was recently asked a question by Bishop Baskerville-Burroughs at a gathering of bishops. His response was, I feel, very important for all Christians, not just Episcopalians.I have long admired the presiding bishop’s work, and often thank God that we have a few extraordinary leaders like him and Pope Francis in these times of religious mediocrity and decomposition. We feel the need for outspoken, courageous, and insightful Christian leaders with special intensity as we as a nation and world stand on a precipice ecologically, politically, socially, economically, and spiritually.In his speech, PB Curry twice emphasized the need to find a voice that is non-partisan ("this is not partisan," "not a partisan voice"). We all know why he needed to say this. The Episcopal church has traditionally been a church that reflected America, with a mix of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. The fact that politically diverse people could come together in Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, and other Christian denominations helped hold the nation together, for better or worse.But now we know that well-organized forces are pulling the nation apart. They have Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor-Green as their ringleaders; groups like the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys as their vigilante militia; mass media outlets from Fox News to OAN to any number of radio and TV talk shows (including Christian religious networks) as their ministries of propaganda; and social media sites as their recruitment and radicalization system. They control a majority on the Supreme Court, and many leaders in Congress have shown that they will betray the peaceful transition of power and support insurrection to prove their loyalty to this rising army of insurrection, white Christian nationalism, and post-democratic authoritarianism.To proclaim oneself non-partisan matters in these polarized times, especially when one takes seriously the Johnson Amendment. But what happens when forces with increasingly undemocratic and even fascist leanings collude with and control one party? Then it gets more complicated.In the years after the Civil War, it was the Democratic Party that played the reactionary role of deconstructing Reconstruction, and it was the Republican Party that stood for a more perfect union. I’m sure there were some Christian leaders who stood tall during those polarized times, speaking prophetically against lynching, poll taxes, segregation, and the white Christian terrorism that led to the Great Migration. But many avoided those subjects entirely, focusing instead on opposing alcohol and evolution.Now, it is the Republican Party that is all but taken over by extremism, and Democrats, for all their weaknesses, are trying to work with the few courageous Republicans willing to stand for non-authoritarian values. We don't know what the future will hold. Perhaps toxic leaders will be held accountable and public sentiment will change for the better. Perhaps not. Either way, the Republican Party of the past and the Republican party of the present are two very different elephants in the room, and as a result, to be nonpartisan in 2022 is far more morally complicated than being nonpartisan in 1952.We all must acknowledge that many Christians across denominations have been wholly won over to the white Christian nationalist resurgence and the party that hosts it. Many don't realize it, but radicalization has happened to them nonetheless. They continue to participate in Christian liturgy for an hour or so every week or so. But they also participate in the liturgies of their political identity for several hours each day, as they watch TV, as they listen to the radio, as they check their social media feeds. In a real sense, many have been thoroughly re-discipled into political extremism. Others are in danger of being so re-discipled.If their priest or pastor dares to do what Presiding Bishop Curry did - to ever-so-gently name the problems, the threats, the dangers - these radicalized members will typically do one of two things. First, they may find a way to silence or punish their religious leader for causing them cognitive dissonance, for putting their identity as followers of Jesus' way of love in tension with their political party's way of domination and winning at all costs. They may write an email, agitate to have their pastor fired, stop giving, or give a stern rebuke in person. Second, they may simply drop out, because at the end of the day, their membership in their political community has come to matter more to them than their membership in their Christian community. They cannot serve two masters, as Jesus put it, so they choose the one they love most.In response to this challenging reality (I'm sorry for saying it so directly, but I must), many clergy remain silent. Anything that white Christian nationalist members of their congregation deem unpleasant is deemed partisan. So, to avoid being partisan, clergy cannot speak about the environment or climate change as an expression of caring for creation. They cannot advocate for wise public health strategies as an expression of love for neighbor. They cannot address issues of systemic economic injustice, even though the Bible says so much about them. They cannot address racism and white supremacy as real problems, even though the New Testament says that Jesus came to tear down dividing walls of hostility. They dare not identify modern-day Herods as foxes in the henhouse (Luke 13:32), even though Jesus did so. They can not stand up for the full equality of women or sexual minorities, even though Jesus (John 7:57-8:11) and Philip (Acts 8:26-40) did so. By avoiding subjects deemed partisan, they avoid trouble.And in the process of saving their jobs and pensions, they lose their voice, if not their souls.I knew this struggle as a pastor for 24 years. Way back in the 1990’s I watched moderate people slowly but surely become radicalized by radio talk show hosts, Christian radio/TV, and Fox News. I got their angry letters and emails, had fingers wagged in my face, watched people leave with their donations, all because I either said what they didn't want me to say, or failed to say what they wanted me to say. I tried to be considerate without compromising. I more often failed than succeeded.Sometimes, I tried to hide in plain sight behind the shabby camouflage of a so-called middle ground, performing my centrism by throwing someone off both the right and left sides of the bus. My parishioners who were women and people of color reminded me that there was no virtue in being a centrist when it came to the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the 19th Amendment in 1919, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Critiquing both sides was a way of pretending to hold the moral high ground, but it really showed my excess of white privilege and a dearth of insight at best — or moral cowardice at worst. Even when I succeeded in doing what my conscience said was the right thing, it still felt like failure when people left.That's why Presiding Bishop Curry’s words are so significant. He dared to challenge an anti-love movement that is present in our nation and our churches. He made clear he didn’t do it for partisan political reasons, but for reasons of discipleship. Clergy are like classroom teachers, and the Presiding Bishop is like the principal who is showing he has their back. Thanks to Presiding Bishop Curry and all who follow his example.~ Brian D. McLaren
Read online here
About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent book is Faith After Doubt. He is the author of the illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story, The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? and his newest book, Do I Stay Christian?. He is a popular conference speaker, a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings, has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations, and is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Carter
We were having a discussion at church last night about theism and worship. How is the Eucharist relevant if theism is taken away, or more appropriately, how can our Episcopal liturgy and worship change to reflect the loss of theism?
A: By Dr. Carl Krieg
Dear Carter,Thank you, for your question, which presents a very challenging set of questions. I am not familiar with Episcopalian liturgy, so you’ll have to excuse me for not dealing directly with that. But the issue you raise is common to all Christians and is bracketed by two inter-related questions. First, how are we to conceive of God? This is where the concept of theism enters the picture. And secondly, where might we encounter this God? This is where the topic of worship enters.I realize that many today believe we have gone or must go beyond theism, and if by that mean a God who intervenes all the time curing disease, helping your team win, and fighting alongside our army against the enemy, then we happily say goodby to such a God. But to be replaced with what? The Encyclopedia Britannica defines theism as “the view that all limited or finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality of which one may also speak in personal terms. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this ultimate reality is often called God.” The problem with this definition is that it could include a deistic God who once created and then took a vacation, leaving us on our own. If we ask what, specifically, we mean by theism, it seems it should include the concept of a God who is, in some way, actively involved in the world. But then,… rooting for our team?, helping our army?Personally, I don’t find helpful the words theism, deism, pantheism, and panentheism, and prefer to ask simply: how do we conceive of God? To this question there are two basic answers: we think of God as One who loves creation, and we think of God as present in all creation. God as Relating Person and God as Reality. There are many attempts to understand and describe how these two attributes of God go together, but none of these attempts are completely satisfactory. And so I conclude that how God is God is a mystery. God loves as a Person would love, and God is the Supportive Ground of all that is. It is a dialectical truth that goes beyond our current understanding.Now, where does one encounter this God? Traditionally, the church has said that God may be found generally in nature, but also that this God reveals God’s self in special ways and places, such as in Jesus, and by connection, as in the Lord’s Supper. There have been long and bloody wars over the question of how Christ was present in the Supper. The Catholic church asserted that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, and it is my understanding that the Episcopalian Eucharist may be close to this idea. The Lutherans did not say that the elements were transubstantiated, but rather that Christ was present “in, with, and under” the elements, a doctrine known as consubstantiation. Other Protestant churches thought of the Supper as more of a remembering of Jesus the Christ, and a celebration of all being together. Just as I do not find useful the words theism, deism, pantheism, and panentheism, so too I find useful neither the concept of a sacrament nor the delimiting and confining of God’s full Presence in any way. We can encounter God anywhere, and that God that we can encounter anywhere and any time is the same God we find in Jesus and also in the community being together while celebrating a symbolic meal. ~ Dr. Carl Krieg
Read and share online here
About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, The Void and the Vision and The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT. |
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| Don't miss the next Episode of PC.org's Executive Directors Mark and Caleb on:
The Moonshine Jesus Show
- every Monday at 4:30pm Eastern Time – watch live on Facebook,, YouTube, Twitter, Podbean |
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| This Week's Featured Author
Our newest and final edition of
A Joyful Path Children's Curriculum
Book
The Year 3 theme is All Life is Sacred. The 38 sessions explore how to deepen our spiritual connection with Earth, one another and our more-than-human relatives. Year 3 looks directly to Earth for the lessons She readily provides, namely the importance of relatedness, across and throughout the web of life. As Jesus reminded us through parables and metaphor, the continuing cycle of creation reminds us it is our nature to be loving, generous and united. Read On ... |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Birth of Jesus, Part II: Paul and the Virgin Birth
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 15, 2012In the writings of Paul, there is not a single reference to a supernatural birth tradition, regarding Jesus of Nazareth. That is a fact easily established. Determining what that fact means is a bit more complicated.
Does this omission mean that Paul was unaware of this part of the Christian tradition? Is it possible that a story as dramatic as the one that appeared 20-30 years later in the gospels of Matthew and Luke could have been ignored by Paul, if it had been known? Paul was an educated man. The idea of a great person being born in a supernatural way that presaged his greatness was not unknown. There were birth legends surrounding the nativity of such icons as Alexander the great, Romulus and Remus and the deity called Mithra, for example, all of which were almost certainly known by Paul. So the evidence suggests that Paul did not include any reference to this tradition in regard to Jesus’ birth because he had never heard of it. If Paul had never heard of this tradition, the overwhelmingly probable explanation of this fact would be that the miraculous stories of Jesus’ birth had not yet been written, which means that they were not an original part of the Christian story. That is, however, an argument from silence and as such is not regarded as particularly definitive. So we turn to Paul’s writings to see what might be possible for us to conclude as the reality that Paul knew on this subject.
Paul gives us some biographical details in one of his earliest epistles, the Epistle to the Galatians. Here he argues that the gospel he proclaims “is not man’s (nor according to man) gospel.” He goes on to say, “I did not receive it from man nor was I taught it but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:10-12). Then he recites his history as a persecutor of the Christian Church. Obviously that was well known, but we need to be aware that the details of his conversion on the road to Damascus will not be written until Luke produced the Book of Acts in the tenth decade of the Common Era, some 30 plus years after the death of Paul.
Paul then describes his life in Judaism in which he asserts that he was “extremely zealous” for “the tradition of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). Then he described his conversion saying that God had “set me apart” and was “pleased to reveal his son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”
To back up this claim, Paul says that after his conversion, which scholars place between one and six years following the crucifixion, he went to Arabia for three years and only then went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephus, that is Peter, and stayed with him for 15 days. He says he saw no other apostle “except for James, the Lord’s brother.” So somewhere no earlier than four years and no later than nine years after the crucifixion, Paul was in the presence of Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. In the first epistle to the Corinthians in chapter 11 and in chapter 15, Paul uses the phrase, “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.” In chapter 11 that phrase introduces Paul’s understanding of the institution of the “Lord’s Supper” and in chapter 15 he relates the final events in Jesus’ life: the crucifixion, the burial and the Easter experience of resurrection.
>From putting these things together we know that Paul learned many of the details of the Jesus story from his association with the disciples, though Paul insists that he got to know Jesus directly, by way of a revelatory experience. He also knows that Jesus had a brother. If the miraculous birth of Jesus had been a fact of history instead of a later developing legend, it seems obvious that an event of this presumed degree of importance would have been communicated to Paul. It wasn’t. In none of Paul’s writings is there any mention of the mother of Jesus, the father of Jesus or the birth of Jesus.
This still remains, however, an argument from silence and as such continues to be weak and inconclusive. So, back to the Epistle to the Galatians we go in search of more data. Here we discover that Paul actually discusses the origins of Jesus. Interpreting the differences in being a child in a family as opposed to being a slave in a family, he argues that children are heirs and that even though they are placed under the authority of guardians, teachers and trustees until they come of age, they are nonetheless destined for freedom and their inheritance. Paul uses this analogy to explain the role of the law given to the people of Israel. The law is to them what guardians, teachers and trustees are to children who are not yet of age. They are obedient to them while they wait for their promised inheritance. In Paul’s mind, the role of Jesus was to give to all human life, Jews and Gentiles alike, the inheritance of full humanity, “sonship” he called it in the patriarchal world.
Then in a wonderfully clear affirmation, Paul asserts this: “When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that we might receive adoption as “sons” (Gal. 4:8).
For Paul, Jesus was “born of a woman.” That is, he was born just like any other person. It is not possible, he was suggesting, to be born in any other way. Could the word that is translated “woman” have in it any connotation of virgin? Not a chance! The Greek word used here is a form of the word “gunos” from which we get the word gynecology. It is not the word “parthenos” from which we get the word “parthenogenesis,” that is to give birth by a single sex and which does include the connotation of virgin. Jesus came from God the way every life comes from God, he was born of a woman. Paul also says that like every Jew he was also born under the law. Paul could not be clearer. The idea of a miraculous or virgin birth is never hinted at by this early Christian writer because he had never heard of it. The story of Jesus’ supernatural birth had not yet been written or developed.
When these birth stories were written, one of their purposes was to assert that from the moment of his birth, Jesus was uniquely related to God. It is also clear that this idea was not one even entertained by Paul. To make this case we turn to the opening verses of the Epistle to the Romans.
Paul certainly gives expression to his conviction that somehow and through some means, the reality of God they thought of as transcendent had been experienced as present in Jesus of Nazareth. In his early epistles he was content simply to proclaim the reality of this experience not to explain it. So he wrote that “God was in Christ” and the content that made this claim real was the experience of “reconciliation.” In the Christ experience, those people who had once been separated are brought together. Again, in Galatians, the apostle proclaims that inside the Christ experience, human differences and human barriers simply fade away. In Christ, there is no such thing as tribal identity, that is, there is no Jew or Greek, no Jew or Gentile, but one humanity. In Christ, there is no gender identity, no male or female, but a single humanity. In Christ, value is not established by economic or social standards, there is no bond or free, no slave or master, but a new creation, a new oneness. That was the God experience that Paul found in Jesus. It was a theme resonating throughout the New Testament.
We see it in the Pentecost story of Acts 2 where spirit-filled people are said to be able to communicate in the same language of human oneness. We see it in the divine commission in Matthew 28 where the followers of Jesus are instructed in the name of Jesus to go to those whom they have previously described as unclean and unworthy and to proclaim to them the limitless love of God. We see it in the Fourth Gospel in which Jesus defines his purpose as giving abundant life to all. That is the God experience that his followers believed they had met in Jesus. When did this God presence enter into Jesus? Paul says it was at the time of the resurrection. This was the moment in which God and Jesus became one in the mind of Paul. So to the Romans he writes that Jesus was descended from King David “according to the flesh,” but was “designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:3-4).
As the tradition developed, that moment when God and Jesus became part of each other would get earlier and earlier. In Mark it was when he was baptized. In Matthew and Luke, it was when he was conceived. In John it was at the dawn of creation. The story of the origins of Jesus’ power would develop significantly between Paul and the later gospels. In that later development, the story of the Virgin Birth would be born and it would begin to grow. Paul, however, knew nothing of this tradition, since it was not developed until well after his death.
The witness of Paul is clear. He never heard of the Virgin Birth. This fact begins to relativize the power of this claim as “revealed truth.” The Virgin Birth is not an essential ingredient in the Christian story. Why? Because one can hardly say that Paul, who had never heard of the Virgin Birth tradition, was not a Christian.~ John Shelby Spong |
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Announcements
Things That Matter: The Spirituality
of Reproductive Freedom – Part 3
Parts One and Two were wonderfully enlightening conversations about reproductive rights with Diana Butler Bass, Sharon Jacob, and Jacqui Lewis. Join us on Wednesday, August 10 at 2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT on Facebook or Youtube as we have a roundtable discussion of pastors and scholars about the “clobber verses” conservative Christians use against reproductive freedom. Read on...
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