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Jack on Prayer
Column by Rev. Gretta Vosper
August 23, 2018
Legacy: The Truths We, Ourselves, Must Face
It was a delight to be at Chautauqua Institution in June to hear Bishop John Shelby Spong (Jack) explore the theses presented in his latest and last, last book Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. Over the course of four days, he shared his perspectives on Christianity in a style that is exquisitely his own. Taking questions from dedicated “Women” and “Men” microphones, the integrity with which he approaches his work and those intent on wrestling with it was, as always, apparent. He would not let his audience off the hook. He would not allow them to be content with the easy, well-trod paths up the mountain. His cajoling impatience is his invitation to us to raise our own rallying cry, even if we don’t quite know what to rally around yet. He is content to shake the bejeezus out of our preconceptions and then get out of the way so that we might find our own path.
Last Lectures
The lectures he gave at Chautauqua are expected to be his last. Despite his amazing recovery from a stroke almost two years ago, a recovery due, I believe, to his incredible physical fitness at the time (he and his wife, Christine, shamed my husband and me on a walk once, following a trail around a lake that left the two of us panting and exhausted while the two of them took it totally in stride, literally), he has said what he needed to say. It is now our problem to address; the problem of Christianity, its history, its horrors, and its future.
Unfinished Business?
Some might consider Jack’s work unfinished; after all, dammit, he hasn’t given us all the answers! He hasn’t given us the prescription for a new church that will be relevant in today’s world. He hasn’t told us what to do with all that’s left of the Christianity he has so meticulously dissected. He didn’t explain how we might put it all back together again, perhaps more honestly this time. How lovely that would have been. But we are those in whose hands he has placed the broken bits and pieces of a Christianity struggling to say something meaningful to generations that will never cross its portals. Of course, we hold these things differently because of Jack’s expansive work and it is not unreasonable to have expected him to conjure the right answers in this last book. But the responsibility is ours to determine if Christianity or the church that confesses it can withstand resurrection or if it should be buried with a dignity and respect it may or may not deserve.
In Unbelievable, Jack looks at many of the major tenets of Christianity against which he has railed these past decades: God, Jesus, original sin, the virgin birth, miracles, the atonement, Easter, Jesus’ resurrection, and his subsequent ascension. Every Christian church or denomination has an interpretation of each of those topics that is based in or has grown out of their own interpretation of scripture. And because those interpretations conflict with one another in so many ways – some say upwards of thirty thousand ways – there is a lot of leeway to explore within each of those tenets. And, since no one knows scripture better than Jack Spong, when he shares his thoughts, we are not wrong to listen to what he has to say.
Because my denomination, The United Church of Canada, taught me that the biblical record of Jesus’ life and work was written decades after his death, however, I never really held to the tenets based in scripture with much devotion. I was taught to wrestle with the many and varied concepts of God that had been articulated down through the ages. Spending my time honing a belief in any one biblical perspective would be too much like passionately tethering my life and beliefs to the political arguments made about World War II this month by authors with no first hand knowledge and an axe to grind. The scriptural stories of Jesus are just that: stories. They do not exist apart from the foibles, biases, and situational realities of the people who wrote them. So Jack’s hard-hitting rhetoric about the scriptures impressed me more by the depth and breadth of his knowledge than by the questions that knowledge raised. Many of those questions had already been set aside by my theological training in The United Church of Canada.
Examining the Scaffolding
No, my appreciation of Jack’s work goes to his engagement and critique of the practices we have built upon those scriptures and the oft-flimsy nature of the scaffolding that supports them. When he addresses the application of Christianity to our beliefs about what happens when we pray, or after we die, Jack raises issues that are close to the hearts of many, regardless of whether they can dismiss most of the traditional dogma derived from scripture or not. Even those who recognize that the Bible is not The Authoritative Word Of God For All Time (TAWOGFAT[1]) can get squeamish when confronted with the detritus that remains of these deeply trusted beliefs after contemporary, critical scholarship – in the form of Bishop Jack Spong – has had its way with them. If there is no expectation of judgment after death, why do we bother to be good? If there is no afterlife, will we never get a chance to be reconciled to those we loved and failed? If we love beyond the boundaries drawn by the church, is that love not also pure? If God isn’t listening to us pray, or worse, is listening but not inclined to do anything to help us in our despair, what is the meaning or value of prayer? Is no one listening to us at all?
Two Questions
Many years ago, Jack shared with me that he was writing a book on the concept we generally speak of as “the afterlife.” That book, Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, was published in 2010. At the time of our conversation, we agreed that the question of what happened after we died was one of two questions we were most regularly asked whenever we spoke publicly. The other question, the one about how we pray if there is no god called God, he thought I should address. And so, as one who embraces the challenges set by the master, I did. Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World beyond Belief was published in 2012. Jack was so supportive as I wrestled with the work of writing on that topic.
But will we ever be finished with the topic of prayer? Jack comes back to it in Unbelievable. His description is both neat and profound. He describes its impetus as that moment when we come to the end of what our own resources can offer but find our need still unanswered, still unmet. “Prayer is … often seen as the activity of last resort,” he writes, reached for “when our own resources have failed us.”
The Irony of Amen
It is ironic, then, that I was unable to do any promotion of Amen, a book on the topic “of last resort,” because, mere days before it was published, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the prognosis of which is extremely grim for all but 15% of women who develop it.[2] Two weeks before surgery, my resources were frayed thin as Amen was placed on the shelves of the nation’s bookstores. Looking back on that challenging time, I wonder if it wasn’t the research and self-examination I had undertaken in writing Amen, that accompanied my husband, Scott, and me through that dark, dark vale together. Once on its other side (a side that really never exists for cancer “survivors”), we were each asked if we had felt moved to pray. In responding, we realized that we had never once resorted to anything that might have been remotely recognized as prayer in the Christian church. To do so had never occurred to either of us.
Conjured To Disturb
When writing about prayer, Jack uses stories to invite us to reach deep into the realities that face us and that plague the pock-ridden features of prayer. Beginning with a story of Bishop Richard Holloway’s shocking response to a question posed to him following a speech, Jack walks us, gently, through the moments in his life when he has been most challenged to wrestle with what prayer means, what it does, and how it changes us. It is as though, like the ghosts Marley conjures to disturb the satisfactions of his still-breathing friend, Scrooge, Jack takes us by the hand, shows us deep and sometimes troubling truths, and challenges us to decide for ourselves. The chapters are brief but the effect is lasting. I do not believe that anyone could read those stories and not be impressed – in the true and deep meaning of that word – by those situations that crafted the heart, mind, and wisdom of Jack Spong.
In The End, Consider These Things
So what is it Jack leaves for us to consider with respect to prayer? It is these things: a call to refuse easy definitions or the pat answers that protect them; that prayer is an act of love so essential that it cannot be compromised, trivialized, or refused, even if we reject its primal Christian nature; that it is best uttered, heard, experienced, and known in the space shared by two people when they refuse to ignore imminent truths needing to be both offered and received; and the cruel truth that the number of prayers refused will only ever tally exponentially higher than those prayers we might claim to have been answered.
Jack’s inimitable style, his deep wisdom, and his uncompromising commitments to both scripture and the Christianity that has evolved from it, have captivated us for decades. In this, his last book and in his final lectures, given on these most important theses, Jack did what he has always done: he handed us the truths we must face and leaves us to that task. May we have the courage and fortitude to do so.
~Rev. Gretta Vosper
Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.
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[1] For With or Without God : Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe, I conjured this acronym to refer to the position taken by those who believe the Bible is The Authoritative Word of God For All Time. I broke into laughter when, descending from a plane to meet someone I might not recognize, I read TAWOGFAT on a sign being held up at the bottom of the stairs!
[2] I am now six years past that diagnosis and surgery. In other words, I am in that 15%. And so every year, I walk in the OneWalk and raise funds for Princess Margaret Hospital’s Cancer Research Foundation. By the end of this year’s walk, I will have raised over $16,000.
Question & Answer
Q: By JB
If you were going to lead a retreat on the Bible (focusing on its origins and purpose), what questions would you find valuable to address?
A: By Rev. David M. Felten
Dear JB,
One of the best methods I’ve found for starting a conversation about the origins and “purpose” of the Bible (especially for those steeped in a more literal/inerrant understanding) is some comparative reading.
Step 1: Divide the group in half and assign group one the reading of the Creation story in Genesis 1. Assign group two the reading of Genesis 2’s story. Have them write down the order of events, the main characters, observations about the environment, important dialog, etc. Each group needs to focus on their story – not letting assumptions from their familiarity with both stories cloud their objective review of their particular text.
Step 2: Bring the groups back together and have a spokesperson share what they discovered. On a flipchart or whiteboard, write out the order of events, characters, observations, etc.
Step 3: Walk folks through the obvious: that these are very different stories with different authors and different agendas describing the “same” event in wildly divergent ways – and they’re NOT sequential. Nor are they able to be synthesized into one story. The first story goes from “wet to dry” (a hurricane at night through to a resolution). The second story goes from “dry to wet” (a terrible drought through to a resolution). This is a good place to talk about the different authors of the Pentateuch, their political agendas, and their theological outlook. For most folks in the pew this is new information. Just be honest with people and field their questions. I’ve found that when people discover this kind of thing on their own, guided by someone who assures them that it’s OK to question and re-organize one’s world-view, it makes a profound impression. And yes, it creates psychological mayhem for some – but a mayhem necessary to break out of the stage of what Marcus Borg called “pre-critical naïveté.”
Step 4: Once through the initial conversation, you can share with them more of the clues that critical thinking reveals when reading the text. I especially like showing how Genesis 1 is as much a propaganda piece as anything. Note how the story (written during or soon after the Babylonia captivity?) dismisses the Babylonians by throwing shade on their “sun god,” Marduk. Yahweh is clearly a more powerful deity because Yahweh creates light independent of the sun (one of Marduk’s primary domains). After that, the obviously superior Jewish divinity doesn’t even get around to creating the sun (Marduk’s representation) until day four. Ouch!
Genesis 1 also contributes to ending the old misogynist argument from Genesis 2 that Eve was somehow an afterthought created from Adam. In Genesis 1, men and women are created at the same time – and as equals. Also, ask your participants to note the humor in the stories. For instance: when Adam is lonely, he asks for a companion. But, duh, God gives him the Aardvark (yes, apparently God is just that dense). According to the rabbis, it’s supposed to be funny, but Christians just take it all too seriously.
Step 5: Then you can talk about how these are stories, not history – and their meaning is much deeper than just an account of what happened. They are origin stories from two very different times in Jewish history that have different sources and different purposes. And neither of them were ever intending to be accounts of “how” it happened (which seems to be the fixation of so many). Instead, they’re about the “why” of existence, relationship with the Divine, and purpose of life. This is a good place to remind people that 70% of what we have record of Jesus saying was fiction – stories told to make a broader point.
Anyway, this should not only be plenty of fodder for conversation about the Bible but also an opportunity to foster the spiritual discipline of critical thinking. Depending on how long you have, you could also analyze the two flood stories, the Jesus birth narratives, or the resurrection stories in the same way. That should get some conversation going.
For reference, the Genesis creation stories are also broken down pretty clearly in (shameless plug) Jeff Procter-Murphy and my book, Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity.
~ Rev. David M. Felten
Click here to read and share online
About the Author
Rev. David M. 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.
Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Virgin in the New Testament - Part 2
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on December 21, 2005
Last week we looked at the New Testament’s portrait of the mother of Jesus and the Virgin Birth. It is scant, late developing material filled with mythological details. That quick analysis served to make us aware that most of the images we hold of the mother of Jesus are not biblical at all. They are the creations of Christian history and they incorporate many elements of the pagan goddess figures that thrived in Europe before Christianity became the dominant religion of that region. Whether Christianity conquered these pagan ideas or was conquered by them is a debate that is ongoing. What can be said without fear or contradiction is that the Bible as we know it does not support the myth of the Virgin as it was developed in Christian history.
Today I trace the development of that myth very briefly. (If my readers want more details, I commend to their attention the book, “Alone of All Her Sex” by a Roman Catholic scholar named Marina Warner.) Once Mary had been introduced as a virgin, first in Matthew in the mid-eighties and later in Luke, the doors were opened for the legends of the ages to be added to the Mary of history about whom almost nothing was known. By the second century, the development of legends about the mother of Jesus moved into high gear.
Step number one was to change Mary from the simple Virgin Mother into a permanent or perpetual virgin. The passion to accomplish this was motivated primarily by negativity toward the body of women in general and toward women’s role in reproduction in particular. The sacred womb of Mary, the ‘fathers’ argued, having been dedicated to the purpose of bearing the Holy Christ Child, could not have been polluted by other births for that would imply other sexual activity. Since both sex and childbirth were somehow “unclean,” neither could be thought of as activities in which the mother of Jesus ever engaged. By this time, Christianity had moved substantially out of Judaism and into the Gentile, Mediterranean world where dualistic, neo-platonistic thought was dominant. The neo-Platonists divided the world into a spiritual realm of mind, soul, purity and God, all of which they believed to be good, and a physical realm of body, flesh, desire and humanity, all of which they believed to be evil. In this era, human life appears to have been divided somewhere near the diaphragm. Everything that involved parts of the body above the diaphragm was thought to be positive, while everything that required the use of body parts below the diaphragm was negative. The pure Virgin Mother could not therefore have been tainted with sex, desire or childbirth once her lofty purpose of being the “theotokus,” the “Mother of God” had been achieved. This meant of course that the biblical story had either to be adapted or changed. Matthew had said that Joseph “knew her not” until she had delivered the Christ Child. Matthew’s presumption was that after that he “knew her” in the intimacy that a wife shares with her husband. Imaginative re-interpretations were developed to cover this.
Then James, the brother of Jesus, mentioned by Paul (Gal.1: 19), the named brothers of Jesus – James, Joses, Simon and Judas – and his unnamed sisters, all of whom are referred to in Mark (6:3), had to be dealt with in some explanatory way. Under pressure from this developing tradition, these siblings became “cousins,” or Joseph’s children by a previous marriage. Some also suggested that they were brothers and sisters only in the sense that someone might address friends as “my brothers and sisters.” It was hard work to amend reality but the ‘Fathers’ of the church were up to the challenge and the permanent or perpetual virginity of the blessed Virgin entered history. This permanent virgin then began to be referred to as the ideal woman. No one stopped to ask the obvious question, namely to whom is a perpetual virgin an ideal woman? The answer is clear, only to the celibate males who were guiding this theological development. By this time the celibate male priesthood had become the dominant pattern of the church’s clergy.
The build-up of the Virgin did not stop here. In the early middle ages a new passion developed to suggest that even the process of Jesus’ birth did not compromise the virginity of this holy mother of God. That is, despite the birth of Jesus, her virginity was still intact, the sacred hymen was not ruptured. Stories began to circulate that perhaps Jesus was born out of Mary’s ear. The ‘Fathers’ of the church began to search the scriptures to find biblical authority to support this claim. Not surprisingly they found it but in rather bizarre places. In the prophet Ezekiel (44:1), a book dating from the 6th century B.C.E., the words were written, “Behold, the gates of the city are closed and only the Lord can come in and out.” Without so much as an apology, these “defenders of the faith” pointed to this text and proclaimed that even the prophets had predicted the post-partum virginity of the Blessed Virgin. To call such a treatment of this text from the Hebrew Scriptures biblical scholarship is both absurd and incompetent. That fact, however, did not stop or hinder these Christian zealots, for biblical scholarship was not a major concern of the medieval church. Church leaders had long before this begun to treat the Bible as the literal word of God and they believed it was full of divine hints and predictions that were literally fulfilled in history.
The second text they used to ground this new post-partum development in scripture was from the resurrection narrative in John’s Gospel (chapter 20). In that story the risen Christ had appeared to the disciples inside a locked and barred upper room. If the risen Christ could pass through the walls of that upper room without breaking the material out of which they were constructed, these leaders of the church declared, could not the infant Jesus also pass through the birth canal without disturbing the sacred hymen? With these tactics, it was not long before the post-partum virginity of the blessed Virgin became fixed in Christian doctrine and tradition.
The next stage in the myth’s development came when the Vatican declared that the immaculate conception of the blessed virgin was now dogma to be believed by the faithful. That proclamation came in December 1854. This idea, so often incorrectly confused with the Virgin Birth, states that Mary herself was born without the contamination of the fall into sin that was assumed to be the status of all who were children of Adam and Eve. The womb of Mary’s mother was miraculously purified so that Mary was born without taint of original sin. This clarification had been unnecessary until people in the early 18th century began to understand the role of women in reproduction. Prior to the discovery of an egg cell in the woman, from which the offspring received 50% of his or her genetic code, it was assumed that the whole life of the baby existed in the sperm of the male who planted it into the womb of the woman. The woman nurtured the male seed to maturity just as Mother Earth nurtured the farmer’s seed to maturity. Since the woman contributed nothing but the warmth of her womb, the original sin could be passed on only through the male. The Virgin Birth, which removed the human father from the birth equation, was thought to have guaranteed that Jesus was ‘born without sin.’ The discovery of the egg cell and the woman’s role in reproduction suddenly challenged that understanding. The woman was a child of Adam too. She was, therefore, also the bearer of the corruption of humanity, which was inevitably passed on to her offspring. Something had to be done to repair this breach in orthodoxy. To give Mary a miraculous birth, an immaculate conception, in which she was not corrupted by the fall into original sin, was the answer. Mary’s birth was now not human. Her rise to divinity was on the way.
The final step in this historic drama occurred in 1950 when Pope Pius XII declared the Virgin to have been bodily assumed into heaven. This meant that Mary did not go through the normal exit door of death to escape this world. She was transformed, this new dogma declared, or she went from earth to heaven without dying. There were other narratives in the biblical story that suggested such a possibility. One was the story of Enoch, who according to the book of Genesis (5:24), “walked with God and he was not for God took him.” Another was Elijah who was transported from earth to heaven by a magical fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses. As part of the official apologetic from the church, the argument was developed that the virgin’s visionary appearances to people at places like Lourdes demonstrated her bodily assumption, for that enabled her to appear regularly to her faithful on earth.
It was a fascinating process to watch. Holiness for the ideal woman was achieved first, by de-sexing her, that is she was a virgin mother, perpetual virgin and post-partum virgin, and then by dehumanizing her, that is by asserting that she had neither a normal birth nor a normal death. Only as a de-sexed and dehumanized woman was she then considered to be worthy to enter into heaven. The question this raises for me is what is the definition of a woman, alive in this religious tradition, that suggests that before a woman is worthy to enter into God’s presence, she must first have her sexuality removed and then have her humanity removed. The other question that cannot be ignored is what does it do to women to be told that the ideal woman is a virgin mother? Since that is not a possibility for any other woman, does that definition not make the ‘guilt of inadequacy’ the daily bread of women in Christian history?
I submit that both of these ideas reflect the historic negativity that
religion seems to harbor against women. One wonders just why it is that an all male institution has the right to define a woman in the name of a God called ‘father.’ The time has come to recognize prejudice for what it is and to invite women to define what a woman is without any pejorative undertones. The Church will not be whole until that happens. The Virgin Mary, as she is presently defined, will also not survive as an icon when that occurs.
~ John Shelby Spong
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Spirituality and Bereavement
This six-week online seminar will take place from September 12 to October 17, on Wednesdays, from 4:30 – 6:30 pm PST.
Engage in group discussion and experiential processes related to:
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* Interactive group exercises and group rituals
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