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Charting the New Reformation,
Part II - The Burning Necessity
The Bible is not the “word of God!” It never has been. No one who has ever read the Bible in its entirety could possibly defend that suggestion. This bizarre and irrational idea was rather imposed upon this ancient text long after its books had been written, collected and bound together as a single volume. In its original form, the Bible is a chronicle of the history of a particular tribe or people as they journeyed in time trying to make sense out of their life and of their God. Its pages are filled with mythic legends, memories, folk tales and the story telling tradition of the Middle East. It is a strange but real fact that many people in the Christian world, who still treasure the Bible’s words, have never heard these facts stated before in their churches.
All the authors of the books of the Bible made assumptions that were common to people living between 1000 BCE and 140 CE, which appear to be the dates during which the books of the Bible were written. Many, perhaps most, of those assumptions cannot be made by people living in the world of expanded knowledge available to us today. This makes understanding the Bible, or sometimes even treating its literal words with reverence, quite difficult.
If the Bible is not the word of God then what does one make of the creeds, adopted by the Christian Church, in the 4th century? How does one relate to the various doctrines and dogmas that grew out of the creeds to form what came to be called the “Faith of the Church?” All creeds and doctrinal beliefs were said to rest on the authority of the Bible. Claims were then made for these beliefs that the truth of God had been captured in these time-bound human forms. It was the same circular argument made earlier for the Bible being “the word of God.” Such a system may well have offered security, but it did not offer accuracy. Throughout history, these claims to possess the ultimate truth of God were defended with a vehemence, which normally reveals hysteria covering doubt and insecurity, far more than conviction. Those who challenged the claims of the Bible’s literal accuracy were called “heretics” and not a few of them were burned at the stake during a period in the 14th century called “the Inquisition.”
In the 16th century, the authority of the church could no longer hold the minds of men and women in positions of obedience, so a rigorous challenge to this religious system arose for the first time. It was called “the Reformation.” During this time, the peace and security of Europe were shattered. The unifying truth by which its people and its institutions had lived was broken. Ancient claims of authority were overturned. Wars were fought seeking to restore the old order. One thinks of the storm-tossed sinking at sea of the Armada from Catholic Spain in 1588 on its way to force Protestant England back under the authority of the Pope. One thinks of the Thirty Years’ War during which each side tried to force the other into either the old way of life or into the new way of life. It was a time of enormous upheaval.
All of these things being so, it is hard to recognize what is actually a fact, namely that the Reformation of the 16th century, as this movement was called, when reviewed in retrospect was not about the substance of the Christian story, nearly so much as it was about who had the authority to interpret this story. When the smoke of the Reformation’s struggle finally cleared away, to the surprise of many, both Protestants and Catholics still read the same Bible, still recited the same creeds, still worshiped in liturgies that, although different in emphasis, would still have been recognized on both sides of the Christian divide as similar. The Reformation of the 16th century thus ultimately gave us a change of form not a change of substance.
Following that Reformation, the years rolled on and human knowledge exploded, cracking assumption after assumption made in the pre-modern world. First, there was a Polish monk named Nicolaus Copernicus, whose studies shattered the image of the earth as the center of a three-tiered universe, which also assumed that God who dwelled just above the sky, always looking down, always recording in the book of life the good deeds and the misdeeds of each person. The promise of reward with God in heaven or punishment from God in hell after this life constituted the central linchpin of a well-ordered human society. When that pin was pulled the whole frame of reference in the medieval world began to shake. Galileo then built on Copernicus’ work, making it far too public to be ignored. So it was Galileo, not Copernicus, who was put on trial for his views. He was spared from the stake by what was surely a plea bargain. Galileo publicly renounced his own conclusions, agreed not to write about those things again and accepted house arrest for the balance of his days. Ultimately, however, people learned that truth, even inconvenient truth, cannot be repressed forever. In 1991, the Vatican issued a paper indicating that they now believed Galileo was correct. It was a surrender to reality, but not a very timely one. Although it was now a fact that both the Bible and the creeds made the now discredited, pre-Galileo assumptions, no one seemed eager to address the reality of their irrelevance. Galileo had destroyed God’s dwelling place in the universe above the sky, rendering God “homeless.” God’s reality immediately began to fade in human consciousness.
Isaac Newton followed Galileo by introducing us to what came to be called the “laws of nature,” according to which the world operated with mathematical precision. Our expanding universe turned out to be ordered, not capricious. The result of this discovery was that the arena in which God was believed to operate, with the supernatural powers of miracle and magic, began to shrink. Most of what we once thought that God did, like direct the weather patterns and cure the sick, we began to explain with no reference to God at all. Isaac Newton had curtailed God’s activity and in the process rendered God “unemployed.” Yet Christians continued to pray to God for divine intervention and to read the Bible’s stories of miracles as if they were literally true.
Next, Charles Darwin changed the way we understood human origins. He asserted that there was no original perfection from which human beings had fallen into what the church called “original sin.” That realization also immediately meant that the way Christians told the Christ story no longer made sense. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, nor can one be restored to a status one has never possessed. The Christian story was visibly unraveling.
Then, Sigmund Freud came along to suggest that God might be little more than a parental authority figure projected into the sky and that the role God actually served was to keep human life in a perpetual state of child-like immaturity. This insight was followed by many other voices that forced our world to face a whole new way of thinking. One thinks of Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Nils Bohr, and Stephen Hawking as examples. We began to understand that “eternal truth,” packaged in human words, no matter how ancient or how venerable, no longer appeared to be something that we possessed. Yet inside the Christian church during this revolutionary time in which human knowledge was literally exploding, the church continued to pretend that the Bible, the creeds, the doctrines and the dogmas of the Christian Church remained inviolate, unchallenged and unchanged. The result was that Christians were taught to develop a bifurcated mind in which the symbols of our faith story were no longer connected with the human experience.
Some people responded to this realization by closing their minds to new truth, even denying its existence. We call them fundamentalists and they come in both a Protestant and Catholic form. Other people, and increasingly this tended to be a generational thing, decided that the religious system of yesterday no longer spoke to them in any relevant way and so they began to walk away from the faith of their fathers and mothers in droves, to take up citizenship in what Harvard’s Harvey Cox called “the Secular City.” This was best symbolized to me when my daughter, Jaquelin, who owns a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University, said to me: “Dad, the questions the church spends its time answering are not questions we even ask anymore.” That was when I knew that the only hope for the continued life of the Christian faith was to launch a new Reformation, one that will deal with substantive not peripheral authority issues. The new Reformation must deal with every ancient formulary of the Christian tradition: the Bible, the creeds, the doctrines, the dogmas and the liturgy. Everything must be on the table for debate. Every sacred symbol must be opened to radically new possibilities. The “faith once delivered to the saints” must now be subjected to a radical revision. Can Christianity stand the shock of such an enterprise? That is not yet clear. What is clear, however, is that Christianity, unchallenged and unchanged, will not survive. The heart will not long worship what the mind rejects.
So this driving necessity lies before this generation of Christians. We are the ones who are called to rethink and to reformulate our basic understanding of God, of Christ and of all that seems to follow from those two things. I suspect this effort will not be appreciated by those who have not yet felt the jolting dislocation between the language of worship and the language of the 21st century. I suspect that many of those who might respond to and appreciate this initiative have already left involvement in the Christian faith. I do not know if they can be reached and encouraged to return. I only know that Christianity must change or die!
So I am ready for the Reformation to begin. Next week I will post on the Web twelve theses that I believe must be addressed and debated if we are to build a “New Christianity for a New World.” I know that I, like Luther, am not an uninvolved critic. I am a committed and unashamed Christian. I seek to bring my head and my heart together in a new act of devotion. So let the Reformation begin.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Gwen Wills of Cornwall, UK, writes:
Question:
It was a delight to attend your lectures and to meet you in Glasgow, Scotland, two years ago when you talked about your book The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I bought the book (which you kindly signed) and I have now read it twice. I have found it an enlightening read; it has at last helped me to make some sense of St. John’s gospel. However, although your suggestion that many of the characters in this gospel were not actually real people of history, but rather were invented by the gospel writer to put across his point not only seems feasible, but convincing, but how can this be so for the character of Judas? Although he is not specifically mentioned in the writings of Paul, he certainly is mentioned by name in the Synoptic Gospels, which pre-date John. This being so, how could he be a character invented by John? John may have added details about him not mentioned in the synoptics, possibly for his own literary purposes, but the name and general character of Judas surely pre-dates John and that therefore he can’t possibly be “invented.” I would be grateful for your comments.
Answer:
Dear Gwen,
Thank you for your letter. Both Christine and I loved being at those courageous, dynamic Presbyterian Churches in the Glasgow suburbs. I thought both pastors were just terrific.
I’m glad you have found my book on John helpful, but I fear you have misunderstood what I said in that book about Judas. I do not think that Judas was created by the Fourth Gospel writer. Rather he enters the Christian tradition in Mark in the early years of the 8th decade. His story does grow from its introduction in Mark to its final references in the Fourth Gospel. The issue I was raising was whether the figure of Judas was actually a person of history when he entered Mark’s story. My study has led me to the conclusion that Judas was an invention of the early Christian community deliberately created to shift the blame for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews. That would make him a symbol not a person. Let me share the things that led me to this conclusion, which was a startling one to reach. I remember being surprised by it.
I was first introduced to this possibility when I discovered that Paul had obviously had never heard of the story of the betrayal by Judas. Paul refers to “the Twelve” but he does not name them. He does refer to the “Pillars” of the Church in Jerusalem and calls them by the names, Peter or Cephas, John and James. The James to whom Paul refers appears not to be James, the son of Zebedee, but James, the brother of the Lord. Paul does use the word “betray” in (I Corinthians 11), but there is no hint that the “betrayal” was at the hands of one of the Twelve. On the third day following the crucifixion, Paul says, in I Corinthians: 15, the raised Christ appeared “to the Twelve.” In Paul’s mind, there had been no defection on the part of a traitor. It seems obvious to me that Paul could not have escaped hearing about one of the Twelve being the betrayer if it had really happened.
The name of Judas is another clue. If the traitor is given the same name as the nation, whose leaders were at that time in the process of excommunicating the followers of Jesus from the synagogue, I think we should be suspicious. In the gospels, Judas is the Jewish figure who turns the blame of the crucifixion away from the Romans and toward the Jews. The greatest debate in the first century both before and during the time when the gospels were being written was whether the followers of Jesus would be allowed to continue to be members of the synagogue and as a corollary, whether the synagogues would be open to receive Gentile Christians as members without them having to become Jews. These battles resonated throughout the gospels. As these debates raged we note that Judas grows darker and darker between Mark and John (70-100), while Pilate and the Romans grow more and more sympathetic.
Mark introduces the kiss of the traitor and is the first to set the moment of betrayal at midnight. Matthew introduces into the story the price of “30 pieces of silver,” the repentance by Judas and his attempt to return the money, as well as the story of Judas hanging himself. Each of these elements can be shown to have been part of previous traitor stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. Judas begins to look like a composite of all the Jewish traitor stories in the Bible.
Judas is mentioned in all four gospels. My argument in The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic is that the Johannine characters who appears nowhere else in the Christian tradition are John’s own literary creations. The list includes Nathanial, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman at the well, the man crippled for 38 years, the man born blind, the figure of Lazarus raised from the dead and John’s special hero, the nameless member of the Twelve known only as “the disciple Jesus loved.”
John also, I stated clearly, has a category of characters familiar to the Christian tradition like: the mother of Jesus, Andrew, Thomas, Philip and yes, Judas, to whom he gives what can only be described as “makeovers.” Thomas, for example, is a name on the list of the Twelve in Mark, but he becomes “doubting Thomas” in John.
The mother of Jesus in John is never connected with the story of Jesus’ birth and is never referred to as a virgin. In John’s gospel, she appears twice; once in the changing of water into wine story and once at the foot of the cross in the company of the “beloved disciple.” There was obviously a woman, a person of history, who was the mother of Jesus. No one enters the world without a mother. The idea, however, that she was at the wedding in Cana of Galilee when water was supposedly turned into wine, or that she was actually at the foot of the cross when Jesus was being crucified, are elements that come into the Christian story only in the 10th decade. Judas, on the other hand, came into the Christian story in the 8th decade, no earlier. He was, I am suggesting, Mark’s creation to which each successive gospel writer added more details.
Studying the Bible is not a simple process. That is why biblical fundamentalism is, in the last analysis, based on little more than religious and sometimes hysterical ignorance.
~John Shelby Spong
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