An Open Letter to Ross Douthat, New York Times Columnist
Dear Ross,
A few weeks ago in an op-ed piece of the Sunday New York Times, you began your regular column with these words, “In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Bishop of Newark, published a book entitled, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure – during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition – but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last decade changing and then changing some more from a sedate pillar of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive bodies in the United States. As a result, the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians.”
I was quite honored that you gave me the credit that you did for influencing the history of my own church as well as yours. I was also intrigued by the image of Pope Benedict XVI holding back the tide of liberal reform in Roman Catholicism. Your column caused me to think of His Holiness standing on the shore trying to defend the land from the incoming tide. I also appreciate having my books referred to in a widely-read, highly-respected medium like the New York Times. As a direct result of your column, I have had interviews with other journalists from as far away as Poland. I want to express my thanks to you for opening those opportunities to me.
But, Ross, your column was profoundly uninformed about the developments in both biblical and theological scholarship over at least the last two hundred years. In a free country, anyone is able to put into the public arena his or her two cents worth on any subject, but if you really want to be part of the modern theological conversation, you do have some responsibility to do some basic research into the subject about which you choose to write. The fact that you so obviously did not do that has left you exposed as being little more than a frightened and uninformed man. You appear to mourn the fact that it is no longer the 13th century, that the world and the church are changing, and that “infallible” truth no longer appears to be infallible.
For example, only someone totally out of touch with the tides of history could seriously object to the fact that the Episcopal Church is no longer “a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment.” You seem to regard that as a virtue. I went to that kind of church when I was a child growing up in the Bible Belt of North Carolina. My church taught me that segregation was the will of God; that women were by nature inferior to men; that it was OK to hate other religions, especially the Jews, and that homosexuals were either mentally sick people, who ought to be cured or morally depraved people who ought to be forcibly converted and changed. The interesting thing is that on each of these issues, my church quoted their literal understanding of the Bible to justify those life-distorting prejudices. I suppose they skipped over Jesus’ invitation that says, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden.” At that time, we also sang hymns like “Just as I am without one plea, O Lamb of God, I come.” We quoted Jesus’ summary of the law that enjoins us “to Love our neighbors as ourselves” and when Jesus was asked to define the meaning of “neighbor” he is quoted as having responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which defines neighbor to include a “half breed, heretical” Samaritan, who was the object of the deepest, prevailing prejudice in first century Judaism So seeking to be true to this Jesus I rejoice that my Episcopal church today in North Carolina has elected a gifted African-American, Michael Curry, to be its bishop; that my church nationally has chosen a multi-talented woman, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, to be our Primate, and that my church has elected and ordained two openly-gay and well qualified bishops, Gene Robinson in New Hampshire and Mary Glasspool in Los Angeles, both of whom live with their partners in faithful committed partnerships. I also am pleased to note that when my church last revised our prayer book in 1979, we asked a panel of rabbis to go over it to assure us that no undetected anti-Semitism lay hidden in its words.
My church has also removed all prohibitions in the ordination process based on race, gender or sexual orientation. I celebrate these steps as steps into a new consciousness that refuses to denigrate or to marginalize any child of God on the basis of who he or she is. That says to me not that the church has somehow lost its way, but that it is hearing and engaging the gospel of Jesus Christ in dramatically new and life-giving ways. It is still breaking down barriers and making it clear that so much of what church people once called “sacred tradition” is little more than human sin perfumed by the pious pronouncements of would-be “holy” people. Those who continue to hold what you seem to believe are the “true” patterns of the past are not seeking the “Kingdom of God” nearly so much as they are trying to protect their own power and privilege. That is shamefully revealed to me when I see the leadership of your church, which you seem to see as virtuous, refusing to investigate and purge its culture of child abuse, but eager to launch an investigation of Catholic Nuns, who in the service of their people press for reforms in that male dominated institution.
When you charge, as you do, that I have “dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition,” you clearly reveal that your passion and fear are running far ahead of your knowledge and understanding. In the 17th century, the Christian Church forced Galileo to recant from his conclusion that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe. In 1991, the Vatican issued a formal paper declaring that they now believed that Galileo was correct. In the meantime, we human beings had begun not only to investigate, but even to travel in space. Would it be your preference that the Christian Church spend its time defending the indefensible or that we begin to engage the vast knowledge revolution that marks the modern world? When the Bible was written between 2000 and 3000 years ago anything its various authors did not understand, they defined as a miracle. As human knowledge has expanded, the arena in which miracles are claimed has shrunk to non-existence. The way we have traditionally told the Jesus story still assumes that there was originally a perfect creation from which we have fallen (into sin, that is “original sin”) and because we cannot rescue ourselves from that debilitating fall, God had to mount a rescue operation to “overcome the sin of the world.” This was accomplished, traditional voices assert, by Jesus who in his death somehow “paid the price” or broke the power of sin and thus restored us to our pre-fallen status of perfection that had been God’s original intention. Since death was conceived in the Bible, not as a natural stage in the course of all living things, but as punishment for the “fall,” it has also been said by traditional voices that Jesus broke the “unnatural” power of death at the first Easter.
Well, whether you and traditional church leaders like it or not, Ross, a man called Charles Darwin, writing as long ago as 1859, challenged that entire set of presuppositions very successfully. He demonstrated that there was no original perfect creation at the beginning, but an on-going and ever changing process of evolution. Given that fact there could have been no “fall” into “sin’ from a non-existent perfection. In the approximate 3.8 billion years that we believe life has been on this planet earth, we have moved from living single cells to complex, self-conscious living people. We cannot fall from a perfection we have never possessed, we cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened and we cannot be restored to a status that we have never possessed. Death, we now know, is a part of life. It is not punishment for the fall and the death of Jesus on the cross cannot break either the power of death or the power of sin under which the church has asserted that life is lived. We Christians can ignore these realities if we choose and become as irrelevant as traditional religious bodies have become in our generation. I, however, do not see that as a virtue as you seem to do. I think that this “new” knowledge requires that we Christians re-think and re-consider the explanations of our religious past and then re-cast the Jesus experience into language and concepts that do not require that we have to twist our brains into first century pretzels in order to worship God in the 21st century. That is not “dismissing almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition,” it is engaging our faith and our world in a new way.
To press this discussion a bit deeper, Ross, the Virgin Birth is not about biology. If it were, the 18th century discovery that women have an egg cell would render such stories as both inoperative and nonsensical. Resurrection is also not about bodily resuscitation, but about transformation. If you had ever studied Paul, or looked carefully at Mark you might know this.
No, Ross, I and others like me are deeply committed to the Christian faith, but we are also committed to escaping the literalistic nonsense of a pre-literate world. What we seek to do is to separate the experience of God in Jesus from the explanation of that experience that was formed in the first century. We seek to preserve that experience from literal absurdity by finding ways to talk about it in language that people living today might be able to hear.
This is not some effort to disturb the “faithful,” as you seem to assume, this is the work of a lifetime, the most important task of contemporary Christians. You seem, not only not to know these things, but not even to know that you do not know them. Denial of reality, even in the name of “traditional” Christianity, is never a doorway into the life of the future.
My best,
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online
here.
