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Engaging the Established Presbyterian Church of Scotland
“Resurrection-Denying Preacher to Return to Scotland.” That was the headline of a story published in the Glasgow Herald about a week before I was scheduled to lecture in the Cairns Church in Milngavie, a constituent member of the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Senior Pastor of that church, the Rev. Andrew Frater, together with his colleague, the Rev, Chris Vermeulen, a pastor in nearby Largs, had invited me to speak in Scotland on two previous occasions in recent years. I was excited about the quality of their ministries and eager to return.
The country of Scotland, my mother’s ancestral home, has always been a favorite place of mine. The former primus of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, the Rt. Rev. Richard Holloway, was probably my closest colleague among all of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. We stood together in those arenas of debate, which defined our church in the latter years of the twentieth century. We fought for establishing biblical and theological scholarship in our communion, and for forcing our church to embrace those whom this church had once denigrated: people of color, women and the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender community.
On previous visits to Scotland, I have endured shouts from the audience in denial of the things I was saying, coming from evangelical and fundamentalist members of the theological faculty of the established Church of Scotland. I have had my lectures picketed by placard-carrying protesters, who handed out flyers quoting verses in the Bible, which were supposed to prove that I was clearly wrong about most everything. On one occasion, fundamentalist protesters used their cars to block the streets leading to the parish church where my lectures were to be held. Despite this negative activity, the crowds coming to listen were impressively large. In time, a Scottish version of something in the United Kingdom known as the Progressive Christian Network had developed a strong presence in this beautiful land of lochs and mountains. So we have returned again and again to Scotland under the aegis of that organization. The Glasgow Herald, aware of this history, and bowing to the negativity of my critics, headlined their story, as noted earlier, in a way as to guarantee controversy. It succeeded and by the time I arrived a full scale debate was raging in the “Letters to the Editor” section in that newspaper. My visit had become the talk of the town, creating amazing advertising for my lecture.
Most of the newspaper’s hostile letters were signed by people who called themselves “The Reverend.” These clerics saw themselves as defenders of the revealed and unchanging truth of God, which was held in pristine purity by these pastors. They suggested in print that the human hope for life after death depended on the literal accuracy of the physical resurrection of Jesus. The Rev. Andrew Frater, my host, had responded to these outbursts with his own letter explaining that biblical language is inevitably metaphorical, since it is trying to describe a realm that is beyond time and space by which human words are inevitably bound. That only elicited another outraged clerical response that the “resurrection of Jesus was a fact not a metaphor!” Understanding what Andrew Frater was saying was clearly difficult for these clergy.
When the days for the two scheduled lectures arrived, however, there were no picketers, but the attending crowds were 40% larger than had been previously expected. Public controversy may be unpleasant, but it has the effect of making people think that there just might be something more to this Christian story than they had once thought. Controversy piques curiosity and encourages attendance. It should not be avoided. Some of my critics in the past have actually suggested that I paid picketers to show up at my lectures and even that I had written the critical “Letters to the Editor” to hype the crowd. At the very least these responses made it clear that my critics recognized that their tactics had worked in my favor not theirs.
I found the two inviting pastors, Andrew Frater and Chris Vermeulen, to be enormously gifted men, pastorally sensitive, intellectually open, well trained, courageous and completely prepared. They are exactly the kind of leaders the church must develop if we want to transform the future. They are serving churches that are islands of hope in a sea of religious negativity. In the process they have drawn to themselves congregations of thinking people, who yearn to be Christians, but who cannot turn their brains back to the 4th century, when the Christian creeds were developed, or to the 13th century when most of our liturgical patterns were born. Their two congregations are aware of the issues the church faces in our generation because these pastors are not only good teachers, but they are also conversant with the developments in biblical scholarship over the last 200-250 years. The people who attend their churches seek new ways of viewing the Christian story. In the process of doing this, however, they have inevitably threatened those in their hierarchies and among their fellow clergy, who fancy themselves as defenders of the literal Bible and of the ecclesiastical status quo. These modern day literalists are clearly the direct descendants of that group of Presbyterian ministers identified with the Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, who published between 1910 and 1915 a series of tracts that came to be called “The Fundamentals.” Financed in their efforts by the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) these tracts circled the globe in the cause that came to be called Biblical Fundamentalism. They attacked “modernism” in general and Charles Darwin in particular. If evolution proved to be true, they argued, then Christianity would not survive. I believe they were correct in that assessment, but only if Christianity was forced to live inside the boundaries with which they were comfortable. Many of the clergy of the Scottish National (Presbyterian) Church reflect the same mentality and seem to be engaged in the same battles. Many of them have also been trained in the rigidly fundamentalist enclave known as the Theological School of the University of Aberdeen.
The world, however, was not created in seven days in the year 4004 BC as James Ussher, a fundamentalist Irish Archbishop, had stated at the end of his elaborate biblical calculation. The world was also not created in a state of perfection only to be plunged into sin by the disobedience of the first human beings in the Garden of Eden. If Darwin was correct, as he indeed is universally recognized to be in academic circles, then there never was an original perfection from which human life could fall. If there was no original perfection, then there could not be something called “original sin.” If there was no original sin, then there was no need to be rescued from a fall that never happened. So the need for God to mount the rescue operation, which involved Jesus paying the rescue price with his death on the cross, becomes a strange, bizarre and inoperative idea. The Christian mantra “Jesus died for my sins” would immediately become both crude and non-sensical. The traditional way of telling the Christian story would thus be destroyed. These were the things that threatened not only the fundamentalists of the early years of the 20th century, but also these Scottish evangelicals in 2015. Look back for a moment at the “Five Fundamentals” written between 1910 and 1915, which these “Tractarians” held to be inviolable. Not one of them is defended in academic Christian circles today, at least not in the literal form in which they were proposed. The five principles, which they said had to be believed for one to be a Christian were: 1. The Deity of Christ; 2. The Virgin Birth; 3. The Blood Atonement; 4.The Bodily Resurrection; and 5. The Inerrancy of Scripture.
In trying to find a way to say that the holy God has been met in Jesus, that in some way human life could not produce what we experienced in Jesus, that he broke every barrier that binds us into being less than we can be and that the Bible points us to a realm and an understanding that human words can never capture, the Christian churches of today seek to maintain the truth of Christ through the medium of modern words and contemporary scholarship. No matter how hard we try we cannot live in another world or make assumptions that we know today are wrong. That is what I sought to communicate in Glasgow, and that is what my two host clergy are about in their growing congregations. That is also where the future of Christianity is located. The world has not fallen. No one is born in sin. Jesus was not God’s rescue operation. The virgin birth is not biology. The resurrection of Jesus is not physical resuscitation to one’s previous biological life, from which inevitably one must someday die again. Jesus did not return to God by ascending into the sky of a three tiered universe. Christianity is so much more than these affirmation would ever understand.
I lectured in the Glasgow area out of this kind of scholarship. The response was incredible. There is a hunger in the world for a Christianity that has intellectual integrity. Until that kind of integrity is proclaimed without fear from the pulpits of our churches on an average Sunday morning, the statistical freefall which institutional Christianity has experienced in the past century will continue. The heart will never worship what the mind rejects. The process of hysterical denial will still be heard from those clergy and congregations that cannot embrace the world in which they live. Anti-intellectualism, however, will never be the wave of the future. Growth that comes from promising a security that no one can ever deliver is a cruel delusion. A few congregations and a cadre of courageous clergy in the Scottish National Presbyterian Church understand that and they are living it out with great integrity. They, not the traditionalists, are building a pathway on which Christianity can walk into tomorrow. I am pleased to know who the heroes are and to place my life alongside theirs.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Dale Gatz, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
In First Corinthians 15:3 Paul says, “He died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” While I believe the doctrine of substitutionary atonement has warped Christian teaching at least since St. Anselm. I see that this statement of Paul’s forms a reasonable basis for it.
What do you think Paul had in mind in writing these words?
Answer:
Dear Dale,
Yours is a good question. It is one that I will address at great length in my next book, scheduled to be published by Harper Collins on or about the first of March in 2016 (Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy-- A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew’s Gospel). People have tended to support the concept of substitutionary atonement by quoting these verses from Paul. That, however, is not what these verses meant or mean, but we almost have to be Jewish to understand the distinction.
For Paul these words, “He died for our sins,” came out of the liturgical celebration known as Yom Kippur. At Yom Kippur an animal, usually a lamb, was ceremoniously slaughtered and its blood smeared on the “Mercy Seat of God” located in the “Holy of Holies” in the Temple. The lamb was the symbol of the yearning of human beings for perfection and thus for oneness with God. The lamb, therefore, had to pass the test of physical perfection; no scratches, no bruises, no broken bones. Because the lamb also lived beneath the level of human freedom, it in addition began to be thought of as morally perfect. An animal cannot choose to do evil. So the sacrificial lamb became a symbol of the human yearning for both physical and moral perfection. It was not a substitute who accepted the fate of suffering for the sins of another.
Substitutionary atonement was built on this, largely Gentile, misunderstanding. It assumes a literal understanding of the biblical myth of the “fall” that we refer to as the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We began to assume an original perfection from which we have somehow fallen into a status of “original sin.” That is the background against which the Jesus story was destined and mistakenly to be told. Unable to extricate ourselves from this state of sin and unable to be forgiven without someone paying the price that our sinfulness required, meant that a substitute must pay this price for us. The substitute must not be a victim of the same fall into sin that corrupted us. So Jesus was offered as the only one who could play that role. Then it was said that God punished Jesus with the punishment that we deserved and that his suffering set us free. It was and is a strange theory.
It is also deeply destructive on many levels. Substitutionary atonement turns God into an ogre who cannot forgive. This is a deity who must have a human sacrifice and a blood offering in order to be moved to offer forgiveness. It turns Jesus into a passive victim, perhaps even a masochistic victim, who finds pleasure in pain. It turns you and me into guilt-filled, Christ killers since our sins caused the death of Jesus. It thus produced a Christianity in which God is seen as either a punishing parent or a hanging judge before whom we must fall on our knees like slaves or beggars and plead for mercy. This God was also thought to manipulate life and “goodness” by employing the tools of guilt and fear. This theology, no matter how traditional one thinks it is, in fact has lost sight of the essential goal of Christianity. That goal, which was articulated best in the Fourth Gospel, when its author had Jesus describe his purpose to be that of providing the means through which we can achieve life and achieve it abundantly. Guilt and fear have never resulted in expanded life for anyone, but love, acceptance and the overcoming of the boundaries which divide the human community do.
So the future of Christianity depends first on hearing the life-giving message of love that is the heart of the gospel and then transforming our various guilt-laden liturgies so that they too reflect this message. It also means that we will have to challenge traditional postures in worship. I, for example, never intend to kneel in church worship services again, for kneeling defines me, Jesus and God in ways that I now believe are not only wrong, but are actually destructive to the meaning of humanity itself.
Without these things rising to consciousness inside the Christian church, I do not believe that there will be or can be a Christian future. So I live more in hope than in confidence as I view the life of institutional Christianity in its various manifestations in our world.
~John Shelby Spong
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