May 2016 - OE - lists.wedgeblade.net

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by ICA International via OE 05 May '16

05 May '16

Enjoy catching up with what is happening in ICAs across the globe.....If you wish to SEND a report...send to your ICA contact person OR...go to the members section on the ICA International website Please click the link below for the May 2016 issue of the Global Buzz Global Buzz Report: May 2016 or copy and paste this URL into your browser's address bar http://globalbuzz.icai-archives.org/7dayreport-16/2016-05-01.php ICAI Communications

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5/05/16. Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XX - The 5th Thesis, Miracles (concluded)
by Ellie Stock via OE 05 May '16

05 May '16

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting a New Reformation Part XX - The #5th Thesis, Miracles (concluded) The nature miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospel tradition were not supernatural events that marked his life as divine. They were rather Moses stories interpretively wrapped around Jesus to proclaim that the God who was present in Moses was even more powerfully present in Jesus, the messiah. The stories in the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) about Jesus having the power to raise the dead are not historical happenings, they are Elijah and Elisha stories being wrapped around the memory of Jesus to proclaim that the God present in Elijah and Elisha was even more powerfully present in Jesus of Nazareth. They are not eyewitness accounts of historical events, they are interpretive portraits being painted of the messianic Jesus who, in the mind of his original Jewish disciples, was both the “New Moses” and the “New Elijah.” The popular and extensive list of healing narratives found in the gospels and attributed to Jesus are also not descriptions of supernatural events that actually happened. They are attempts to solidify the truth about Jesus as the messiah and to demonstrate the fact that the signs that were to accompany the breaking in of the Kingdom of God were in fact present in Jesus’ life. The claim was made that the wholeness, which the prophet Isaiah had said would mark the arrival of the Kingdom of God, was in fact present in the life of Jesus. In the Kingdom of God, Isaiah had proclaimed, the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the lame would walk and the mute would sing! So stories of these signs began to be wrapped about the memory of Jesus as they were more and more convinced that he was the expected messiah. These are not historical events but interpretive signs. Every Jewish reader of the gospels would have known this. Only those who were not Jewish and who were not aware of the place of the miracles in the Hebrew Scriptures would ever have thought of the miracles as literal events occurring in history. Matthew and Luke both related a story about John the Baptist that solidifies this conclusion and this interpretation of miracles. At a midpoint in both of their books, each of these gospel writers do what I call a flashback. They have both used the story of John the Baptist in his role as the forerunner of Jesus’ public ministry earlier in their narratives, indeed right after their stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth. Then as their gospel narratives moved on, John the Baptist faded into the background. Simultaneously the Jewish liturgical year had moved on, past the observances of Passover and Shavuot, to arrive at the fall festival called Rosh Hashanah or the New Year’s Day of the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashanah had been observed as the time the Jews prayed for God’s Kingdom to come, which meant that it was the time for welcoming the messiah. Over the centuries, the figure of Elijah began to be the face of the one announcing the coming of the messiah, so it was said that Elijah must come to prepare the way of the Lord. John the Baptist had been quite consciously identified by the followers of Jesus as the one who had played that role. That is why the first time John the Baptist appears in the New Testament (Mark 1:4) he was dressed in the garments identified with Elijah (camel’s hair and a leather girdle about his waist – Mark 1:6). He was located in the wilderness, i.e. the desert, which was the location of Elijah (Mark1:4) and he was given the diet of the wilderness to eat (locusts and wild honey), the diet of Elijah (Mark 1:6). The identification was thus complete. That was where Mark started his story; it was a narrative appropriate to Rosh Hashanah. Matthew and Luke, however, started their gospels about five months earlier just after the Passover so they were forced to introduce John much earlier to mark the inauguration of Jesus’ public career. So when they finally got around to Rosh Hashanah in their gospels, they needed a new John the Baptist story and a new way to identify Jesus as the messiah. A Cecil B. DeMille-like flashback was their answer. John, in prison before his execution, was said to have sent messengers to Jesus asking the messianic question, “Are you the one who should come or do we look for another?” In both Matthew and Luke, Jesus does not answer this question. Rather he tells these messengers to return to John the Baptist and to tell him what they see and hear. Then he quotes from Isaiah’s description of the signs that will mark the arrival of the Kingdom of God. That is the place where the healing miracles enter the story. Jesus gives sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to speak to those whose tongues were tied in muteness and the ability to walk to those with crippled or paralyzed limbs. That is how the healing miracles came to be added to the memory of Jesus. It was not because he had actually done these things, but because his disciples had come to understand him as the messiah. So miracles in the gospels were never intended to be objective events that rose supposedly out of Jesus’ divinity. The original Jewish readers would have understood this. Literalizing these narratives came as a result of an uninformed Gentile readership that did not understand Jewish symbols. This literalism would later be re-enforced in Christian art, which portrayed biblical events as if they were actual occurrences. So, upon deeper reflection, the miracles associated with Jesus in the gospels turn out to be magnified Moses stories, magnified Elijah and Elisha stories and prophetic signs drawn from Isaiah, which solidify the claims his followers were making for him by attaching to his life and memory the signs that would accompany the dawning of God’s Kingdom. This was not eyewitness history being recollected, it was Jewish biblical interpretation and portrait painting. The other list of supposed supernatural acts were recorded in John’s gospel as the “Book of Signs.” Five of these signs were quite similar to the miracles in the synoptic tradition (the feeding of the multitude, walking on water, the healing of a Gentile official’s child, the restoration of a cripple and giving sight to a blind man), but two of them do not fit into any previously discussed category. These two serve as bookends to his whole discussion of signs. The first is the story of Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee (John 2). The second is the story of Jesus raising from his grave the four-days-dead Lazarus (John 11). Clearly neither of these events happened in history. How do we know? Because there is no mention of them anywhere until 65-70 years after the crucifixion. Do you really suppose that someone at a public wedding could change water into wine or at a public funeral could call forth from his grave a person dead and buried for four days and no one would write about it for 65-70 years? Of course not! So these stories must have a different meaning that literal minds cannot understand. Surely the author of the Fourth Gospel was not deluded, nor did he claim that history was being described. When we examine closely the details of each story then the original alternate meanings begin to appear. The water that was transformed into wine story was, we are told, the water used in Jewish rites of purification. The wine into which this water was changed was the wine of the Christian Eucharist. The person who stood at the point of transition between the Jewish water and the Christian wine was the mother of Jesus. She was clearly the symbol of Judaism, which would give birth to Christianity, for that is what a mother does. In his gospel, John also creates another symbolic character to serve as “the ideal Christian” calling him the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” Later John would bring these two literary characters together at the foot of the cross. There he would have Jesus commend the symbol of Judaism, his mother, to the care of the symbol of Christianity, the Beloved Disciple. Then in a reciprocal command, he would charge the symbol of Christianity to care for the symbol of Judaism. To paraphrase Jesus he was made to say: “Judaism, the mother of Jesus, behold your child, Christianity.” Then to the Beloved Disciple, the symbol of Christianity, Jesus said: “behold, recognize your mother, Judaism.” It was a powerful sign not a literal event. The story of the raising of Lazarus was used by the author of the Fourth Gospel as the event on which Jesus would hang all of his teaching about both life after death and the meaning of resurrection. It was based not on an actual event, as biblical literalists inevitably claim, but rather on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, sometimes called Dives, which appears only in the gospel of Luke. In that parable, Lazarus, a poor beggar and Dives, a rich man both die. Lazarus goes to “the bosom of Abraham,” a uniquely Jewish conception of heaven. (Note-if I were going to spend eternity lying in someone’s bosom, I don’t think I would want it to be Abraham’s)! Dives goes to a place of torment. In his hell, Dives asks Abraham to have Lazarus bring him water. That is impossible, Abraham responds. You cannot get there from here. Then Dives asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers lest they too come to this place of torment. Abraham responds, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them heed them!” Dives persists, saying “but Father Abraham, if someone were to go to them from the dead they would repent.” To this Abraham gives his final word: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” What John has done is to historicize that Lucan parable and the result is exactly what Abraham in the parable said it would be. Lazarus returns. In John’s gospel it becomes not an occasion for the birth of faith, but the actual event that led to the crucifixion. The miracles are not events of history. They were never meant to be. They are symbols that the messiah, the new Moses and the new Elijah has come in Jesus. A new response is demanded. How badly warped have the texts of the gospels become by literalization. John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer The Rev. James Carpenter of Kerrville, Texas writes: Question: I am a 79-year-old retired minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Your books have been crucial to my spiritual odyssey and have positively shaped my faith. I would like your help with a question that seems to me to be fundamental to progressive Christianity. Like you, I, too, have been influenced by the writings of Bishop John A. T. Robinson of the Church of England. I can no longer remember the particular volume in which he made this point, but I have never forgotten what he said; he declared that the difference between humanism and Christian faith is this; Humanism says that Love ought to be the ruling principle of the universe, while the Christian faith affirms that, in Christ, we see that Love is the ruling principle of the universe. Or, in other words, in Christ God revealed that Love really is (not simply ought to be) the ruling principle of the universe. At that time, that statement was very reassuring to me. The older I get, however, the less I can believe that “love is the ruling principle of the universe.” It appears to me that there are three ways to view the universe’s attitude toward us human beings: (1) the universe is for us; (2) the universe is against us; or (3) the universe is indifferent to us. From my observation, I can only conclude that the universe is indifferent to us. As I see it, it is up to us humans to shape the world so that it is for us; it is up to us to make Love the guiding principle of life, and that is something that humanists and other people of good will can do, just as well as Christians can. I guess that leaves me wondering: Am I simply a non-theist or am I in fact an atheist? That is, am I simply a denier of the existence of a Supreme Being separate from the universe, or am I, in fact, a disbeliever in any “God” or “Higher Power” apart from us human beings? Am I a Christian or am I (just) a humanist? Answer: Dear James, First, thank you for your letter and for your ministry. I have been impressed with the leadership of the clergy I have met, who are part of the Disciples of Christ Church. I am grateful for that witness. Thank you also for bringing my friend and mentor, John A. T. Robinson, back into my awareness. My new book, just published in February of 2016 (Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy), was dedicated to my three greatest mentors. John A. T. Robinson was one of the three. If one defines God as an external being, as you appear to do, one must ascribe the power to change this world to this deity. The suggestion that “The universe is indifferent to us” results from the death of this theistic definition. If, however, God is experienced not as a supernatural, intervening deity, but as the “Ground of Being,” as well as the Source of Life and the Source of Love, an understanding of God developed in the 20th century by the German Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, then you need to ask whether being, living and loving themselves, are expressions of the nature of reality and thus of God. It is a very different approach. There is no evidence, of which I am aware, that God can or will calm the winds and rains of a hurricane to spare the people of New Orleans or stop the collision of tectonic plates beneath the seas to prevent an earthquake in Haiti. Since earthquakes are deemed to be the cause of tsunamis in other parts of the world, the same thing applies to them. In that sense both nature and the universe do indeed seem to be “indifferent” to life. If, however, we look into the heart of the universe, we find a bias toward life that is overwhelming. Without this bias, how could life have ever emerged out of lifeless matter? Next we look at every form of life from plants to trees to insects to reptiles and to mammals and we find every segment of life to be possessed by a drive to survive. To be alive is, by definition, to be survival-oriented. This reality has made it possible for life to have moved from a single cell at its birth some 3.8 billion years ago, to the self-conscious manifestation of complexity that human beings have become. An examination of the history of life will reveal the various stages through which life has traveled. We started as single cells and developed next into a composite of multi-cellular living things. Then this thing called life, divided into two major strains. One was called animate life and the other inanimate life. Then out of the animate side of life primitive forms of what we now recognize as consciousness appeared and began to grow. After hundreds of millions of years that thing called consciousness evolved into self-consciousness. In that journey through life, it is the presence of what we today call love that seems to have been the enhancer of life at every stage of our development, though that was not understood until self-consciousness appeared. Love, you see, is not always conscious. Sometimes it is instinctual behavior. Is it not love, however, that drives the bird from its nest in search of food for its young? Is it not love that moves a cat to lick the fur of a newborn kitten or a cow to lick the skin of a new born calf? Is it not love that enhances our humanity? Can anyone become human without love? So if God is the name of the power in the universe, guiding us to life, love and being and if God is manifested in us when we escape our limits and love beyond our fears, is God not present in who we are? Is God separate from our life, our love and our being? Is this not the God we see in the life of Jesus – the one who lived fully, loved wastefully and who had the courage to be all that he was meant to be? If God is “a being” separate from us, we have to develop words like “incarnation” to enable this divine “being” to enter human history. If, however, God is the Ground of Being, then God is part of all that is, this means that the divine comes to our awareness in the acts that enhance life, expand love and increase our capacity to be. So you, James, are quite correct to say it is up to us human beings to shape the world and to make love the guiding principle of life. In this process, you have moved experientially from God as “a being” to God as “Being itself.” Now all you need to do is to bring your theology into dialogue with your experience. An atheist is one who dismisses the theistic definition of God as inadequate; an atheist is not one who says that there is no God. That is a distinction that our language itself makes it difficult for us to see. The questions you need to ask, and indeed are asking, are these: “Can I be a non-theist and still be a believer in God? Can I be a non-theist and still be a Christian?” To both of those questions, I would respond with a vigorous Yes. It is too bad that the Christian Church in most of its institutional forms has never been able to talk about these things with any level of understanding. You have, and for this I am grateful! Live well!! John Shelby Spong Read and Share Online Here. Announcements Bishop Spong speaks at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Bangor, PA, June 10th - 12th, 2016. In this conference, as in the book by the same title, Bishop Spong will seek to recreate the original Christ experience that opens us to walk into a New Christianity, one that sees biblical fundamentalism as a Gentile heresy. For more information click Here.

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5/28/16, Spong: Charting a New Reformation, Part XIX - The 5th Thesis, Miracles (continued)
by Ellie Stock via OE 03 May '16

03 May '16

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting a New Reformation Part XIX - The 5th Thesis, Miracles (continued) “In a post-Newtonian world supernatural invasions of the natural order performed by either the eternal God or the “Incarnate Jesus” are simply not a viable explanation of what actually happened.” We have noted earlier that originally miracles did not appear to have been connected with the memory of Jesus. The first book to portray Jesus as a worker of miracles was the gospel of Mark, written in the early eighth decade or some forty-two years after the crucifixion. Matthew, the second gospel writer, who copied almost ninety percent of Mark into his ninth decade gospel, repeated every miracle that Mark had included, while adding only one other. Luke the third gospel writer heightens the note of the miraculous greatly in his late ninth to early tenth decade work. Luke’s story of the resurrection, for example, is far more supernatural than anything written prior to Luke. In Luke, the resurrected Jesus appears to be able to materialize into and to dematerialize out of thin air. In Luke, Jesus can also defy gravity and disappear into the sky as if propelled by an unseen rocket force. In the later development of these twelve theses, I will explore these heightened stories in regard to the resurrection and the ascension more fully. Suffice it now to limit myself to some general observations in regard to the presence of seemingly supernatural events. Once we recognize that miracle stories are a late-developing part of the Jesus tradition, we can look at them with greater objectivity. When we do, a number of things become obvious. First, we note that the miraculous elements in these stories grow as the stories are repeated in a later work. Second, we discover that frequently there are in the gospel miracle stories about Jesus, echoes of a narrative from the Hebrew Scriptures now being retold about Jesus. Third, each miracle story appears to have the interpretive purpose of relating Jesus to the expected messiah. These observations carry us deeper into the gospel texts and give us another way to view miracles other than to relate to them as the deeds being done by God in human disguise, which is the Christological lens through which so many traditional Christians view them today. The development of this kind of Christology, that is the study of the divine nature of Jesus, has grown rapidly over the centuries. In the Epistle to the Philippians, Paul spoke of God emptying the divine self into Jesus, but no one can seriously argue that Paul was talking about what later came to be called “incarnation.” Paul was not saying that the divine entered into and took over the human in the life of Jesus. This is made clear in other places in the Pauline corpus when Paul talks about God “designating” Jesus as “the Son of God by the action of the Holy Spirit” by raising Jesus from the dead (Romans 1:1-4). For Paul Jesus did not in and of himself “rise” from the dead. God raised him! If God can designate and “raise” Jesus, then clearly this is not a description of co-equality. Paul was too deeply Jewish to entertain Trinitarian thinking. Mark also appears not to be a Trinitarian. At the beginning of his gospel Mark describes Jesus as a fully human, adult male who comes to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. It is in that baptismal act, we are told, that God’s spirit infuses the human Jesus. Incarnational and Trinitarian thinking, this is not! In the later gospels of Matthew and Luke major steps are taken toward “incarnational and Trinitarian” thinking. Both added a virgin birth story to the memory of Jesus. God now enters Jesus at conception not at resurrection, as Paul had implied, or at his baptism, which Mark seemed to suggest. As the years go by the gospel miracles became less and less God acting through Jesus and more and more descriptive of Jesus acting on behalf of God. The creator of the world in human form could certainly make the winds and waves obey him. The divine Jesus could surely banish illness, which was thought of in the first century as God’s punishment of human beings for the sinfulness of their lives. The world in which this “divine Jesus” lived had not yet heard of germs, viruses, tumors, cholesterol, or of human cells expanding in a reckless and disorganized manner. Once those things were discovered, then prayers requesting the miracle of healing, or a sacrifice offered to appease the punishing deity, began to be seen as nonsensical. By the time the Fourth Gospel was written (95-100 CE), miracles had been transformed into “signs.” There is a difference. A miracle is defined as an objective event, which can be observed and documented. A sign is an event that points beyond itself to something that is mysterious and unseen, but not doubted. In the Fourth Gospel, John portrays Jesus as the author and originator of seven powerful signs, two of which are absolutely unique, having never been mentioned or even hinted at in the three earlier gospels. The first of these is the strange story of Jesus changing water into wine. The other is the dramatic story of Jesus calling forth from his burial place, the four-days-dead-and-buried Lazarus. This brief analysis drives us to ask: “Did any of these miraculous events really happen?” The answer to that question is, I now believe, a firm no. Does this mean that the gospel writers were telling us about things that never happened, or does it mean that we have literalized inappropriately the gospels for far too long? Earlier in this series, we traced the development of miracles in the entire Bible; they are not omnipresent. Biblical miracles only seem to occur in the cycles of stories that have gathered around the heroic figures in Jewish history. In particular, these figures focus on what might be called the “twin towers of Israel’s religious life,” the law and the prophets. Moses was the father of the law while Elijah was the father of the prophets. These are the major biblical figures around which miracle stories have gathered in Hebrew history. We also noted that these miracles occurred in the lives of Moses and Elijah’s immediate successors. It looks as if the miracles stories identified with Moses were then wrapped around Joshua, while the miracle stories originally identified with Elijah were then wrapped around Elisha. When we arrive at the Jesus story, we discover that Moses-Joshua stories have now been wrapped around Jesus. Like Moses, Jesus has power over nature. Moses could split the Red Sea, Jesus could calm the storm and walk on water. Moses could cause manna to fall in the wilderness to feed the hungry children of Israel, while Jesus, in another wilderness, could take a limited number of loaves and fishes and feed a multitude. Are not these gospel writers following an ancient Jewish story-telling tradition, to assert that the same God who was experienced as present in Moses was now clearly present in Jesus? Did these biblical authors ever consider the possibility that these miracle stories would ever be taken literally? Did they think for a moment that they were writing history? No, of course not! They were, in a typically Jewish manner, painting an interpretive portrait. Elijah and Elisha expanded the domain of the miraculous from the world of nature, as it was for Moses and Joshua, to the world of human experience. Both Elijah and Elisha were said, for example, to have been able to raise the dead. It was a widow’s only son, who was raised in the Elijah narrative. So are we surprised when Luke wraps that story around Jesus and it becomes Jesus raising the only son of a widow in the village of Nain? Elisha raises a child from the dead. That story is also wrapped around Jesus when Mark, Matthew and Luke all relate a story of Jesus raising a child from the dead. So both the nature miracles and the ability to raise the dead appear to be Jewish stories about past heroes now being retold about Jesus. That still leaves us, however, with two categories of miracle stories attributed to Jesus that do not fit into these Hebrew patterns. The first category includes most of the healing miracles, in which Jesus is reported to be able to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to sing to the mute and the ability to walk to the lame. The second are the “signs” that occur in the Fourth Gospel. What is their source? From whence are they derived? Could these still be viewed as literal accounts of historical events? Time and space require that we separate the two categories, so I will deal with the healing miracles this week and the Johannine signs next week. If we were people familiar with the Jewish Scriptures, we would know that messianic thinking had long viewed the promised messiah as the one who would inaugurate the reign of the Kingdom of God in human history as spelled out by Isaiah in the 8th century BCE. When the Kingdom of God dawned, telling signs, Isaiah said, would make all people aware of it. Water, he said, would flow in the desert, allowing the crocuses to grow there. Then human wholeness would transform human brokenness. In the messianic age, Isaiah suggested, the blind would see, the deaf hear, the mute sing and the lame walk. If one believed Jesus was the messiah inaugurating the Kingdom of God, then the signs of that age must surely be attributed to him. This, I now believe, is the primary source of the New Testament healing miracles. This is also why miracles were so late in being attributed to Jesus. They had to wait until this understanding of Christology developed. The healing miracles in the gospels were not ever events that actually happened, they were rather signs of the presence of God bringing the messianic age into being. We have misread them as miracles. It is a new insight – the burden of the miracles is lifted off the memory of Jesus in our age when supernatural thinking does not fit well into our world. John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Raymond Rakower From Gex, France, writes: Question: It’s always a new pleasure and enrichment to read your weekly issues. If you’ll forgive my arrogance, I would like to make a suggestion, a tentative explanation of the unshakable conviction of so many people that there is an almighty theistic God outside our universe It might be the vague recollection, an echo of the last weeks or months of our fetus life when our universe was limited to our mother’s placenta but with an acoustic system already operational and connected to our primitive brain. We heard the voice of our father coming from outside of this universe and many a time with a deep caring male voice. This recollection would be later incorporated in the baby after a couple of years when its unconscious mind would develop. Hence so many people will never accept to abandon their belief. I got this idea whilst reading (and translating into French at my favorite publisher’s request) the book of Aletha J. Solter, PhD, The Attachment Play, based on the behavior theory. She demonstrates in this book the fact that after the birth, the baby remembers sometimes for clearly a couple of years what happened before and during its birth! She used this remarkable memory of the early childhood to heal some children’s behavior problems. My second point in this email concerns your Q&A, in your response to the question of Sue Stover. I recently read a book, which analyses many details that are quite familiar to you: The Yahweh vs. the Elohim traditions of the Old Testament. Its title is Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman. It may contain some interesting hypotheses about this topic. Answer: Dear Ray, Thank you for your letter with your provocative insights. My readers need to know that I have had the chance to know you and to talk with you about these and many other things in the years of our friendship. They also need to know that you were the first translator of my books into French. You have always been a resource to my life and both Christine and I look forward to our opportunity to see you in Basel, Switzerland next October. In regard to the comments and questions expressed in your letter, let me say that I am certain that there is something called “pre-birth memory.” Evidence for that seems well established. I am also convinced that there is something real about what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious,” which looks at some other interconnections. I have not, however, read deeply enough on that subject to have formed sufficiently well-researched opinions that I would be comfortable sharing with others. In the field of theology we are oft times tempted to say more than we know and even to become dogmatic in the face of mystery. The Christian life, I remind myself daily, is a journey into a dimension of truth that no human mind can ever fully possess. So I have no great light that I want to flash before your fascinating suggestion that the idea of a theistic God is derived from the suggestion that an unborn child experiences his or her father first as a presence from a universe different from the one the fetus occupies. I find that suggestion intriguing, but not convincing. It seems to me that there are many sources of that idea, not just one. Above all I am convinced that every idea of God ultimately arises from a human experience, but that does not mean God is no more than a mythologized human experience. Over the years of human history every human definition of God has finally died, or been radically revised in the light of new knowledge and expanded human experience. So in my mind there is a reality to God that transcends every definition. God does not die when any human definition of God, like “theism” dies. I make a clear distinction between God and every human idea of God. So I will take your idea under advisement, just because it is your idea, and I will explore it further. Perhaps we can discuss it more in October. Until then we send you our best wishes. John Shelby Spong Announcements Bishop John Shelby Spong to speak at and receive the Religious Liberty Award at the American Humanist Society's 75th Anniversary Conference, May 26th - 29th in Chicago, IL.

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5/14/16, Spong: Charting A New Reformation, Part XVIII - The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued)
by Ellie Stock via OE 03 May '16

03 May '16

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Charting A New Reformation Part XVIII - The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued) Following the Exodus, Moses’ miraculous power was never again so powerfully displayed in the biblical story, but it did not disappear. In a battle against the Amalekites (Exod. 17:8-14) when Moses held his hands up, the Hebrew army won the day, but when fatigue forced him to lower his arms, his enemies prevailed. This problem was solved when Aaron and Hur stood by his side and held his arms up. God was still directing the affairs of human beings from above the sky and Moses was God’s vessel. Other nature miracles adorn the Moses story. When the Hebrew people had no food in the wilderness God, at Moses’ request, rained heavenly bread called manna, upon them. When there was a shortage of water, Moses struck a rock at a place called Meribah and water flowed forth in abundance (Exod. 17:1-7). This was, however, a strange miracle for although God appears to have ordered it, a Hebrew norm was violated. Moses demanded that God bring water out of this rock. It was not proper for a human being to give God orders. The norm was for God to command and for human beings to obey. Moses had, quite improperly, put “God to the test.” God was not pleased. The story said that God had clothed Moses with miraculous power, but because of this serious indiscretion, Moses was to be punished by being forever prohibited from entering the “Promised Land.” While miracles were clearly associated with the memory of Moses, it would not have occurred to anyone to speak of him as “the son of God.” He was simply a human channel through whom God’s power was allowed to work. There was no confusion of the medium with the message. Miraculous power belonged to God; it was not thought of as Moses’ possession. When Moses died (Deut. 34), he was succeeded by Joshua, who had been his military captain. There is always great anxiety in a nation when it loses its leader, especially a long time and successful leader like Moses. One of the ways in the story-telling tradition of the Jews that anxiety was dissipated was to wrap stories about the deceased leader around his successor. The ancients did not see this as dishonest. What this practice was designed to do was to convey the message that the God of Moses was still with them, but now as the God of Joshua. So Joshua’s life was said to be marked with the same power that had once marked the life of Moses. The power to manipulate the forces of nature had been a sign of God’s presence with Moses. Moses had been portrayed as able to command the forces of nature. Joshua would now exhibit a similar power. He would command the sun to stand still in the sky on its journey around the earth (Joshua 10). This would enable Joshua’s army more daylight in which his soldiers were able to kill more retreating Amorites before they found safety under the cover of darkness. It was a power similar to that of Moses. The second example was an even more obvious Moses story. Moses had split the waters of the Red Sea to allow the children of Israel to escape death at the hands of the Egyptians and to walk through that sea into the safety of the wilderness. Joshua confronted another body of water that impeded the Israelites’ progress. This time it was the Jordan River. Those who have seen the Jordan River are not impressed with either its size or its difficulty to navigate. In some seasons of the year, one can literally step across the tiny stream in the midst of the river basin. So the author of the book of Joshua had to heighten the size and degree of difficulty. He states that this miracle occurred when the river was in flood season and was a massive body of rushing water. In Moses-like fashion, Joshua stepped into this flooded river and the waters parted so that Joshua and his army could invade the territory populated by the Canaanites by walking on dry land. In these narratives, Joshua, like Moses, was seen as possessing supernatural power, but he too, was simply a vehicle, a channel, through which the miraculous power of God could be made available in human history. Thus, miracles in the Bible were originally not a sign of the human becoming divine, but rather the sign that God could work through a human life to establish God’s power over nature. It would be about four hundred years before miracles would make a second appearance in the biblical story. Once again miracles were associated with the lives of Jewish heroes. These heroes were also a connected pair of figures, who were at the heart of Israel’s national life. While Moses would become known as the father of the law, this man, Elijah, would become known as the father of Israel’s prophetic movement. He would be linked with his successor, Elisha, to form the second tandem to which miracles would be attached. What constituted a miracle, however, began to be greatly expanded. First, there was in the lives of these two figures a repetition of the nature miracles that marked the previous heroes, Moses and Joshua. For example, Elijah and Elisha had the power to expand the food supply, a cruse of oil and a supply of grain were not diminished with use. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the continuity of the Moses-Joshua tradition was seen in that both Elijah and Elisha, when impeded from their goals by the Jordan River, responded by sweeping a mantle over the water of that river and standing back to watch the waters part, which enabled them to overcome this watery barrier and to walk across the river bed on dry land. This Moses story, wrapped originally around Israel’s founding hero at the Red Sea, was later wrapped around Joshua, then wrapped around Elijah and finally wrapped around Elisha. There are thus four-splitting-of-the-waters stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. Other miraculous acts were attributed to this 8th century BCE duo of Jewish heroes. Elijah and Elisha could both perform supernatural acts of healing that were seen as miracles. Both were also said to be able to raise the dead. Elijah raised the only son of a widow from the dead. Elisha raised a child from the dead. So by the eighth century, before the Common Era, the Hebrew Scriptures spoke of the miraculous power being within the capability of the lives of the foremost heroes of Israel. Once again, it was God’s power acting through God’s servants in the Hebrew Scriptures, although increasingly as the stories were told, that power was more and more attributed to the people themselves. After Elijah and Elisha, we note that miracles largely disappeared from the biblical story until the first century when they were told again, first about Jesus of Nazareth in the gospel tradition and then about his immediate successors, the apostles, in the book of Acts. The patterns were quite similar. The supernatural acts fell into three categories. First, there were nature miracles: the stilling of the storm and the ability to walk on water. There were also narratives about the ability to expand the food supply. Six times in the gospels an account was given of Jesus feeding an almost unlimited multitude — 5000 on four occasions, 4000 on two occasions — with a limited number of loaves and fishes. Next in the Jesus narrative were the raising of the dead stories, five to be specific are related in the four gospels, but only three people were said to have been raised from the dead. That was because the narrative of Jesus raising a child, the daughter of Jairus, from the dead, was told three times, once in Mark, once in Matthew and once in Luke. The details vary, but only slightly. The main story line is, however, almost identical with the account of Elisha raising a child from the dead. The second raising of the dead story is told only by Luke and involved Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow, which supposedly took place in the village of Nain. This narrative, upon a closer examination, appears to be based on the story of Elijah raising from the dead the only son of a widow. The third raising of the dead story is only told by John and is the familiar account of the raising the four-days-dead Lazarus, who was said to have literally walked out of his tomb. This story appears to have had no antecedent in the Hebrew Scriptures whatsoever, but perhaps it was based on Luke’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Finally there is a series of miracle stories associated with Jesus that are the most familiar of the miracle stories in the Bible. I refer to those narratives in which the blind are enabled to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to sing and the crippled or lame to leap. Many of these healing miracles are later attributed to the disciples in the book of Acts, which serve to give us the third pairing of miracles stories to keep the pattern intact. Clearly the same power, observed in Jesus, was said to have been present in the leaders of the early Christian Church. Is there a source in the Hebrew Scriptures that might give meaning to this final type of healing miracles attributed to Jesus? I think there is. In the 35th chapter of Isaiah, the prophet is addressing the subject of the signs that will mark the emergence of the Kingdom of God on earth. This was, in apocalyptic Jewish thought, nothing less than the birth of the messianic age. Isaiah responded that the world would recognize the in-breaking of the Kingdom in these ways: water would flow in the desert, the crocuses would bloom in places where they had never bloomed before and human wholeness would appear in places that had been marked with human brokenness. That is “the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the mute would shout and the lame would leap.” For Isaiah these would be the signs that would signal the messiah’s arrival on earth to inaugurate the “Kingdom of God.” Are these miracle stories then interpretive signs rather than literal events? I think they are. We will pursue this conversation further next week, when we discover that Jesus himself is said to have made this identification. When one really reads the text of the gospels, much of the miraculous framework that we have traditionally placed on the Bible gives way to a very different understanding. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Albert Ringewald of Cocoa Beach, Florida writes: Question: I would appreciate it if you could provide me with your views on Christian forgiveness. It seems to me on this issue that Christians are all over the map. Some are quick to offer forgiveness as shown to us recently over closed circuit TV by the relatives of the nine victims of Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the shooter, who specifically expressed no remorse during his court hearing; to the author, Roxanne Gay, who wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed (June 23, 2015) that her Catholic upbringing had taught her that “forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance.” I think the almost instantaneous expression of forgiveness by the relatives of the church shooter’s victims perplexed many of us as sincere, yet somehow contrived because of its suddenness.” Complicating matters further, Kristin Neff, out of the University of Texas, has written extensively about self-compassion and to forgive is to lay down the burden of anger toward the offender and thereby changing your role as “victim” to finding compassion for yourself and possibly even for the offender. Finally, we seem to be taught the essentials of forgiveness through the parable of “The Prodigal Son” contained in the gospel of Luke, in which the father forgives the wayward son only after the son acknowledges his wrongdoings and begs for forgiveness. Would forgiveness have been proffered by the father without contrition on the part of the son? Does forgiveness require acknowledgement of the wrong doing by the offender? Does forgiveness require the offender to ask for it in order that it be effective? Psychologists are quick to describe the benefits of forgiveness, but they fail to describe the requirements, if any. Answer: Dear Albert, Thank you for your questions and for posing the issue so powerfully with your very contemporary examples. Let me try to separate the wheat from the chaff. First forgiveness is in my opinion, ultimately a godlike response. As such it is freely given, always available and requires nothing. Our ability to receive or to access this ever-present forgiveness may require repentance and an attempt at restitution, but that is a requirement of our receptiveness, it is not a requirement located in forgiveness itself. So it seems to me that the families of the victims of the shooting in the Charleston, S.C. African Methodist Episcopal Church acted out of a profound understanding of what the forgiveness of God is like. It was that very powerful witness to this ultimate meaning of forgiveness that moved the people of South Carolina to look at their own behavior vis-à-vis people of African descent and to bring to the ground the long-flying flags of the Confederacy. The forgiveness of God, which they articulated, does not require confession from the guilty one in order for it to be given; but it may require confession in order for that forgiveness to be received by the guilty one to whom it was so freely offered. That is the picture of forgiveness I find in the New Testament. In the episode of the woman taken in the act of adultery, forgiveness is offered long before she was told, “go and sin no more.” Jesus is portrayed in Luke as offering forgiveness to the soldiers who crucified him. There is no indication that he required them to repent first. Forgiveness is a gift of God. It is grace; no prerequisites are required. The life of Jesus reveals this to me quite powerfully. He was betrayed and he loved his betrayer. He was denied and he loved his denier. He was forsaken and he loved those who forsook him. He was tortured and he loved his torturers. He was murdered and he loved his murderers. That is a portrait of the forgiveness of God being lived out in a human life. What the God presence in Jesus says to each of us is this: “There is nothing you can do and nothing you can be that will place you outside the boundaries of God’s love.” We are loved as the hymn says: “Just as I am without one plea.” It is not your business or mine to judge whether forgiveness is deserved. It is not your business or mine to determine whether repentance is adequate. Those are the results of the rules of religion that often appear to have been elevated to a status they have never merited. Even in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which you cite, the wayward son “comes to himself,” that is, he turns toward the forgiveness that was always there even when he could not see it. It is human to judge, but judging is finally an act of idolatry. It assumes that you have the right to judge. It assumes that you can place limits on the forgiveness of God. It assumes that your righteousness is greater than God’s righteousness. The response of religion is never to be identified with the response of God. Religion gave us anti-Semitism, the Muslim-hating Crusades, the moralistic Puritans, the justification of slavery, segregation and Apartheid, the diminution of women and the repression of homosexual persons. Judgment arises out of the human tendency to place onto God the limits that you yourself cannot transcend. “How often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” asked the disciples. Then trying to answer their own question, they said, “until seven times?” Jesus’ response was “Until seventy times seven.” Did he mean that we must forgive 490 times, but not 491? No, he was calling his disciples beyond any limits because forgiveness with limits is never forgiveness. There are no requirements in the forgiveness of God. That is the truth that calls you and me beyond our own limits and beyond the perilous suggestion that you or I have the right to judge anyone. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements Meet Bishop Spong at a private VIP reception Bishop Spong will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming Death and Afterlife Awareness Conference in St. Louis, May 12-15, 2016. He will also be the guest of honor at an intimate VIP reception limited to only 30 guests. This is a rare opportunity to meet at chat with him, so reserve your tickets early! Click here for details!

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Fwd: Terrible Situation
by George Holcombe via OE 02 May '16

02 May '16

Someone is using Ellie’s name with one of those distress calls to get money. George Holcombe 14900 Yellowleaf Tr. Austin, TX 78728 Mobile 512/252-2756 geowanda1(a)me.com "Whatever the problem, community is the answer. There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about." Margaret Wheatley > Begin forwarded message: > > From: Ellie Stock <memaltman(a)aol.com> > Subject: Terrible Situation > Date: May 2, 2016 at 1:09:43 AM CDT > To: geowanda1(a)me.com > Reply-To: elliestock1(a)outlook.com > > I really hope you get this fast as i could not inform everyone about my trip. This message is coming to you with great depression due to the state of my discomfort. I'm presently in Philippines, I came here for a conference and I just had my bags stolen from me and personal belongings. I have been trying to sort things out with the necessary authorities, the bad news is my flight will be leaving very soon. I need some assistance from you. > > Let me know if you can be of any help > > Thanks. > > Ellie

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