[Dialogue] Spong for this week

[kroegerd@aol.com]

June 22, 2005
Debating with Evangelicals 

Twice recently, I have had the opportunity to engage in public debate two people who identify themselves as evangelicals, the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Rev. Dr. William Craig, a non-residential "Research Professor of Philosophy" at the Talbot School of Theology, an evangelical school in La Mirada, California. The venues for these debates were quite different. Dr. Mohler and I were in two studios in different cities so we never actually met, nor could I see him. Dr. Craig and I shared the stage before a live audience in an auditorium at Bethel College in Ohio. The subject matter was also different. With Dr. Mohler, it was the Bible and how one is to approach the sacred text, while with Dr. Craig we limited our subject to the resurrection of Jesus as the gospels describe it. 
These two gentlemen differed greatly in personality. Dr. Mohler was overtly aggressive, while Dr. Craig was quite civil, despite slipping occasionally into 'cuteness.' There was, however, little to distinguish their perspectives. In typical evangelical style both validated their points of view by describing the time when each "gave myself to the Lord," suggesting in subtle ways that without this saving moment, rational conversation about the Bible had little relevance. Yet both of these guardians of the literal Bible appeared to me to be highly defensive. 
Their defensiveness was apparent first in their constant citing of the names of those biblical authorities they quoted to justify their evangelical conclusions. They worked hard to build up the credibility of these 'scholars', listing their degrees and publications and stating that they represented a new wave of learning. That was, they suggested, why I might never have heard of them. It was an argument not dissimilar from the way evangelicals also quote certain 'scientists' who, they claim "challenge Darwin and evolution in the name of science." An investigation of the credentials of these authorities, however, reveals that the majority of their degrees come from evangelical schools and that their books are published by evangelical publishers. When these facts are raised to consciousness, the response is typically that "liberals do not take evangelical scholarship seriously because of an intellectual bias." 
I confess that I plead guilty to that charge to this degree. I can read two or three pages of the work of someone described as an "evangelical scholar" and tell you quickly why I have no desire to read more. What they call scholarship is always in the service of the evangelical agenda. There is in fact no such thing as "conservative" biblical scholarship, any more than there is something called "liberal" biblical scholarship. Scholarship is by definition neither liberal nor conservative, it is, rather, competent or incompetent. The nature of scholarship is to go wherever the search for truth leads; it does not exist to buttress pre-conceived evangelical conclusions. That is to confuse both education and scholarship with propaganda. Most of the evangelical "scholars" that these two gentlemen cited are unknown in the academic circles I inhabit not, as they claim, because of a liberal bias but because their work is not regarded as academic at all. It, therefore, stands at odds with the great tradition of biblical scholarship that broke upon the Western world in the late 18th century, and that continues to challenge, deeply and successfully, the literal assumptions made by most evangelicals. When Dr. Mohler asserted in our debate, "that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God," it was obvious that this critical work of the last 200 years has never engaged his mind. The inerrancy he claimed for "the Word of God" requires one to live in a pre-Copernican, pre-Darwinian world. To pretend that the earth is still the center of the universe is simply no longer credible. Old Testament narratives from the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, to the story of manna raining down from heaven on the Israelites in the wilderness reflect that now-rejected world view, as do the New Testament accounts of a star being dragged across the heavens slowly enough to allow wise men to keep up with it and Jesus returning to God by ascending into the sky. DNA evidence also makes the idea of a separate creation for human life laughable. The people who wrote the Bible, knew nothing about germs, viruses or tumors, and assumed that sickness was punishment for sinfulness, that epilepsy resulted from demon possession and deaf muteness derived from the devil tying the victim's tongue. One does not want to attribute such ignorance to God. Furthermore, evangelicals do not face the fact that a book which says quite literally that homosexuals should be put to death, women are inferior to men, slavery is legitimate or Jews deserve God's wrath, should never be called "the Word of God." 
When Dr. Craig proclaimed that the gospels were "biographies of Jesus," reflecting "eye witness accounts that go back into the first decade following the life of Jesus," it was apparent that he was either unaware of or had deliberately rejected the conclusions of two centuries of biblical studies. Then he stated that the Book of Acts was written in the early sixties, a date reputable scholars find incredible. To debate such ideas as if they are competent is like debating with members of the flat earth society. It is universally attested today that Acts is volume two of Luke and that Luke has copied into his gospel about fifty percent of the Gospel of Mark. If Dr. Craig were correct that would force us to date Luke and Mark early in the 50's. Both gospels reflect a much later structure of church life and appear to be cognizant of such external events as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., each of which makes Dr. Craig's dating impossible. 
I have no desire to impugn the integrity of either of these gentlemen, but I can say that their level of learning is at best naive. Like most evangelicals, they know much about the literal content of the Bible and can cite its proof texts with alacrity, but they seem to know nothing about the Bible's formation, its clear conflicts, or anything else that threatens their primary presuppositions. Neither man understood a basic distinction, which is that while all people are welcome to their own opinions, none are welcome to their own facts. Facts can be tested. Evangelicals also do not seem to recognize that there is a time-honored method by which new thoughts enter the public debate. The one with the challenging insight writes a book or a paper and allows it to be circulated among those judged to be experts in that field so that they might react to it. If the insight opens new doors into truth it will ultimately win its way to acceptance. If it does not, it will receive the treatment it deserves and be roundly dismissed. Insights that are saluted only by evangelicals do not meet that test and all the rhetoric, designed to make credible that which has no academic merit, will avail nothing. 
The major problem with those who read the Bible literally is that they do not understand how the world has changed since the Bible was written. Propositional statements made in any time frame reflect the worldview of the one speaking. Language is always a dialogue between truth and time. Ultimate truth may be timeless but all articulations of truth are time bound and time warped. That distinction is still foreign to the conservative religious mind. 
My debating partners became quite contentious when trying to maintain their intellectually indefensible positions. Dr. Mohler revealed this by going into a full-scale attack. He suggested that I had rejected "every tenet of traditional Christianity." He checked them off: the Virgin Birth, the blood atonement, the physical nature of the Resurrection, the supernatural God, and the reality of miracles. As he fired his fundamentalist artillery, he slipped quickly into character assassination. The oldest trick in debating is to attack the messenger when you can no longer deal with the message. What I do reject is not the basic 'tenets of Christianity' but the literal interpretations and dated world view that have been imposed on traditional Christianity by those who think they are 'defending the faith.' That is a distinction that those who identify Christianity with their own narrow definitions of it cannot make. Dr. Mohler's assertions were almost identical with those things outlined by evangelicals in a series of early 20th century tracts called "The Fundamentals," every one of which has been dismissed by the academic world of Christian scholarship. No scholar of world rank today, treats the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke as literal biology, the resurrection as physical resuscitation or envisions God as a deity who requires a blood offering and a human sacrifice as the means of achieving salvation. Such literalizations have become nothing less than a source of Christian embarrassment. 
Dr. Craig sought to distance himself from such strict fundamentalism by announcing that he was not an absolute literalist. When the Bible suggested that the hills clapped their hands, he explained, he did not believe that "hills actually had hands that could clap." If that's the mentality that tempers his literalism, he has a long way to go before he can enter the contemporary theological dialogue. His wife actually articulated the real problem at the end of the debate. I had related the story of how my evangelical church had taught me as a child that segregation, patriarchy, anti-Semitism and homophobia were the will of God, quoting the literal words of the Bible to 'prove' it. She expressed her sorrow "for the way I had been treated as a child by evangelicals." If I had just had a wise and loving evangelical as my childhood pastor, perhaps someone like Dr. Craig, none of these dreadful things would have happened and, presumably, I would be a good evangelical today. I smiled inwardly, for clearly her comment revealed no insight at all into the things we had been discussing for two hours. 
Christianity is in desperate need of reformation but dialogue with evangelicals is not the way to pursue that task. As the old love song suggests, 'we live in two different worlds.' 

-- John Shelby Spong 
Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at bookstores everywhere and by clicking here! 
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Rhoda Swonger, via the Internet, writes: 
Please help me understand . . . What do you mean when you say you are a "Believing Christian." If God is not a being who is this "Christ" that you believe in? 
Dear Rhoda, 
The difficulty with trying to speak theologically in today's arena is that the words we use have been distorted by images of a world that no longer exists. 
For starters, I do not now who God is or what God is. That is knowledge beyond human capacity. Does a dog know what a human being is? Of course not, a dog can only respond to the experience a dog has with human beings. Human beings can only respond to the experience they have with God. Therefore, we cannot talk with any credibility about who God is, we can only talk about what we believe our experience of God has been. So, your question is posed in an unanswerable way. I can say that to describe God as a kind of supernatural being no longer makes much sense to me. If you have identified God with a particular human definition of God, you immediately become defensive when your definition is challenged by new knowledge. That is where many traditional believers find themselves today. The word "God" is a human symbol that stands for our experience of otherness, transcendence, love and wonder. Jesus is the human life who opened our eyes to see this God presence in the depths of our own humanity. Given the way we understood both the world and God in the first century, we described this experience of God as a supernatural heavenly Being who invaded the world through the miracle of the Virgin Birth and who departed this world through the miracle of the cosmic ascension. That was a perfectly reasonable explanation, given their view of the world as the center of the universe and God as an external being dwelling above the sky. That explanation was, however, rendered nonsensical by the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Darwin just to name a few. Our job is not to try to force 1st Century faith forms into 21st Century molds but to put the timeless Christ experience into a vocabulary that is in touch with where we live in the 21st century. 
Questions like yours are those of one seeking a quick and satisfying answer. Answers to such questions are not possible in this Q and A format. Sometimes a book will speak to these concerns but more often it takes a lifetime of study. I have addressed this theme in a number of my books and am working now on a Jesus book that will come out in 2007. Suffice it to say at this moment that I believe God is real and that Jesus is my doorway into that reality. I recommend that you start there. 
--John Shelby Spong 
 
Dick Kroeger