[Dialogue] Spong, and a notice about myself

[kroegerd@aol.com]

Spong article follows.
 
I consider members of these lists to be my colleagues and comrades in arms.
 
I am once again retiring (for the last time) as a full time insurance broker.  My last day at work is Wednesday, 11/30/05
 
I will drive school bus part time (the best job I ever had) and contine my hunting dog training practice.
 
I have also committed to Amelia to begin to work away at the list of household and family tasks that I have avioded. (some for decades!)
 
I also plan to increase my activity in the realm of social justice, and will probably run for local office in 2006.
 
Finally, I want to say that I have deply appreciated the OE, ICA, and Earthrise lists, and look forward to our continuing dialogue.
 
the Micah list remains pretty much a monological Blog to a handful of local church folks.  
 
All is Good!
 
Now on to Spong...
 
Dick Kroeger  
 
  
November 23, 2005
The Bias Against Women in the Judeo-Christian Tradition 

Last week I began an exploration of the origins of that incessant religious negativity toward women. I located its deepest root in the evolutionary process where survival becomes the ultimate self-conscious value that dominates the human psyche. I suggested that part of this survival process involved the definition of the stronger and faster male as superior to the smaller and slower female. It was a definition based on observable biology since women, especially in the last stages of pregnancy and the period of child nursing, had to be dependent. So the primitive tribe organized its life around this observable reality. 
Since it was not part of the defined role of the woman to think, education for women was not encouraged, which helped to develop the image of the woman as a less intelligent creature who should not be allowed to participate in the decision making processes of the tribe. The woman's role, in the tribe's quest for survival, was to be the supporter of the males who protected them. That God created her only for breeding and the ancillary domestic roles became an ingrained idea. In time sacred stories were composed to demonstrate that these realities were in accordance with the will of God, making it inappropriate for any human being to seek to change them. When feminist rebellion against this stereotype finally arose it was perceived to be a rebellion against God. That is what set the stage for most religious systems to be not just anti-female but to be specifically against any attempt to assert woman's equality. To continue this analysis, I now seek to look at how this bias found expression in the Judeo-Christian tradition. 
The Bible begins with two contradictory accounts of creation. The opening story of the six-day creation is actually the younger, written in the 6th century BCE while the Jews were in exile in Babylon. In this account human life is made as the final act on the sixth day before God's Sabbath of rest began. Its primary purpose was to establish for the Jews, the custom and authority of the Sabbath, which was one of the barriers erected to avoid amalgamation with the Babylonians. The second and much older creation story by some 300 years is in Genesis 2:4 - 3:24. It features Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden. The major reason this became the primary creation story in Christian history was that Paul quoted it, making it part of the tradition that was destined to become the dominant religious system in the Western world. It behooves us, therefore to look at this account in detail in order to discern in it the tap root for Western Christian patriarchy and sexism. It is surprising how few of us really know the details. In this account, God created first the heavens and the earth. God also created separately every plant and herb before God put them into the earth since that was not yet possible because, as the text says, it had not rained and there was no man to "till the ground." However, God remedied that problem by causing a mist to rise from the earth, enabling God to create the first man out of the dust of the earth now made pliable by the mist. The picture in this text is not unlike that of a child making a mud pie. When the man was fully formed, he was still inert but God came down upon that creature in an act of divine mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, breathing into the nostrils of this lifeless form the very breath of God. Since God's breath, according to this story was the source of life; this was the moment in which the man became "a living soul." 
Next God fashioned a garden in a place called Eden into which God placed this newly formed man. Out of the now moist ground, God then made trees to grow. Some were pleasant to look at. Others produced food to eat. God also placed into the midst of the garden two mysterious trees: one was the Tree of Life; the other was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Four rivers watered the garden, two of which were named the Tigris and the Euphrates, which means that the writers located the Garden of Eden somewhere in present day Iraq. The garden also had within it both gold and onyx. It is not clear why the man needed either gold or onyx but whoever wrote this story knew that gold and onyx were valuable so felt that both must be present in the Garden of Eden. This being done, God placed the man in the garden to till and care for it with permission to eat of the fruit of every tree save one. On pain of death, the man was not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That, this story asserts, is how human life began. It was very male at its origin, 
However, the story continues, God perceived that the man was lonely. Perhaps the man complained about that with great frequency, so God decided to "make him a helper fit for him." God then inaugurated an almost hilarious process of trial and error seeking to fashion a proper friend for the man. No matter how many creatures God made, none appeared to satisfy the man's yearning for a friend. One gets the sense that God became frustrated with the divine inability to satisfy the man's wishes. That explains, according to the author of this story, why there is among the animals and birds so much variety. Some creatures were big like elephants. Some were small like cats and rabbits. Some had straight tails, others had curly tails, and still others had no tails. No matter how many varieties of beast and bird God fashioned, none satisfied the man. Adam, demonstrating the human claim to dominance, defined each creature by naming it, but among them all, the Bible asserts, was not found "a helper fit" for the man. 
This primitive and obviously imperfect God must have said something like: "Adam, you are very hard to please!" To which Adam must have responded: "But, God, how can I describe what I want if I have never seen it?" So, the story says, God reverted to another plan. This time, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, probably using an anesthesia that would not be discovered for thousands of years. With Adam thus out of it, God opened his chest, removed a rib and then closed the patient up. What kinds of sutures were used was not disclosed. With that rib, God fashioned the woman. As one feminist biblical scholar observed, "it was childbirth as only a male who had never had a baby could have imagined it!" 
God stood this newly formed woman before Adam displaying all of her charm and feminine pulchritude, while gently bringing Adam out of his deep sleep. One gets the impression that Adam's eyes bulged out of his sockets as if on coiled springs at his first viewing. The King James Bible records Adam as having said, "This is now bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man." It is a rather calm translation for what was in Hebrew a slang expression. It might have been more accurately rendered, "Hot diggety, Lord, you finally did it." The Bible closes this ancient story by saying that the man named the woman Eve demonstrating male authority over the woman and accepted the divinely appointed destiny to grow up to the point where he will leave his parents and cling to his wife. In the King James English, the woman was designed by God primarily to serve the man, to meet his needs. Unlike the man, the woman was not thought to have been made in God's image. She was higher than the animals but always meant to be subject to the authority of the lordly male. That is the oldest and most influential definition of a woman in the Bible. 
Because she existed for the man's pleasure, she soon came to be thought of as his property. Polygamy in the Bible was justified on this basis. A man could have as many wives as he could afford. Harems were nothing but a sign of wealth. Even the Ten Commandments carried with them this degrading definition of women as property. The 10th Commandment ordered the people not to covet their "neighbor's wife (Ex. 20:17)." Note there is no injunction in any book of the Bible against anyone coveting a neighbor's husband! That appears to be proper; one just cannot covet another's wife. Husbands were not property, but wives were and this commandment was about property rights. The neighbor, who is clearly a male, has his property listed in order of its perceived value: his house, his wife, his slaves, his ox, his ass and his other possessions. One wonders if those who want to put the Ten Commandments in our courtrooms realize that, literally interpreted, 50% of the human race would become the property of the other 50%. Religious emotion covers up so many facts of history. 
The same definition of women as property is reflected in the 7th Commandment against adultery. People need to realize that the style of marriage present when the prohibition against adultery was promulgated was polygamy. A man could have as many wives as he could afford. Some 300 years after Moses was said to have received the Commandments on Mt. Sinai, King Solomon had one thousand wives. What does adultery mean when one man owns a thousand women? If with a thousand wives you still have some need to commit adultery, you do have a problem! I suspect it is not even a moral problem. When one couples this with the fact that a sexual liaison with an unmarried woman was not considered adultery but rather a crime against the property of that woman's father, the operative biblical definition of a woman becomes clear. Her journey out of this biblically imposed definition was destined to take centuries. 
The echoes of this "God imposed" prejudice still are heard in Christian churches in the 21st century. Those churches that still refuse to allow women to become priests and bishops do so, they say, because a woman cannot represent God before the altar. The woman is defective in that she is not created in the image of God. Other churches will not allow women to become senior pastors since the Bible, they say, forbids a woman from having authority over a man. How long, one wonders will a new generation of women tolerate this sexist ignorance? When will some appropriate person say: "What the church calls a 'sacred tradition' is nothing more than a lingering prejudice that no living institution in the 21st century can continue to tolerate. Where do we go from here? Stay tuned. 
? 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
Robert Wenger writes: 
When the lights go out and doors are closing, where does one find the courage to look for the way? I know this will sound like a bizarre question but I just finished your autobiography HERE I STAND: MY STRUGGLE FOR A CHRISTIANITY OF INTEGRITY, LOVE AND EQUALITY, and am sincerely impressed by the apparent fact that you found a reason to continue despite an unrelenting opposition. To what do you attribute this courage, drive, resolve, or stubbornness? 
Dear Bob, 
Thank you for your letter and your reason for asking. 
I am not engaged in a task that can be defined as "winning" or "losing." My agenda is to raise consciousness. That can be done in many ways and being defeated is one of them. 
In my autobiography, to which you refer, I mention the battle to raise consciousness in my church, nationally and world-wide on the issue of acceptance, justice and celebration of gay and lesbian people. What I describe in that book were indeed the dark days of that struggle. The darkest days of all came when the Anglican bishops of the world gathered in 1998 at the Lambeth Conference under the leadership of The Most Reverend and Right Honorable George Carey who, in my mind, is the least competent man ever appointed to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed some of the cruelest, most ill-informed and most overtly prejudiced resolutions about homosexual people I have ever read. One of those resolutions defined homophobia in such a way as to exonerate these homophobic bishops from the charge of homophobia!! 
It is never easy to be defeated politically but I met the press in Canterbury immediately after the voting on these dreadful resolutions had been tallied and declared it a great victory. Stunned by this remark, a reporter asked me to amplify. I did so by reminding the gathered press conference that in these negative resolutions the prejudice about homosexuality had been placed at the center of the life of the entire Anglican Communion. It was, therefore, on the agenda of every national branch of this church the world over. What they did not realize, I suggested, was that once a prejudice begins to be publicly debated, it is always revealed to be a dying prejudice. One does not debate a prejudice until the definition undergirding that prejudice has begun to be questioned. 
As long as people are convinced that homosexuality is a choice made by homosexual persons because they are mentally ill and cannot help themselves or because they are morally depraved and want to live in this sick and distorted manner, then there is no debate. Only when this definition is challenged does debate ensue. So the debate about homosexuality in both church and state is a sure sign that the old definition is not holding, that a new consciousness is emerging. There has never been a time in human history when a new consciousness did not finally trump the old definition on which prejudice has been based. So there was no doubt in my mind at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, and there is no doubt now as to what the final outcome of this debate will be. It is easy to lose a battle when you know that the war is going to be won. 
I grew up in a segregated church in Charlotte, N.C, and lived to see an African American man named Michael Curry be elected bishop in the Diocese of North Carolina by a majority of the clergy and lay people of the Episcopal Church meeting in a diocesan convention. I grew up in a church that treated women as second-class citizens, even calling them "The Auxiliary," and I lived to see 40% of our clergy become women and to see my church elect fifteen women to be among its bishops. I grew up in a church that castigated and oppressed homosexual people and lived to see a gay priest, Gene Robinson, who lived openly with his partner for 14 years, be elected and confirmed as Bishop of New Hampshire. 
To know that history will affirm the minority position you hold today provides me with a great and empowering perspective with which to bear pain and defeat. If the purpose of Jesus was to give life more abundantly, I was always sure that I was walking in his company. It is reconciliation with God not unity among church members that is the purpose of Jesus. An ultimate victory always awaits those who serve the truth. Perhaps it also takes a bit of courage, drive, resolve and even stubbornness 
Thanks for asking, 
? John Shelby Spong 
 
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