[Dialogue] Spong on the church and scripture

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 9, 2006 
The Ambivalent Church  
There is something fundamentally flawed about institutional Christianity  
today. I see it in two distinct places. It was clearly present when I listened  
to ecclesiastical figures talk about the election of a female bishop to be  
primate of the Episcopal Church in the USA. The other is found both in the tone  
and content of the debate on the issue of human sexuality that consumes the  
energy of the Christian Church today. In this column, I want to examine both of 
 these phenomena with the suggestion that they are deeply related.  
A chorus of less than celebratory comments by Anglican Church leaders greeted 
 the election of Katharine Jefferts-Schori to be presiding bishop of the  
Episcopal Church.  
Seeking to be positive, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, sounded 
 more like the sympathy seeker he seems to have become. "Poor Rowan Williams" 
is  the way people refer to him today across the United Kingdom as he 
describes how  difficult his role is. Instead of being the leader he is capable of 
being, he  has become a chronic whiner about the task of keeping Anglican unity 
as if that  is an appropriate vocation for its titular head. In his statement 
about  America's new primate, he welcomed Bishop Jefferts-Schori to her new  
responsibilities and promised to be supportive of her ministry but proclaimed  
that her election would place a strain on the bonds of Anglican unity. I 
presume  that he thinks the continued oppression of women throughout the Communion 
would  somehow strengthen the bonds of Anglican unity. Surely, any student of 
history  will tell you that as new consciousness and values emerge, those who 
have built  power bases on an old consciousness and dying values will be 
threatened and will  seek to defeat the new ideas. History does not move backwards 
and once any  prejudice is debated publicly, it has already begun to die. 
There are no  exceptions to this rule in history.  
The Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, Texas, Jack Iker, greeted Bishop  
Jefferts-Schori's election as primate by immediately appealing to the Archbishop  of 
Canterbury for protection of his institutionalized sexism. There were two  
things pathetically pitiful about this appeal. First, the Archbishop of  
Canterbury has no authority whatsoever over the American Episcopal Church.  Second, 
the ordination of women has been in effect canonically in the American  Church 
for 30 years. Forty percent of the Episcopal clergy are now women, sixty  
percent of our theological students are women, and 15 of our bishops are women.  
All of those steps were achieved according to the canons that bind the  
membership of this church and especially its bishops. There is no authority  beyond 
that of the national governing body of any province of the Anglican  Communion. 
This part of the Christian Church is now and always has been a  confederation 
of national bodies with no central authority. The  once-every-ten-years 
gathering of Anglican bishops of the world is for  consultation only, with the power 
to speak to the churches but never for the  churches. Jack Iker knew all of 
these things when he was ordained priest and  promised to conform "to the 
discipline of this church." He accepted election to  the Episcopal office in a 
church that already had both women priests and women  bishops. I helped him be 
confirmed in his Episcopal post both with my vote and  with my public support 
among progressive bishops. He needed every vote he could  get and squeezed in by 
the narrowest of margins. I supported his election  because I treasure the 
catholic broadness of my church. We are and must be broad  enough to welcome and 
include the Jack Ikers of the world. Now he struggles to  narrow the 
boundaries of this church that had to be stretched to include him, to  the place where 
only he and his few acolytes are members. It is strange logic  but religion 
produces quite irrational manifestations from time to time. Now,  instead of 
facing reality, he wants someone to protect him from having to adjust  to 
reality, but adjust he must. If he cannot do so, he should vacate his office  instead 
of begging for special treatment.  
He is joined in this sad chorus made up of a handful of malcontents, who have 
 cultivated negativity for some years now. They have not won on any issue 
before  this church in the last century, from desegregation, to prayer book 
revision, to  women priests, to women bishops, to inclusion of gay and lesbian 
people. They  portray themselves as God's sole supporters in a world going to 
hell. They  remind me of the lament of Elijah in the book of Kings where the 
prophet  bemoaned the fact that he alone was faithful to God. That story says that 
the  Lord opened his eyes to see thousands who "had not bowed the knee to 
Baal." It  is a peculiar form of mental illness to think that everyone other than 
you is  wrong. The Church has every responsibility to love those that the 
world has left  behind. They are hurting people, fragile people, living in pain. 
However, the  Church has no responsibility to accommodate them, to promise them 
that their  dying point of view and their dated prejudices will be respected. 
They have no  reason to expect that either the Church or the world will slow 
down so that they  can catch up. People complained that the unity of the 
Church was violated when  black people demanded access and equality. Would this 
present group of unity  seekers want the Church to accommodate racism by trying 
to keep the slaveholders  happy? Of course not. In a similar manner, unity is 
not served by tolerating the  sin of patriarchy or the sin of homophobia.  
I remember well the rhetoric of the era when race dominated the church's  
debate. In 1948, when I dared to suggest that all Episcopal young people, black  
and white, should be invited to the Youth Convention of the Diocese, my 
bishop,  Edwin Anderson Penick, said to me: "Jack, the people of the Church in North 
 Carolina are not ready for integration." Which people were not ready, I  
wondered? The black people were quite ready. The younger clergy, whose  
consciences had been raised to the evil of segregation, were quite ready. The  people 
who were not ready were the bigoted ones who were unprepared not just to  give 
up but even to face their prejudice. "The Church," in the name of some  
bizarre definition of unity, coddled them by a continued rejection of people of  
color and their allies until that stance became absurd.  
Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, probably the most backward and 
 fundamentalist Diocese in the entire Anglican Communion, says that the 
battle  over homosexuality is a battle about "the authenticity and authority of  
Scripture." That is absolute balderdash! It is about the misuse of scripture in  
the cause of continued ignorance! For centuries the Bible was quoted on the  
wrong side of every public issue. It was quoted to oppose the Magna Carta, to  
condemn Galileo, to discriminate against Jews, to justify war, to uphold 
slavery  and segregation, to oppress women and to persecute homosexuals. The Bible 
lost  every one of those battles. Peter Jensen is so afraid of reality that, 
more than  anyone I know; he tries to control access to truth in his 
archdiocese. He made  his brother the Dean of the Cathedral in Sydney, appointed his 
son to the  faculty of Moore Theological Seminary in Sydney and employed his 
wife on the  staff of the Archdiocese of Sydney. For a priest to serve in that 
diocese, he  (no she's are allowed) must be a Moore Seminary graduate. For a 
professor to  teach at Moore Seminary, he must be a Moore graduate. Moore 
Theological Seminary  would make Bob Jones University look moderate! Can truth ever 
be engaged by  those who believe they possess it and are afraid to listen to 
anyone else? I  view that as hysteria, not confidence. Archbishop Jensen does 
not know the  difference between freedom and bondage, between power and truth, 
between himself  and God. Why any institution, with leaders like these, would 
appeal to anyone  other than frightened, insecure people who hide from reality, 
simply escapes my  imagination.  
The second question is what is the basis of the Church's claim to possess  som
e expertise on the issues of human sexuality? This is the same group that  
said: "Celibacy is the pathway to holiness." It is far more often the pathway to 
 sexual guilt and to the sexual violation of the weak and vulnerable. This is 
the  institution that said the ideal woman is a "virgin mother," reducing all 
women  to a sense of inadequacy. They defined virtue in women as being a 
"permanent  virgin." I suppose that made sense to the celibate males who did the 
defining,  but it makes sense to no one else. This is the institution that 
tells us that  birth control is evil, that condoms used to stop AIDS even among 
married people  is sinful, that women are defective males and that homosexuals 
are morally  depraved or mentally ill. Is that a track record to inspire 
confidence? This is  the institution that wants to root out homosexuals from 
studying for the  priesthood, but is not about to purge gay men from the ordained 
ranks, where  they now serve at the highest levels and in numbers that are 
breathtakingly  large but real.  
The debate on sexuality inside institutional Christianity is revelatory of  
the fact that this institution parted company with reality years ago. It is on  
the losing side of this battle. It is doing the dance of the dying, 
exhibiting  the final shake of rigor mortis.  
What hope do we have for the future of the Church? My hope is in an  
increasing number of people in groups around the world who want to be Christians  
without closing their minds to new truth. They want to embrace the real world,  
not some fantasyland of make believe. They are small cells watching the Church  
they love from within as it flails away in the losing battle of trying to  
suppress every controversy that emerges when new truth demands attention. They  
are ready for a new day. That new day is coming no matter how desperately the  
Vatican, Canterbury, Church Synods and Councils try to hold it back. I welcome 
 it.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Kurt Kenworth of Claremont, California, writes:  
Recognizing that the Bible consists of many books by many authors over a  
1,000 year period of time, and assuming that no major additions to the Bible  
have been attempted since the King James Version was published 400 years ago or  
so, and further noting that a stupendous amount of information about changes 
in  the secular world, which seem to be accelerating, are now before us do you 
think  a major addition, such as another "testament" or "New Testament No. 2" 
or an  authorized supplement to the Bible (other than modern era 
re-translations that  have been printed even in the 20th century, and which appear to be 
entirely  self-serving) is in order? If so, might such an addition help 
theologians reduce  the irrelevance of their teachings and answer many of the 
questions raised by  your latest book, "The Sins of Scripture?"  
If so, who could write it, who could publish it, and who could be induced to  
read it? Who, of all our religious leaders now in positions of power would be 
in  support of such a development and could be induced to accept it inasmuch 
as,  surely, they would see it as a threat to their power? It might be the 
only way  to make religion relevant again as it once was in ancient times, in my 
opinion.  What do you think?  
Dear Kurt,  
Thank you for your letter and your question. Let me first clarify an issue  
you raise. The King James Version was a translation of the Scriptures not an  
addition to the Scriptures. It was a very important piece of work that utilized 
 the best knowledge available to Christians at that time of history. The 
study of  both language and texts and the discovery of many things about that 
biblical  period of history have served, however, to make the scholarship that 
underlies  the King James translation much less respected in academic circles 
that it once  was.  
The other issue you raise is far more important. That whether or not it was  
proper to close the Canon of scripture when the Church did and to suggest  
thereby that the revelation of God and God's purposes ended about 135 C.E. when  
II Peter, generally regarded as the last book of the New Testament, was 
written.   
Was there no new insight to come out of Christianity after it was recognized  
by Constantine in 313? When Augustine related Christianity to the thoughts of 
 Plato in the 4th and 5th centuries, was none of that worthy of being  
incorporated into the Canon of Christian scripture? When Thomas Aquinas  rethought 
Christianity in the 13th century in terms of the thoughts of  Aristotle, was 
not some part of that work worthy of inclusion? Were there no  voices out of the 
Reformation that rose to the level of scripture? When  liturgies were shaped 
in the 13th century, should not the account of that have  been incorporated 
into our sacred story? If the book of Acts that chronicled  events in the first 
century or epistles that addressed issues in the Church in  the first century 
were thought of as sacred scripture, why not events and issues  that shaped 
Christianity in other centuries?  
Next there is the issue of the voices that were excluded from the Bible by  
our prejudices. No voices of women are heard in the Bible. Did 50% of the human 
 race never think a thought or say a word that we might call "The Word of 
God?"  There are no voices of ethnic minorities. Does the word of God come only 
through  Middle Eastern males? Should Martin Luther King's "Letter from a 
Birmingham  Jail" be read as an epistle to the Church? I consider it a tragedy that 
the  Bible was closed to all new additions in the early years of the second 
century,  when Christianity had just begun its journey through history.  
There are two ways to remedy this. One is the way you suggest. We could  
supplement the Bible with many things. You have identified some of the problems  
of this approach. Who would write it? What would be included? Who would publish 
 it? Who would read it? Given the divisions in Christianity today, I cannot 
see  how agreement or consensus would ever be achieved. In another way, we 
would  simply be lifting other writings into our version of scripture. This 
approach  would also continue the present trend to view the Bible as the 
authoritative  Word of God as the new additions began to be viewed with the same 
authority  claims that we have applied to the old.  
Another way to proceed would be to attack overtly that biblical idolatry by  
which people seem to worship the Bible in general and the New Testament in  
particular instead of God. We need to cease investing this book with claims of  
inerrancy and recognize the Bible for what it is: a compilation of human  
attempts to describe and interpret the meaning found in the critical moments of  
our spiritual development, for that is what the Bible is.  
If we de-emphasized the texts of the scriptures so that those books then  
became important expressions of a special time in Christian history but not the  
inerrant or infallible 'words of God,' then other works could be elevated to  
stand with equality beside the books of the Bible in our unfolding faith 
story.  
I believe that approach has promise.  
John Shelby Spong
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20060810/3da6a10d/attachment-0001.html