[Dialogue] Spong on aq bunch of bible stuff (yawn!)

[KroegerD at aol.com]

November 22, 2006 
Debating a Fundamentalist in  Orlando 
Marcus Borg did it. John Dominic Crossan did it. The clear implication of  
the person issuing this invitation was that I should do it too. He wanted me to  
participate in a debate in Orlando, Florida, under the auspices of something  
called Sovereign Christian Cruises; an evangelical organization that does 
indeed  do cruises. My debating partner was described as an "Evangelical Scholar 
and  author" named Dr. James R. White. Evangelicals write many books, all of 
which  are published by evangelical publishing houses about which no one 
outside  evangelical circles has ever heard. They teach in evangelical seminaries 
that  award numerous doctoral degrees, but could never be accredited by a 
recognizable  academic source. None of these comments mean that these evangelicals 
are not  bright or that they are evil. It does mean that they have closed minds 
and live  in a religious world that passed out of existence long ago. Dr. 
James R. White  clearly met all of these criteria. The title of the proposed 
debate indicated as  much: "Is homosexuality compatible with authentic, biblical, 
orthodox  Christianity?" Each of those three adjectives modifying the noun 
"Christianity"  were clearly defined in the minds of this organization in such a 
way that only  evangelicals really embodied Christianity, all others being 
'non-authentic,' non  'biblical' or non 'orthodox.' The executive head of 
Sovereign Cruises could not  have been more gracious or desirous of bringing off this 
debate. My wife,  Christine, who does all of our scheduling, convinced me 
that once in a while it  is worth listening to those who see things so 
differently, especially if it is  in Florida in the winter!  
I never prepare for an event until it is next on my schedule. About a week  
before this debate, I looked at the details. It was to be three-hours with  
opening statements, rebuttals, mutual interrogations and closing statements,  
followed by questions from the audience.  
My experience debating religious conservatives is that the pre-suppositions  
we bring to the debate are so different that there is no real area in which  
significant dialogue can occur. This is particularly true when the subject is  
homosexuality and the proponent has a view of scripture that claims for these  
words the extravagant declaration that God is their author. Nothing happened 
in  Orlando that changed my mind on that subject.  
My debating partner turned out to be the director of the "Alpha and Omega  
Ministries," a Christian apologetic organization based in Phoenix, Arizona." I  
had never heard of him, but had no reason to believe that he would be 
different  from other fundamentalists. He wasn't.  
Dr. White was at first genial and quite pleasant, but a staunch defender of  
what he believed was orthodoxy. That included defending the Bible as the 
literal  "Word of God." He would not admit differences in the various texts of the  
gospels or even the fact that the Jesus story grew dramatically from the  
earliest gospel, Mark, written about 70 CE to the last gospel, John, written  abo
ut 100 CE. He did not seem to be aware that both Matthew and Luke had copied  
much of Mark into their gospels, nor that each had felt free to add, to 
delete,  to change and even to heighten the miraculous in Mark's text. One certainly 
does  not do that to the literal words of God! He could not accept the fact 
that  Matthew introduced the Virgin Birth story in the 9th decade; that neither 
Paul  nor Mark appear to have heard about such a tradition. Paul says Jesus 
was "born  of a woman, born under the law." The word woman here has no hint of 
virgin in  it. Mark, the original gospel, portrays Jesus as being fully human 
until God  enters him, not through a miraculous birth, but through the 
outpouring of the  Holy Spirit at his adult baptism. Mark also portrays Jesus' mother 
as seeking to  put him away because he was "beside himself." She seemed never 
to have heard of  his supernatural origins.  
To these questions, Dr. White offered the clue that "scripture must be used  
to interpret scripture." That argument was developed only after the Protestant 
 Reformation, when finally people had the opportunity to read the Bible for  
themselves. Then they discovered numbers of contradictions in the texts that 
are  both obvious and inescapable in a volume made up of 66 separate books, 
written  by a variety of authors over a thousand years of history from about 1000 
B.C.E.  to 135 C.E. To blunt the impact of these contradictions on their 
literal Bible,  Protestant Christians developed the theory that all scripture must 
be harmonized  into a single non-contradictory message. That could be 
accomplished, the  argument said, only when "scripture is used to interpret 
scripture," which set  up an amazing gallery of irrational hoops that the interpreter 
had to navigate.  James White did not seem to understand how circular this 
argument was. Perhaps  that is because his whole theory of interpreting the 
scriptures as "inerrant"  depends on "quoting the Bible to prove the Bible's 
accuracy." If your  perspective is kept in tact by a circular argument, then one does 
not recognize  a circular argument used to defend a circular argument.  
James White did not seem able to admit that the Bible had been quoted to  
support slavery for over 1800 years and to oppress women for over 1900 years. He  
sought to defend that by stating that men and women were different. He  
illustrated that with the fact that his wife had more shoes than he did. It was  
cute, but it missed the point. Separate but equal is a discredited argument left 
 over from the days of segregation. "Separate but equal" is always separate, 
but  never equal. The Bible has been used to justify the victimization of 
women for  far too long by that threadbare argument. It is still going on today in 
both  church and state.  
Dr. White seemed upset most of all that I had not studied his books,  
especially his book entitled, "The Same Sex Controversy," published by his  Christian 
fundamentalist publisher and reviewed in no credible journals of which  I am 
aware. This was, however, just part of his greater complaint that main line  
scholars never bother to engage what he called, "The serious biblical work of  
evangelical scholars." In his criticism, the implication was that if they did  
they would not be so rejecting of the evangelical interpretations that came 
from  their scriptural work.  
Unfortunately that is not the problem. Evangelical writing is not engaged by  
academics because it is not regarded as worth engaging. That is not to sound  
either harsh or arrogant. It is to face reality. No one thinks of these 
people  as somehow evil, they certainly are not. They are ignored because they 
continue  to fight battles that have been settled and about which there is no 
further  debate. I don't read articles written by members of the Flat Earth 
Society  either. James White seems to believe that evolution is still an open 
question  and, like Don Quixote, he battles against it mightily. I am not interested 
in  revisiting the Scopes trial. That battle is over. He thinks homosexuality 
is a  choice and he wants to change homosexuals through his religion. I do 
not know of  any reputable doctor or scientist who still salutes that point of 
view and I  regard anyone who tries to change a person's sexual orientation as 
not only  ignorant, but as practicing medicine without a license, for which 
they should be  criminally prosecuted. He believes that the Bible is the 
dictated word of God  and claims that this was what Jesus actually taught. Yet Jesus 
never saw a  gospel or an epistle since the New Testament was written well 
after his  crucifixion. Ultimate truth is not capable of being captured in a 
2000-3000  year-old book, whose authors believed in a three-tiered universe; 
regarded  epilepsy and mental illness as the result of demon possession and 
sickness as  divine punishment. Truth is experienced in our world as ever expanding. 
In the  words of James Russell Lowell, "time makes ancient good uncouth."  
I want to be part of a Christianity that will engage the truth and I am not  
interested in wasting my time by engaging the thoughts of those who are not  
living in the real world. I believe that our understanding of God had to be  
revised when the Copernican Revolution destroyed the divine dwelling place above 
 the sky in a three-tiered universe. I believe our understanding of miracle 
and  magic had to be revised when Isaac Newton introduced us to natural law and 
when  weather patterns were no longer understood to be the means through 
which God  punished sinners. I believe that the biblical idea that we are a little 
lower  than angels had to be revised when we discovered through Darwin that 
we are only  a bit higher than apes. I believe that the way in which the Jesus 
story is told  must be rethought when we no longer see ourselves as people 
created perfect in  God's image, who then fell into sin through an act of 
disobedience that  corrupted all human life, which necessitated a divine rescue 
operation  accomplished on the cross. We are rather incomplete people still 
emerging out of  billions of years of evolutionary history, who need not rescue but 
the power to  escape our survival mentality and to achieve a new consciousness 
of our oneness  with God who is the source of the life that is within us.  
If none of these things have been engaged by those who call themselves  
"biblical, authentic and orthodox" Christians, then debate is of little value  and 
not a good use of time. That was true with Dr. White, whose mind has not yet  
entered the world I inhabit. He is appropriately fearful of that world, for to 
 enter it would result in the collapse of his security system.  
I'm sure that James White viewed me as one as close-minded as I viewed him. I 
 am in fact closed to his world of a parent God beyond the sky, who dictates 
the  divine rules and who rewards those who obey them and punishes those who 
do not.  I have no desire to engage this God of fear, threat and wrath. If that 
is the  only God there is, I believe the world would be better off to rid 
itself of such  a deity. It is because I believe that God is so much more than 
this that I  refuse to give up the quest for a new way to understand the God 
experience that  I believe is real. I am also quite willing to accept as part of 
the price of  that quest that I will be criticized, misunderstood and even 
abused by the  closed-minded, fearful defenders of the God of yesterday. These 
people never  really know how offensive they are. For some, ignorance is bliss.  
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 
Cheryl Leonard from Toronto, Canada, writes:  
Thank you for inspiring me to think! Your message is very relevant to the  
teens I teach. You mention that Jesus did not die for our sins (I agree). My  
teens believe that Jesus died for the resurrection to happen. What are your  
thoughts?  
Dear Cheryl,  
I am not sure that anyone can say why Jesus died. The fact is that he did and 
 it appears to have been violent. It left his disciples with many questions 
about  the meaning of both his life and his death.  
In seeking to answer these questions, the formation of Christian doctrines  
began; Paul started us on the track of saying Jesus "died for our sins in  
accordance with the Scriptures.' Mark built on that idea by referring to Jesus'  
death as a "ransom."  
Behind both of these understandings was the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom  
Kippur) when a lamb was sacrificed for the sins of the people, to ransom them  
from the punishment that their sins required. It probably made sense in that  
Jewish world for it expressed the human yearning to be at one with God and to  
face liturgically that deep sense of human alienation. When Christianity left  
its Jewish world, those ideas got understood in terms of a legal contract and  
God became an ogre who demanded a human sacrifice and a blood offering. Jesus 
 became the victim of an abusive heavenly father and you and I became 
burdened  with the guilt of having been responsible for his death. Jesus died for my 
sins  became the mantra of Evangelical Christianity and the Mass as a 
re-enactment of  Jesus' sacrifice on the cross became the center of Catholic liturgy. 
Part of  what is going on in Christianity today is that these literalized 
concepts have  reached a point of revulsion.  
It is also not quite right to say that Jesus died for the Resurrection to  
happen. That is also to ascribe literal purpose to an event of history. At the  
very least, the Resurrection became the lens through which the death of Jesus  
became to be understood.  
The meaning of the Resurrection is in my opinion far more than just that, but 
 that is clearly a part of it. I discuss the resurrection of Jesus in great  
detail in my book "Resurrection: Myth or Reality." Unfortunately, in a 
question  and answer format, I cannot do more than point you to that source.  
Thank you for your letter.  
John Shelby Spong 
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