[Dialogue] Spong on miracles and Buddism resend

[KroegerD at aol.com]

September 6, 2006 
Miracles in the Bible, Part II  
There is a great desire among religious people for quick answers to  complex 
issues. "What is the meaning of prayer? What do you believe about life  after 
death? Do you believe in Miracles?" These are questions that I am often  asked 
when giving lectures, where I am limited to only a few minutes for each  
response. The fact is that none of these questions can be competently addressed  
until I have unloaded the dated and inoperative assumptions out of which they 
so  frequently have arisen. It is, for example, difficult to address questions 
about  prayer, God or miracles until some time is spent clearing out the 
intellectual  debris about what prayer is not (adult letters addressed to a Santa 
Claus-type  God), or what God is not (a supernatural parental Mr. Fixit in the 
sky), or what  miracles are not (divine intervention to rescue us from peril). 
When I hear  someone talk about the miracles that they believe have happened 
in their lives,  I wonder if they have ever stopped to think about the 
hundreds of thousands of  people who lived in similar circumstances where there were 
no miracles.  
This long and roundabout introduction is designed to warn my readers that, if 
 this series of columns on the miracle stories found in the Bible is to be  
worthwhile, I will have to prepare the ground to give us the context in which  
the real issues can be addressed. Only then can appropriate understandings be  
formed. I intend to go slowly into this process for the theological 
implications  that are involved are serious. I will be happy if I can lead my readers 
to at  least one new insight in each column as I pursue this topic periodically 
through  the coming fall.  
I begin by challenging some common but uninformed ideas. Most people assume  
that the Bible is filled with stories of supernatural happenings and 
miraculous  interventions. Yet in the whole of the Bible, miracle stories are found in 
only  a very small number of places. Indeed there are only three cycles of 
stories in  the entire biblical drama that contain widespread accounts of 
supernatural  miracles. First, miracles are encountered in the Moses-Joshua 
narratives in the  Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) followed 
by the Book  of Joshua in which Moses' successor is said to be able to act 
with the power of  Moses. It is too early in this study to draw any conclusions 
about connections  between the miracles attributed to Moses and those 
attributed to Jesus, but we  might note that Moses is mentioned in the gospels 37 
times, in the book of Acts  19 times, in the Pauline epistles 8 times, in 
non-Pauline epistles, especially  the Epistle to the Hebrews, 13 times and once in the 
book of Revelation. That at  the very least gives us some sense that the two 
narratives were not completely  separate from each other.  
The miracles attached to Moses are almost all nature miracles and some of  
them are quite bizarre. Moses, for example is said to be equipped with the  
ability to turn his staff into a snake, to stick his hand into his tunic and to  
pull it out filled with leprosy and then to return it to his tunic in order to  
pull it out clean. These were signs supposedly given him by God so that he 
could  successfully negotiate the release of God's people from slavery in Egypt. 
When  these miracles proved to be inadequate for that task, Moses' power over 
nature  was heightened into the stories of the plagues that were inflicted on 
Egypt,  beginning with turning the Nile River, the lifeline of the Egyptian 
economy,  into blood and ending with the killing of the firstborn male in every 
Egyptian  household on the night of the Passover. Nature miracles continued 
to mark the  life of Moses after the Exodus from Egypt with the splitting of 
the Red Sea  being the best known. There were also the stories of the miraculous 
raining down  from heaven of bread called manna upon the starving Israelites 
in the wilderness  and the miraculous flight of quail to provide "flesh to 
eat" that would balance  their diet.  
It is interesting to note that in each of these miracle stories, Moses was  
the instrument of God's supernatural power. That power did not reside in him. 
It  is also worth noting that some of those Moses stories reveal a use of  
supernatural power that would, by our standards today, be declared to be acts of  
immorality. The enemies that God seems to hate are the same ones that the 
people  of the Jewish tribe hate. The plagues inflicted by an angry God, are 
designed to  destroy the lives of those who are the enemies of the tribe for which 
this God  is the tribal deity. That is simply not worthy divine behavior. The 
biblical  portrayal of God as passing through the land of Egypt 
indiscriminately murdering  the firstborn male in every Egyptian household on the night of 
the Passover,  needs to be named for the immoral act that it is. So my study 
leads me to  challenge the assumption that if something is described as a 
miracle it is  necessarily either good or moral.  
Joshua, Moses' chosen successor, was also said to have been endowed with  
Moses' same God-given power, so nature miracles also appear to mark his life.  
Two of these miracles are quite well known. First Joshua, like Moses, splits a  
body of water so that the people of Israel could pass through it on dry land.  
This occurred in Joshua's invasion of the land of Canaan. Following that  
"miraculous" crossing through the flooded Jordan River, Joshua then proceeded to  
rout in battle the Canaanites, whose ancestors had lived on that land for  
literally hundreds of years. The Bible provides Joshua with the moral pretext  
that God had promised Abraham that this land would be the possession of his  
descendants. If such a promise were given, it would have been about 1850 B.C.E.  
Joshua is dated about 1200 B.C.E. So for some 650 years no one had told the  
Canaanites that they were squatters on Jewish land! That is obviously not a 
God  the Canaanites would have had any interest in worshiping.  
However, Joshua was not through with nature miracles for just a few chapters  
later in the book that bears his name, Israel is at war with the Amorites.  
Israel is winning the battle, but the sun begins to sink in the west and that  
will provide the Amorites with sufficient cover of darkness to escape death at 
 the hands of the Israelites. So Joshua prayed to God and God stops the sun 
in  the sky, the first recorded instance of daylight-saving time, for the sole  
purpose of allowing Israel to slaughter more of their enemies. Is that an  
appropriate divine intervention? Could the Amorites ever worship so vindictive a 
 deity? If we defend the literal occurrences of the supernatural, then we 
have to  face the question as to whether God-sanctioned actions might sometimes 
be evil.  That is a conclusion few people entertain when they think of the 
miraculous.  
The second series of miraculous biblical accounts is found in the  
Elijah-Elisha cycle of stories recorded between I Kings 17 and II Kings 13. Once  again, 
we note that these are primarily nature miracle stories. Elijah is  portrayed 
as having the ability to call down fire from heaven to ignite his  sacrifice 
in a duel with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel after which Elijah  calmly 
beheads them all. Later, Elijah uses this heavenly firepower to burn up  his 
enemies. Both Elijah and Elisha are said to be able to manipulate the forces  
of nature sufficiently to produce a drought. Both Elijah and Elisha have 
stories  told about them in which they too are able to split the waters of the 
Jordan  River to walk across on dry land.  
Healing miracles, however, do make their appearance in the Bible in this  
Elijah-Elisha cycle. These two prophets are also said to be the first people in  
the Bible who have the power to raise the dead back to life. Elijah, like 
Moses,  exercised enormous influence on the development of the sacred story of the 
Jews  and this influence is seen in the fact that Elijah's name receives 
mention 27  times in the gospels, once in a Pauline epistle and once in the 
epistle of  James.  
So long before the time of Jesus, we discover that miracles are not something 
 unknown in the Jewish faith story, but that they are limited to the two 
major  heroes of Judaism, Moses, the father of the law and Elijah, the father of 
the  prophetic movement as well as their immediate successors. When we do turn 
to  examine the miracle stories attributed to Jesus, we find that they fall 
into  three categories: nature miracles, healing miracles and raising the dead  
miracles, and that each category has been previously introduced into the  
biblical story in these two earlier cycles of miracle stories. Some  intermingling 
of these three traditions would not be surprising.  
A second popular assumption that needs to be questioned, arises when we  
realize that it was not until some 40 to 70 years after the earthly life of  Jesus 
came to an end, that the gospels were written. They are not eyewitness  
reports. Can we find any evidence of miracles being associated with Jesus before  
the gospels were written? The fact is that we cannot. There are no miracle  
stories in Paul who wrote between 50 and 64. Had Paul never heard of this  
tradition? Had he heard about it and dismissed it as not authentic? Was the  miracle 
tradition added to the memory of Jesus well after the fact? Giving at  least 
some credibility to this latter possibility, we note that there are no  
miracle stories in either the Q document or the Gospel of Thomas, which are the  
only other two sources that at least some scholars think might be earlier than  
the gospels.  
For now I ask you simply to absorb these facts and to entertain these  
questions. It is too early for conclusions. Nothing has yet been proved. An  
argument from silence is not a strong argument. However, if Paul had no need to  
buttress his claims for the presence of God as the operative force in the life  of 
Jesus, at least I think we might suggest that the power of Christ was not  
originally attached to his ability to do miraculous acts. That raises the  
possibility that miracle stories were added to the memory of Jesus for some  
purpose other than that they were recordings of things that happened. We will  
revisit this possibility again before this series is complete.  
That is as far as I can go this week. I hope the discussion is beginning to  
intrigue my readers.  
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 
Brenan Nierman of Falls Church, VA, writes:  
First of all, let me say that, if I can still consider myself a Christian, it 
 is thanks to you and your work. As a former Catholic, I can only contrast 
your  message of the God of Love with the God of Judgment that we find in vir
tually  all the modern popes with the (miraculous?) exception of John XXIII. But 
I  sometimes find myself wondering: why not just do as I have done and 
identify  oneself primarily as a Buddhist? The Buddha isn't God, he's just another 
human  being who, like Jesus, pointed the way for his fellow humans to find 
peace and  liberation from suffering. Scholars like Marcus Borg have indicated the 
 similarities between Jesus and the Buddha; and indeed, great and inspiring  
people like Thich Nhat Hahn have indicated this in their work as well.  
Both Jesus and the Buddha point to the transforming power of love/compassion  
that there is to be found in all of us. I think that the traditional 
teachings  on what has happened to Jesus (sitting at the right hand of God) and the 
Buddha  (becoming one with the universe) are basically the same myths trying to 
capture  something that, so far, lies beyond the experience of most of us. 
(Similarly, on  a recent trip to Vietnam, I was struck by the function that the 
bodhissatva of  compassion Quan Am plays in Vietnamese Buddhism - much the role 
of the Virgin  Mary has in Catholicism.) Part of me suspects that the reason 
why such writers  as you and Thich Nhat Hahn do NOT advocate Westerners 
becoming Buddhists is  because we have been raised in a culture that, if it supports 
any spirituality,  does so from a Christian perspective.  
But for some of us, it is precisely the distortion of these cultural aspects  
of the Christian message that makes it so hard to see Jesus without what I 
call  "spiritual interference." For Catholics such as myself, it might be the 
spectre  of the church cover-ups of the abuse of so many children by its 
shepherds, or  the appalling cost wrought by Paul VI with his encyclical on birth 
control.  Maybe it is the reluctance of bishops to permit women to even serve as 
altar  girls, let alone priests and bishops. Maybe some members of the Church 
Alumni  Club have been so worn out trying to see Jesus past the figures of Pat 
Robertson  and Jerry Falwell that they have forgotten how God's power shines 
through such  contemporary figures as Martin Luther King, William Sloane 
Coffin, John Dear,  Daniel Berrigan, Joan Chittester and yourself. Am I on to 
something here?  Basically my question is, since the Church is so in need of 
reform, and since  conservative power is so entrenched, why not become a Buddhist? 
Or is there  really a difference I am missing?  
Dear Brenan,  
You raise a fascinating issue. I have read Thich Nhat Hahn with great  
pleasure and admire the Buddhism that I know. I have a friend in England who,  
though still an Anglican priest, describes himself as a Christian Buddhist  
Atheist. I'm not sure I know what that means but it certainly combines some  
interesting words not normally associated with each other.  
I have had the privilege of engaging in an afternoon long dialogue with a  
Buddhist monk in China and with a group of three Hindu scholars in a daylong  
event in India. Out of these two experiences, I came to an awareness that there  
is great similarity in the religions of the world in the questions that they 
all  seek to answer. They are, after all, profound human questions. The 
differences  appeared in the ways the various traditions sought to answer these 
human  questions. Answers come out of culture, environment, and circumstances and  
reflect the worldview of the area in which those religious systems arose. I 
do  not know why that surprises anyone. There is no such thing as God language. 
We  have only human language to use and that is always a reflection of the 
tribe,  the culture and the history that produced the language. I find little 
value in  suggesting that people change religions unless they also change 
cultures. I  doubt if a westerner could ever really plumb the depths of an eastern 
religion  although some certainly try to do so. I much prefer to have people 
search out  all that their own religious tradition offers, purging the 
distortions,  abandoning the things that have become literalized and separating out all 
the  political compromises that every religious tradition has made on its 
walk  through history. I seek the essence of Christianity beyond the Scriptures 
that  were written well after the life of Jesus, beyond the creeds that are 
third and  fourth century creations or even beyond the familiar words of our 
liturgies that  were shaped most dramatically by the 13th century. Our search for 
truth must  always go beyond our own religious tradition unless we assume that 
'the Holy'  can be bound by the words of a 2000-3000 year old religious 
system. I do not  believe that God is a Christian or a Buddhist. Yet both 
Christianity and  Buddhism have pointed hundreds of millions of people toward the 
mystery of God.  
I walk the Christ path with both joy and expectation. My sense is that I have 
 only just begun to explore the depths of Christianity. I would not want to 
stop  this wonderful pilgrimage to start over in another tradition.  
Thank you for your question.  
John Shelby Spong 
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