[Dialogue] {Spam?} {Disarmed} resend Spong part 1

[KroegerD at aol.com]

 Miracles and the  Resurrection
The Fourth Fundamental, Part I  
In fundamentalist religion there are a number of strange claims made that  
arise primarily out of a lack of biblical knowledge. One of them is the claim  
that the miracles of Jesus, described in the gospels, are proof of his 
divinity.  Only because he is the divine son of God, they say, are these miracles 
possible.  Fundamentalists seem not to realize that miracle stories appear in 
other parts  of the Bible, but those to whom this miraculous power is attributed 
are never  thought of as being divine. In this second column on the Fourth 
Fundamental, I  want to expand our consciousness to an awareness of the miracles 
found in the  Bible that are not attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.  
Much, indeed most, of the Bible is miracle free. In those portions of the  
Torah which fundamentalist religion claims to be the laws of God recorded  
directly from God's dictation, there are in fact no miracle narratives. In the  
writing of the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, there are no miracle stories  
except in the Book of Daniel which was not composed until 160 B.C.E., clearly  
the last book in the Old Testament to be written. The miracles in the book of  
Daniel are of the nature of folk tales about those who are rewarded for being  
faithful to God. One thinks of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abenego who escaped the 
 fiery furnace and of Daniel who escaped the lion's den. There are no miracle 
 stories in the Psalms or in any of the Wisdom literature, like the book of  
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes or the Song of Solomon. In the New Testament Paul 
records  no miracles in any of his epistles and none in the non-Pauline epistles. 
As  fanciful as the book of Revelation is there are no stories there of anyone 
doing  a supernatural act. By and large there are only three places in the 
entire Bible  in which miracles seem to be prominent. All three revolve around 
primary,  pivotal people in the development of the Jewish faith story and their 
immediate  successors. In many ways it is also worth noting that the miracles 
attributed to  their successors do not look like original stories at all, but, 
rather, like the  retelling of narratives that had been first told abut the 
primary figure. The  three places where miracles invade the texts of the Bible 
are in the cycle of  stories that gathered around Moses, the giver of the law 
and founder of the  Jewish nation and his immediate successor Joshua; those 
that gathered around  Elijah, the founder of the prophetic movement and his 
immediate successor  Elisha, and finally, these that gathered around Jesus, the 
life upon which the  Christian faith is built and his immediate successors, the 
Apostles. The ability  to perform miracles, while thus not being attributed to 
many in the Bible, do,  in fact, surround Moses and Elijah, who were such 
pivotal figures in Jewish  history, that when the Jews talked about the essence 
of their faith, they said  it "hangs on the law and the prophets." In that 
phrase they are referring to the  twin pillars of Judaism: Moses, the giver of the 
law and Elijah, the father of  the prophetic movement. It should be no 
surprise that when the story of Jesus  was written, the images of Moses and Elijah 
loomed hugely in the background  thinking of the gospel writers and they even 
made this quite overt by assigning  to Moses and Elijah cameo roles in the 
story of Jesus' transfiguration on top of  the mountain. The purpose of that story 
was to demonstrate that Jesus  transcended the greatness of the two primary 
heroes in the Jewish sacred story.  So the first thing an interpreter of the 
gospels must do, especially the  interpreter of the inter-related synoptic 
gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, is  to grasp the connectedness between the 
miracle stories attributed to both Moses  and Elijah and those attributed to Jesus 
in these gospel accounts. I do not  believe that it is co-incidental that 
miracle stories surround all three of  these religious heroes. I am also convinced 
that any attempt to make sense out  of the miracle stories of the gospels 
must begin with an analysis of the miracle  stories of Moses and Elijah.  
In the Moses stories, God appears to work through Moses to do miraculous  
things in the world of nature. The book of Exodus tells us that Moses first  
meets God in an encounter with a burning bush in the wilderness. The fire seems  
to surround the bush but the bush miraculously is not consumed. It is out of  
that bush that God calls Moses into leadership. This power over nature 
continues  to highlight the Moses story in the book of Exodus. God next equips Moses 
with  miraculous power to be used in negotiations with Pharaoh. On cue, Moses 
can hurl  his staff to the ground and cause it to turn into a snake. Moses can 
stick his  hand into his tunic and then draw it out filled with leprosy. God 
also provides  a cure for this miraculous trick because when Moses sticks his 
leprous hand back  into his tunic, he draws it out clean. These are all stories 
in which Moses is  said to have power over the natural order. That theme is 
continued in the  stories of the plagues against Egypt. Moses becomes God's 
agent in the turning  of the Nile River into blood. This causes the fish to die 
and the frogs to  evacuate those waters. Then come in quick succession the 
plagues of insects,  hailstones, darkness, boils, cattle disease and other horrors 
designed to force  Pharaoh to set the Jewish slave people free. The final 
plague inaugurates the  reign of terror in which the first born male in every 
Egyptian household is  slain by God on the night of the Passover. This is 
followed by the splitting of  the Red Sea so that the Israelites can cross it to 
safety, but it closes just in  time to drown all the Egyptians. Next while in the 
wilderness comes the raining  of heavenly bread called manna on the Israelites 
when they were hungry. That is  not a complete list of Moses' ability to 
perform miracles, but it should be  sufficient to make the point that in the Bible 
Moses possesses the miraculous  power to manipulate the created order, to 
control the elements in the world of  nature like water, as God's instrument on 
behalf of his nation. Nature miracles  are thus a significant factor in the 
cycle of Moses stories.  
When Moses is succeeded by Joshua, some of his miraculous power appears to  
make its way into the Joshua narrative. Joshua is also confronted by a body of  
water that impedes God's people so he too splits the water, this time the  
swollen and flooded Jordan River instead of the Red Sea, so that the Jews can  
walk across on dry land. When Joshua faces his enemies in Jericho, he causes 
the  walls to fall down miraculously, so as to win a great military victory over 
the  city. When he is confronted by the possibility that the Ammonites might 
avoid  total defeat on the battlefield by escaping in the falling darkness of 
evening,  Joshua asks God to stop the sun in the sky so that daylight will not 
disappear  until the Ammonites are destroyed. All of the miracles attributed 
to Joshua  appear to be drawn from the Moses story in that all are nature 
miracles simply  being retold about Joshua. That was the way Jewish writers 
portrayed the idea  that God, once present with Moses, was now present with Joshua. 
Miraculous power  over nature belonged to God, but Moses and Joshua were the 
lives through which  that power was deployed.  
Last week we observed that nature miracles were one of the three kinds of  
miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Among Jesus' nature miracles was  
his ability to control things like wind and water. Jesus' power to walk on the  
water might be an even greater demonstration of miraculous power than 
splitting  the Red Sea and would be an attempt to show Jesus as acting with expanded 
Moses  power. While Moses could pray to God to send manna on the starving 
Israelites in  the wilderness, Jesus, portrayed as the new and greater Moses, 
could with his  own power expand loaves and fish to feed a similar hungry 
multitude in the  wilderness. All of the nature miracles attributed to Jesus appear to 
be expanded  Moses stories and they were written to serve an interpretive 
process, rather  than to be simply supernatural acts. They were saying that in 
the person of  Jesus we have met a presence of God even greater than the one our 
ancestors  encountered in Moses, the holiest life Jewish people have ever 
known. It was  their attempt to make their words big enough to embrace the wonder 
and mystery  that they encountered in Jesus.  
If that is true, and I believe it is, the narratives about nature miracles in 
 the gospels are not historical events in which supernatural power was  
demonstrated at all, they are interpretive Moses stories raised to the 'nth'  power 
by Jesus' disciples and retold about Jesus of Nazareth. When Western  people, 
who did not know how to read these essentially Jewish stories, they  simply 
misinterpreted these stories as descriptive accounts of literal events  that 
had occurred in real time. Western people only seemed able to ask the  typical 
objective question: "Did this event really happen?" Those who answer  this 
question with a "Yes," asserting that it really happened because Jesus did  it 
with his divine power and all we must do is to believe the Bible, become the  
uncritical traditionalists, the unthinking fundamentals, and thus the purveyors  
of a religion of certainty. Those who answer that question with a "No,"  
asserting that such miracles cannot really happen, become the skeptics, the  church 
dropouts, the citizens of the "Secular City" and the members of the  Church 
Alumni Association. Both answers, however, miss the point because they do  not 
understand the Jewish tradition of story telling.  
The nature miracles in the gospel are not descriptions of events that ever  
happened, they are expanded Moses stories designed to help people interpret the 
 power of the Jesus experience. This insight opens us to a new way to look at 
the  miracles. Could this idea also illumine the healing miracles and those 
miracles  purporting to say that Jesus had the power to raise the dead back to 
life? That  becomes the question crying out for an answer. Tune in next week 
as this series  continues.  
John Shelby Spong _Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is 
available now at bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Clarence from Cincinnati, Ohio, a member of DignityUSA, the national  
organization for gay and lesbian Catholics, asks:  
What is your knowledge of the number of priests in the Episcopal Church who  
are gay and openly accepted, versus those whose ministry is rejected because 
of  their gay identity?  
Dear Clarence,  
Statistics are hard to demonstrate in the absence of honest data. An African  
bishop told me once that there are no homosexuals in Africa. "It is," he  
declared, "an English disease." I could have shown him my file of letters from  
gay Africans, a file that includes both clergy and bishops. In an Episcopal  
Diocese in the United States where the bishop is quite homophobic and  
persecutory of gay clergy, they say they have "no gay clergy." My experience in  these 
dioceses again and again gives the lie to those assertions.  
There are other dioceses in the Episcopal Church, like Newark, New York, Long 
 Island, Washington, Maryland, Indianapolis, Chicago, Rochester, Minnesota 
and  Los Angeles, where openly gay and lesbian clergy serve with distinction and 
win  full acceptance. When I retired as the Bishop of Newark in 2000, we 
could count  35 openly gay or lesbian clergy serving congregations, 31 of whom 
were living  quite publicly with their partners, and four of whom were single. As 
acceptance  grew in our diocese in the 80's and 90's, more and more of our 
clergy found the  courage to come out to their congregations and, in some cases, 
even to  themselves. I suspect, if anything, that this number has grown in 
the years  since my retirement.  
I do not believe that I know an Episcopal priest who was removed from his or  
her priesthood for being gay or lesbian, although I have heard of that 
happening  and I am sure there have been many in the past. My sense is that bishops, 
 including anti-homosexual bishops, have developed a kind of code language 
which  allows them to "know without knowing." Many of them have also developed a 
modus  operandi of condemning homosexuality verbally but accommodating it 
privately.  
I knew an evangelical Anglican bishop in England, now retired, who headed a  
large southern diocese, who was a bitter, condemning, outspoken opponent of  
homosexuality in public, but who regularly assigned clergy who were partners to 
 adjacent parishes. As long as they did not live in a single rectory, 
parsonage  or vicarage, it seemed to be no problem to this bishop, who always claimed 
that  he did not know they were partners. That stance has little integrity in 
my mind,  but duplicity and dishonesty have never bothered the church nearly 
as much as  sex has.  
In almost every Episcopal seminary in this country we have gay and lesbian  
students preparing for ordination. In many of them, gay faculty members are 
both  known and appreciated. In my own seminary in Virginia some 15 or so years 
ago, I  engaged in a debate with the Bishop of Central Florida on 
homosexuality. The  seminary had maintained to me that they had no gay students. However, 
after the  debate, my wife Christine and I took Virginia Seminary's gay 
students out to  dinner. It was a round table and it was full! A gay Roman Catholic 
priest also  joined us.  
I cannot, therefore, give you statistics because I don't trust the rhetoric.  
My professional guess is that if we could get honest statistics, the 
percentage  of Roman Catholic clergy who are gay would astound the public. The 
percentage of  gay and lesbian clergy in the Episcopal Church would be higher than 
most now  believe, but because the ordained ranks of my church are open to 
married  persons, it would not be as high as the number in the Catholic priesthood. 
I  personally know clergy who are gay or lesbian in the Methodist, 
Presbyterian,  Unity, Lutheran, Religious Science, United Church of Christ, American 
Baptist,  Southern Baptist, Pentecostal and Unitarian churches. I have close 
friends who  are gay Roman Catholic priests. However, I do not have any way to 
gauge the  accuracy of my professional guesses about the numbers in the entire  
denomination..  
I do know that we have twice as many left-handed Episcopal priests than there 
 are left-handed people present in the national population. I'm not sure that 
I  understand what that means either. If you have a theory let me know.  
Thanks for being with me at the Dignity USA Conference for gay Catholics.  
John Shelby Spong 



************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at 
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20070817/e67eff67/attachment-0001.html