[Dialogue] First Fundmental

[KroegerD at aol.com]

March 28, 2007 
The First of the Five  "Fundamentals:" The Bible is the Inerrant Word of God! 
 

"God wrote it! I believe it! That does it!" Those words adorned the bumper of 
 a car I saw in the deep South. "This is the word of the Lord!" That is a  
liturgical phrase heard after the scriptures are read in many Christian  
churches. "The Bible says!" "It's in the Bible!" Those are phrases frequently  heard 
in religious debate. When these phrases are introduced there is a sense  that 
this is the last word and that no higher appeal to truth can be cited. The  
"inerrant word of God" has, however, supported throughout history a wide variety 
 of completely discredited practices. The Bible was quoted to claim that 
kings  rule by divine right, that the earth is the center of the universe around 
which  the sun rotates, that slavery, segregation and apartheid are legitimate 
and  moral social institutions, that women must be kept in second class 
positions,  that evolution is wrong and that homosexuality is a condition condemned 
by God.  In each of these cultural debates the Bible has lost! Despite these 
constant  defeats the tenacity of this irrational and patently absurd idea is 
still  asserted. It is therefore not surprising to discover that the claim of 
inerrancy  for the scriptures as the "Word of God" would be the first line 
drawn in the  sand when the beleaguered conservative Protestants struck back 
against the  modern world in the early 1900's. They seemed not to be aware that 
this claim  reflects both an almost total ignorance of biblical scholarship and 
has been the  source of enormous human evil over the years of Christian 
history. Behind every  burned heretic, at the heart of every debilitating human 
prejudice that has ever  plagued the Western World, the justifying claim of 
biblical inerrancy can still  be heard. If that claim is an essential ingredient in 
Christianity, then surely  the Christian God is destined to join Marduk, Baal 
and the gods of the Olympus  in the museums of human history in an exhibit of 
"Dead Deities." The fact that  even today in 2007 religious leaders like Jerry 
Falwell, Pat Robertson, Albert  Mohler and a host of lesser known lights can 
still utter this claim without a  gullible public being convulsed with laughter 
at its absurdity is proof of the  tenacity of religious superstition and of 
the enduring human, but nonetheless  neurotic, need for certainty.  
Attacks on a fundamentalist view of the Bible as the literal word of God are  
still interpreted in conservative religious circles as if they are attacks on 
 the Bible itself, on God, on Christianity and even on religion. The 
television  screens and radio airwaves are still filled by those who believe that this 
claim  continues to possess some shred of credibility. It doesn't! And that 
needs to be  said loudly and consistently not just by those who are religious 
critics, but by  those of us who are Christians, who worship God regularly, who 
treasure the  Bible and who find in the Bible truths that we do not care to 
sacrifice or lose.  So I plan in this column to examine this first principle of 
the "Five  Fundamentals" that the Bible is "the inerrant word of God."  
This claim assumes first that the Bible is somehow a single entity with a  
single ultimate author. It is neither. The Bible is made up of 66 books, more if 
 one includes the Apocrypha, written by a large number of authors, most of 
whom  are completely unknown. Moses did not write the Torah (Genesis, Exodus,  
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). Indeed Moses had been dead for 300 years  
before the first words of the Torah were written. The Torah achieved its 
present  form over a period of some 500 plus years from about 960 B.C.E. at the 
earliest  to the mid-fourth century BCE at the latest. So the first question that 
must be  asked is: "Why did it take God so long to finish the divine 
dictation of God's  word? When we read the entire text of the Bible we next ask how 
could something  be the "the Word of God" that supports, as it does, the 
institution of slavery,  treats women as property, and calls for the death penalty 
for those who worship  false gods, commit adultery or disobey their parents? 
Reading more closely we  ask how a text could be called "The Word of God" when it 
portrays God as hating  the Egyptians, killing the first born male in every 
Egyptian household and  rejoicing over the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red 
Sea? How can the Psalms  be "the Word of God" when they call "happy" those 
who dash the heads of their  enemies' children against the rocks? If this is the 
"Word of God" then Jesus is  either wrong when he called us to love our 
enemies or God is terribly confused.  
"Softer" fundamentalists might retreat from such a hard line in regard to  
what they call the Old Testament, reflecting in that comment a latent  
anti-Semitism, but when one moves to the New Testament, their attitude stiffens  
considerably. However, the facts are no more credible there than anywhere else  when 
this strange claim is uttered. Not one of the gospels, for example, was the  
work of an eye witness. All are based on hearsay. Everything that we purport 
to  know about the life of Jesus was transmitted orally over a period of 40-70 
years  before the process of writing the gospels began. Mark, the first 
gospel, forms  the basis of both Matthew and Luke, each of whom we can demonstrate 
edit,  correct, add to, delete from, and contradict Mark. One does not correct 
"the  Word of God." One does correct the words of Mark. Matthew and Luke did 
just that  rather freely.  
The authors of the gospels even misquote, perhaps deliberately, their Old  
Testament sources to make them better fit their particular agenda. They assume  
things that educated modern men and women could never assume, like the idea 
that  mental illness and epilepsy are caused by demon possession, that clay made 
with  spittle can bring sight to one born blind, that menstruation makes a 
woman  unclean or that the way to return to God is to rise up into the sky. Such 
an  ascension will not get one to heaven, but into orbit. If the gospels are 
"the  Word of God" then God appears to be badly misinformed about the nature 
of the  world.  
Are Paul's letters "the Word of God?" Of course not! They are the words of  
Paul, a brilliant, God-filled first century man, who was also limited,  
opinionated, prejudiced and warped. When people quote him to justify treating  women 
as less than human, to assert the necessity of women covering their heads  in 
public or to demonstrate that homosexuals are those punished by God for  
worshiping improperly, then surely we do not wish to blame God for these  
culturally-defined, first century prejudices, which are little more than overt  bits of 
human ignorance. When the New Testament either predicts or describes the  end 
of the world, there is no reason to believe that these things are any more  
correct because they are in the Bible than they have been when uttered by a  
series of religious "crazies" throughout history.  
Calling the words of a revered text the dictated words of God, reveals that  
one is assuming that creation was recent and that human life was the crown of  
that creation. God could hardly dictate the divine word to human beings until 
 they developed the ability to write. Writing became a human skill somewhere  
between 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. Since human life has been on this planet  
between 100,000 and 2,000,000 years, depending on how one defines human life, 
we  are forced to conclude that God did not speak to us until very late in 
our  history. Even after writing became a human skill God's "Word" in the Bible 
was  still a very late development, since the Bible's date of writing appears 
to be  no earlier than 1000 BCE and no later than 135 CE. Fundamentalists 
never think  of these things. Perhaps God did not know for centuries what God 
wanted to say  to the world.  
The fact is that investing holiness in the written words of a sacred text  
began only after the nation and the temple of the Jews were both destroyed by  
the Babylonians in the early years of the 6th century BCE. These then exiled  
people were separated from the precious soil of their homeland, from their holy 
 places and from all the things that they had been taught to revere as 
symbols of  God's presence. In response to that crisis, they began to wrap their 
need for  certainty and for a visible symbol of God's presence in their midst 
around their  sacred texts. When they heard their Scriptures read in public 
worship, which was  the only place they ever heard them, they invested these words 
with a new sense  of holiness. They claimed the God of their ancestors as 
their own and found this  God anew in their midst by identifying God with the 
recitation of their sacred  scriptures each Sabbath. At this time local synagogues 
began to replace the  Jerusalem Temple in the affection of the people. The 
rabbi, who was primarily  the teacher, replaced the Temple priests as the 
mediator of the word of God. The  tabernacle in which the scrolls bearing the words 
of their scriptures were  stored replaced the Holy of Holies where God had 
once been presumed to dwell.  With great reverence the sacred scroll of the "Word 
of God" was removed each  Sabbath from the tabernacle to be read to the 
faithful in corporate worship.  That was how they came to believe that God was 
present with them in the "Word."  Slowly but surely over the years the words of 
scripture came to be thought of as  the words of God, the ultimate authority, 
incapable of being challenged.  Scripture suddenly did not just reflect the 
holiness of God, it came to be  identified with the word of God itself. The 
idolatry of the book had entered the  Judeo-Christian religion. It was destined to 
grow until Protestant  fundamentalists would raise the words of scripture, now 
containing not one but  two testaments, to new levels of sanctity and 
authority, making assumptions that  hysteria alone, not rationality, could ever make 
and, as a result, wreaking pain  and terror on many throughout history. I will 
continue the examination of this  strange bit of bibliolatry next week.  
The Bible is not, I repeat, is not the "Word of God" in any literal sense.  
Repeat that line once or twice a day until you no longer expect lightning to  
strike you dead when you utter it. To kill an idol in whose service you have  
lived in both bondage and fear is never easy. The real tragedy, however, is 
that  bondage to any idol, even the idol of the Bible, makes it impossible, as 
history  reveals, to be fully human and that is clearly the final goal of 
Christianity.  
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)   
Dr. Alvin Taurog, PhD, Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas,  
Southwestern Medical Center, writes:  
I was introduced to your Internet essays only a few months ago and was so  
impressed with your ideas that I purchased and read your book, "A New  
Christianity for a New World." I heartily agree with your arguments against the  
existence of a theistic God and with your discussion of the implications to  which 
such arguments lead. However, there is one fundamental implication which  was 
not discussed in this book - the issue of immortality. As a scientist  trained 
in physiology and biochemistry, I find it impossible to believe in the  
existence of life after death. I would be greatly interested in your comments on  
immortality, a topic intimately associated with all religious belief.  
Dear Dr. Taurog,  
Thanks for your letter. I wrestle with that question constantly. If I write  
another book it will be on that subject. I have worked on it for years. I find 
 myself torn between my understanding of God that involves an unending  
relationship and the various religious concepts of life after death, which have  
little meaning for me. The very use of the word 'after' involves a dimension of  
time that is simply not appropriate to what we are seeking to describe, since 
 time itself is a category that makes sense only inside the time/space 
universe  that we human beings inhabit. I think the use of the idea of life after 
death as  a method of behavior control is not worthy of further consideration. 
It is  obvious that the deep survival instinct born of our evolutionary past 
drives  most of our life after death concepts. Despite these concerns I am still 
not  able to dismiss the possibility that we are and will be invited into the 
 eternity which God inhabits.  
It is still hard to know even where to begin to address this subject. I have  
become convinced that one essential first step is to learn to embrace death 
as a  friend not an enemy, because that introduces us to a new dimension of 
what it  means to be human. Whatever heaven means it is my conviction that it was 
not  designed to define a quantity but a quality of life.  
I have a profound sense of what it means to be a self-conscious human being.  
The gift of self-consciousness makes us capable of communing with the source 
of  life itself, however that source is defined. Whatever conclusions I 
finally work  out on this subject will be speculative at best for they are little 
more than a  human attempt to describe that which is beyond every human 
capability to  describe. I will, however, work from the human to the divine since 
there is no  other way that any human being can work. The acceptance of death as a 
fact of  life is a doorway into a new, rich understanding of what life is all 
about.  Heaven, if it is real, and I think it is, can only be another 
dimension of life  itself.  
I have written twice about this subject. One was the last chapter of my book, 
 "Resurrection: Myth or Reality?" The other was in the next to the last 
chapter  of "Why Christianity Must Change or Die." Those two places represent all I 
can  now say with integrity on this subject. I will write this next book, 
only if I  can find a way to say more.  
My best.  
John Shelby Spong      



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