[Dialogue] Spong 2/21

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 21, 2008 
Pope Benedict XVI and Captain  Robert Fitzroy of The Beagle  

I want to return this week to the book Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph  
Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI. I do this because I was so shocked  at 
the indefensible conclusions revealed in this book that I began to wonder  what 
happens in the minds of people who, like the Pope, continue to articulate a  
point of view as dated, unsubstantiated and out of touch with contemporary  
biblical scholarship as that which is found in this book. The Pope is not alone.  
Evangelical fundamentalists seem equally capable of closing their minds to  
reality sufficiently to allow them to continue to parrot nonsensical religious  
and biblical ignorance as if it is still relevant to current debates. One 
thinks  of such issues as evolution or homosexuality, two places where religious  
ignorance and current scholarship collide. Something seems to happen to the  
minds of these people that enables them to filter out anything that does not 
fit  into their version of truth. For example, in this book the Pope seems to 
pretend  that the 40-70 year period that separated the life of Jesus from the 
writings of  the gospels did not affect the historicity of the people's memory 
of Jesus. He  avoids taking into account the fact that the gospels were 
written in Greek, a  language that neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke, and a 
language that brings  with it dualistic concepts about which Jesus would have had 
no experience or  understanding. He seems to be unaware that the narratives of 
Jesus' miraculous  birth were a late developing tradition, entering the 
Christian tradition only in  the 9th decade. Nor does he face the fact that Matthew 
based that narrative on a  mistranslation of his proof text in Isaiah. 
Matthew renders Isaiah 7:14,  "Behold a virgin shall conceive," when what Isaiah 
wrote in Hebrew was:  "Behold a woman is with child." Surely one recognizes that 
the two are  not the same. This fact was pointed out to Christians in the 
early years of the  second century by a Jew named Trypho in his famous dialogue 
with Justin Martyr.  Obviously Christians from that day to this, including 
Benedict XVI, have not  been willing to let reality stand in the way of their 
developing doctrines, so  this knowledge was first ignored and then repressed. The 
Pope avoids dealing  with the obvious fact that the early Christians wrapped 
the Hebrew Scriptures  around Jesus as the only way they could make sense out 
of the power of their  experience with him. He continues, without credibility, 
to apply the convoluted  and discredited idea that the prophets magically 
revealed God's divine plan and  that Jesus simply acted that plan out in some 
literal and robotic way. With  seriousness he advocates the idea that the 
scriptures reveal that Jesus  appointed Peter to be the first Pope, when every 
historian knows that the  institution of the papacy developed much later and that 
Rome won out in a  competition with other great centers of the ancient world, not 
finally achieving  its preeminence as the center of institutional 
Christianity until the Roman  Emperor was defeated by the Barbarians. The papacy then 
moved into the power  vacuum that remained. He does not see that between Mark, 
written in the early  70's of the first century, and John, written in the late 
90's, the Jesus story  grew substantially. In Mark Jesus became God-filled when 
infused by the Holy  Spirit at his baptism; in Matthew and Luke it was when 
he was conceived by the  Holy Spirit in the womb of his virgin mother, in John 
Jesus was defined as the  enfleshment of the Word of God that was present as 
part of who God is at the  dawn of creation. He does not appear to notice the 
difference in the portrait of  the dying Jesus, who in the earliest gospel 
cries out in human despair: "My God,  why have you forsaken me?" and the calm, 
resolutely victorious, divine figure  who in the later gospels dies not in 
anguish, but in total control, saying:  "Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit," or "It is finished," that is, "My  work is completed." Even the resurrection 
of Jesus moves from being symbolized  in the earliest gospel (Mark) not by an 
appearance of the raised Jesus, but by  an empty tomb that could not contain 
him, to the portrait in the last gospel  (John) of a resuscitated body capable 
of being handled and felt, indeed so  physical that Thomas could actually 
touch the wounds in his hands and feet.  
Those who treat the Bible as the inerrant "word of God" cannot face the fact  
that both Matthew and Luke copied extensively from Mark, and in that process  
felt no compunction whatsoever about deleting from, adding to, changing and 
even  correcting Mark whenever it suited their purposes. One does not correct 
or  delete from a source that one believes is the dictated word of God. 
Clearly,  however, that is what Matthew and Luke actually did since they had not been 
 introduced to the inerrancy claim. That was a much later development in 
history.   
There is something so irrational about these claims and so circular about the 
 arguments developed to sustain these claims that it is not surprising that 
anger  arises whenever facts appear that contradict them. Yet, apparently 
educated  people like the Pope or Pat Robertson, who owns a Doctor of Jurisprudence 
degree  from Yale University, continue to promote these ideas as if they were 
still  believable, but no one should take these claims seriously.  
As I was contemplating these issues in wonderment, I also happened to be  
reading the diary of Robert Fitzroy, the captain of HMS The Beagle when  that 
small ship made its five-year trip around the world carrying a passenger  named 
Charles Robert Darwin and including history-shattering stops in the  Galapagos 
Islands. Reading that diary brought me a new insight into how it is  that 
educated people can so easily close their minds to new insights.  
Robert Fitzroy, himself a competent scientist by the standards of his day,  
was privy both to Darwin's discoveries and to his developing theories. He was,  
however, also a traditional man of faith, steeped in the Christianity current 
in  England in the 1830's. Fitzroy could not view the growing data that 
Darwin was  accumulating except through the lens of a literal Bible. He could not 
think  outside the box of his deep conviction that the Bible was the revealed 
word of  God and the final source of all truth. It was, therefore, his task 
when writing  his journal to harmonize these data with his biblical lens. His 
words were  convoluted and his reasoning skewed because his mind could not admit 
anything as  fact that did not fit within his frame of reference.  
By reading Fitzroy's journal, I was finally able to understand how a learned  
man like the Pope could have written this book Jesus of Nazareth. Both  the 
Pope and Robert Fitzroy viewed their subject matter through a presupposition  
that neither allowed nor admitted any challenging reality. One does not seek to 
 discover truth if one believes he or she already possesses it. If all else  
fails, truth that is inconvenient and does not fit must be either ignored or  
suppressed. That is what Benedict XVI does in his book and what 
fundamentalists  do every day. That is almost inevitable if one begins with the idea that  
ultimate truth is or can be a human possession. Such an idea, rooted in fear,  
transforms the desire to educate into the need to propagandize, producing the  
closed religious mind that cannot accept an idea that falls outside its  
religious filter.  
That is the concept which permeates the Pope's book. Everywhere there is the  
assumption that the Christian faith as understood and taught today by the 
Roman  Catholic Church is not only absolutely true, but that it can be validated 
in  every detail of the Bible. That faith, he believes, was anticipated in the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, revealed in all its fullness in the gospels and has 
developed  in a consistent way through the ages into the doctrines, dogmas and 
creeds of  his Church. The Pope simply cannot ask the scriptures the scholar's 
question  about the original meaning of a text. He insists that scripture alone 
can be  used to interpret scripture. Since ideas cannot develop slowly through 
time the  later gospels can never contradict the earlier ones, they simply 
spell out what  the earlier writers did not themselves fully understand. Such 
argumentation has  appeal only so long as one is convinced that truth has been 
fully revealed in  the scriptures as the church interprets them and that no new 
knowledge can ever  challenge or contradict that revealed truth.  
That explains why the Pope and Protestant fundamentalists feel free to  
condemn to purgatory or hell anyone who disagrees with their guiding view of  
reality. That is why the Church throughout its history has, with easy  conscience, 
burned heretics at the stake. That is why biblical scholarship can  be ignored 
and even repressed in both Catholic and Protestant traditions. That  is why 
interfaith cooperation will never be possible within that world view.  
This concept works until a thinking world no longer affirms that religious  
view of reality and when fewer and fewer people are able to live in this 
fantasy  land of pretending. Then the religious world splits, as it is doing today, 
into  two mutually exclusive camps. On one side are the Catholic and 
Protestant  fundamentalists clinging steadfastly to their dated conceptions, and on the 
 other is the Church Alumni Association, made up of those who can no longer 
twist  their minds into 1st Century pretzels in order to continue to be 
believers.  Since I cannot live in either of those warring camps I continue to seek 
to  translate the religious experience of yesterday into the 21st Century. It 
is  sometimes a lonely place for a Christian to dwell.  
My thanks go to Captain Fitzroy for helping me to understand the mentality of 
 the religiously certain. That insight has also helped me to understand and 
even  to appreciate why my publisher, Harper-Collins, has decided to promote 
the  upcoming release of the paperback version of my book Jesus for the  
Non-Religious as an alternative to the Pope's book Jesus of Nazareth. "The Pope," 
says the promotional blurb on the new paperback's cover,  "describes the ancient 
traditional Jesus. John Shelby Spong brings us a Jesus by  whom modern people 
can be inspired." I hope they are correct.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
John from Sydney, Australia, writes:  
Sydney is a conservative place, where the only approach to the Bible is  
literal and judgmental. The God of the Bible seems to be vengeful and angry. The  
God in the Old Testament is particularly unappealing. What resources could you 
 suggest to help me find a more open and life-affirming interpretation of the 
Old  Testament God?  
Dear John,  
I have been to Sydney on at least eight occasions and have experienced  
exactly the attitude you express. The Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches are  so 
out of touch with the modern world that they are an embarrassment to the  
whole of Christianity. There are some isolated congregations in the Uniting  
Church of Australia (I think of Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney and one or  
two Anglican Churches with whom I am in contact regularly) who buck the trend,  
but the trend is overwhelmingly negative. So individual Christians and honest  
seekers after the truth must find resources outside the normal ecclesiastical 
 structures. I recommend two such resources to you. One can be done 
individually.  The other needs a group or community commitment.  
The first is a study resource developed at Christ Community Church in Spring  
Lake, Michigan, by the senior minister, Ian Lawton; his father, Bill Lawton, 
and  a member of that congregation who is a university professor in the field 
of  biology, Howard Van Teal. Of note is the fact that both Ian and Bill 
Lawton were  priests in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney at an earlier stage in their 
careers.  Ian left first to go to Auckland and then to Spring Lake. Bill 
retired, but the  roots that both of them have in Sydney are deep. Ian is even a 
graduate of the  Moore Theological Seminary in Sydney, which is more 
evangelical and  fundamentalist than any place I know outside of Bob Jones or Oral 
Roberts  Seminaries in America.  
These three gifted people have developed an online study resource on the Old  
Testament beginning with the Book of Genesis. I have read it and I think it 
is  super. It is an "e-course" to which individuals can subscribe for a very 
minimal  fee and get the entire course sent as an e-mail five days a week for 
three  weeks. Its focus is on the relationship between science and religion. A 
message  board will be set up to allow subscribers to discuss the course with 
others.  After reading the course I sent the authors the following endorsement: 
 "Would you like to meet a God greater than the one most frequently met in  
Church? This e-course on science and religion and the Book of Genesis will open 
 doors that you never imagined."  
For further information, go to the_Christ Community Church_ 
(http://www.christ-community.net/ecourses.htm)   Web site. Other e-courses are under 
preparation. In my opinion, this is one of  the most creative churches in the United 
States, perhaps in the world.  
The second resource is entitled "Living the Questions," a multi-week adult  
education resource that many churches all over the world are now using. It too  
is a downloadable study that features many of the top names in progressive  
Christianity in the world today. "Living the Questions" is the creation of two  
young and multi-talented Methodist ministers in Phoenix, Arizona: Jeff  
Procter-Murphy and Dave Felten. It would be more effective if a group inside or  
outside the church wanted to do this course together. It would also be more cost 
 effective. For more information go to _Living the Questions_ 
(http://www.livingthequestions.com/) . Both of  these resources can be used anywhere in the 
world. Good luck in Sydney.  
John Shelby Spong 



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