[Dialogue] {Spam?} SPONG 01/30/08

[KroegerD at aol.com]

January 30, 2008 
Heresy on the BBC  

Recently I had the privilege of doing an interview with BBC World Service  
from its studio in New York City. The program was entitled "Free to Speak" and  
was hosted by Dan Damon, one of the BBC's best known radio personalities. The  
topic for this interview was those religious leaders who seem to be 
theological  critics living inside their own households of faith. Two other guests were 
on  this show, one a London Rabbi representing Judaism and the other a 
liberal and  open to change Imam representing Islam.  
Dan Damon said each of us was picked for this program because many in our  
religious traditions view us as "heretics." That was Damon's definition not mine 
 and I found it to be less than profound. He was assuming that there is a 
body of  beliefs in each religious system that constitutes orthodoxy. I regard 
that  assumption as little more than pious religious propaganda.  
How can one suggest that another is a heretic unless one makes the claim that 
 he or she possesses ultimate truth? Who has determined the nature of 
ultimate  truth? Did this truth drop from heaven in propositional form? Is there 
really  something called the "Deposit of Faith?" Is the Bible the inerrant word of 
God,  the Pope an infallible spokesman and can the creeds be said to set the  
boundaries of truth for all time? I find such notions preposterous.  
When Dan Damon tried to put content into his assumptions, he said to me, "In  
your writings you have denied the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of Jesus and 
 the miracles of the New Testament." First of all, that is not so as he has  
stated it and second, it is the typical tactic of "true believers" to begin 
this  kind of conversation with a series of charges strung together that cannot  
possibly be addressed in the time available for the interview. That leaves 
the  impression that the person being interviewed is a negative, strange 
character,  unsupported by the scholarship of his or her profession. I have, for 
example,  written a 224 page book on the Virgin Birth (Born of a Woman,) and a 293 
page  book on the resurrection (Resurrection: Myth or Reality?). In addition, 
I have  treated the miracles of the New Testament at great length in my 
latest book  (Jesus for the Non-Religious). None of these subjects can be explored 
in the yes  or no framework of a literal question. They certainly can not be 
addressed  intelligently inside a thirty minute radio interview with a host and 
two other  guests. When one factors in the time needed to introduce the 
guests, set the  stage for the conversation, illustrate the issues and conclude the 
discussion,  no guest would have more than five or six minutes at most in 
which to respond.  This means that I could never unload Damon's erroneous 
pre-conceptions and could  at most address only one of his issues. Since his charges 
began with the Virgin  Birth, I also started there.  
"The Virgin Birth story is not an original part of the Christian tradition,"  
I began. "It did not come into Christianity until the writings of Matthew in 
the  9th decade. Paul, who wrote all of his epistles between the years 50 and 
64,  appears to have known nothing about any miraculous birth tradition 
associated  with Jesus. Of Jesus' origins, Paul says in Galatians only that he was 
"born of  a woman; born under the law!" The word "woman" carried with it no 
connotation at  all of virginity. Paul was saying that he was born like every 
other human being  is born, and because he was a Jew then like every Jew he was 
born under the law.  The closest thing to the claim of an extraordinary birth 
for Jesus in the  writings of Paul was his statement that Jesus "was descended 
from David  according to the flesh." I tried to go on to note the fact that 
Mark, the first  gospel to be written (70-72 C.E.) has no miraculous birth story 
in it. Mark sees  Jesus rather as a fully human person, who becomes 
God-infused, through the  action of God pouring the Holy Spirit upon him at his 
baptism. Dan Damon,  however, interrupted me to say that this was not a time for 
debate or argument,  he just wanted to establish that traditional Christian belief 
contains the  Virgin Birth and that I appear to be denying its historicity. 
"This is not  argument or debate," I countered, "These are just facts. I cannot 
address your  question unless we can establish some commonly agreed on 
facts." There was  obviously no time in this discussion for facts.  
If it is heresy to deny that the Virgin Birth is literal biology, then both  
Paul and Mark, neither of whom appears ever to have heard of this tradition 
much  less to have believed it, must be called "heretics," an idea Dan Damon 
could not  have imagined. I could have gone on to show that the author of John's 
gospel  also does not contain a story of a miraculous birth and actually 
refers to Jesus  on two occasions (John 1:45 and 6:42) as the son of Joseph, but 
there was no  time. It is not possible, in my opinion, for John, who wrote his 
gospel between  95-100, not to have heard of the Virgin tradition since it had 
appeared in both  Matthew (82-85) and Luke (88-93), well before John's gospel 
was written. John  appears to have determined that this tradition was not 
worthy of inclusion. The  facts are that two of the major New Testament writers, 
Paul and Mark, appear  never to have heard of the Virgin Birth and a third, 
John, appears to dismiss  it. How then does the Virgin Birth become the litmus 
test for heresy? If I had  been able to make these points, the focus of this 
program on heresy in  contemporary religion would have become irrelevant. So once 
again, Dan Damon  interrupted and tried to keep to his script. He moved on to 
his Rabbi and his  Imam to examine how they too had deviated from their 
"orthodoxy."  
The Bible has been distorted for so long in Christian history by means of the 
 use of false assumptions and the unwillingness of literalists to engage 
biblical  facts that this BBC interview was not unusual. When fundamentalists like 
Pat  Robertson or Albert Mohler claim that the Bible is the "inerrant word of 
God,"  it makes the same sense that people make when they assert that "the 
earth is  flat." It is simply profoundly uninformed. These fundamentalists have 
either  never read the Bible or they have read it within a mindset that does 
not allow  reality to interfere with their convictions. When Anglican bishops 
in the Third  World, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, contend that 
"homosexuality is  condemned by scripture and therefore cannot be accepted in 
any part of the  Church," I gasp at their ignorance. Have they read nothing in 
the last hundred  years about the reality of homosexuality? It is not a sin to 
be ill-informed,  but it is a sin to use one's ignorance in the public arena 
to attack the  integrity of others and to avoid having your prejudices tempered 
by new  information.  
Christians must embrace the fact that using the literal Bible to provide  
answers on contemporary issues is nothing but religious propaganda. That tactic  
was discredited when Christians quoted the Bible to oppose Galileo's new 
insight  that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe. Galileo was  
convicted of heresy, forced to recant and died under house arrest. The fact 
is,  however, that Galileo was right and the Bible and the Church were wrong. 
The  Vatican finally admitted that in an official letter issued in 1991, some 
four  decades after human beings had begun space travel. If false teaching is 
the  meaning of heresy, was it not the Pope and the Vatican leaders who were 
the  heretics? Is there anything different about Christians demanding that a 
view of  creation, compatible with the Bible, must be taught in public schools as 
an  alternative to evolution? In that debate facts are discounted to make 
their  theory plausible.  
Examine the way the Bible was quoted in Christian history to justify slavery, 
 segregation and apartheid. Examine the way the Bible has been used to 
deprive  women of equality, education, the right to vote, to enter the professions 
and to  be ordained. Examine the abuse that is still today poured out on gay 
and lesbian  people by scripture-quoting religious people. That is where one 
must look if one  wants to see heresy today, for that is false teaching. I wonder 
why that did not  that occur to the host of this BBC program.  
Embracing new truth in the midst of a dying tradition that is either unable  
or unwilling to hear or to comprehend that new truth, is the only hope  
Christians have for a Christian future. I do not know of a single biblical  scholar 
of world rank today who treats the Virgin Birth as either history or  biology. 
Does that make those of us who agree with this almost universal  scholarly 
consensus heretics? I do not know of a single biblical scholar of  world rank 
today who thinks the story of the resurrection of Jesus is about the  physical 
resuscitation of his three-day dead body. Does that make those of us  who have 
read and been convinced by this consensus heretics? Such charges of  heresy 
are little more than the frightened responses of the religiously insecure  who 
can not seem to comprehend that the gospels did not drop from heaven fully  
written. They were composed some 40-70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus and  
in a language neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke. The heresy hunters do not 
 understand that the creeds were hammered out in a Church convention in the  
fourth century and that neither Paul nor the disciples of Jesus would have  
recognized the concepts in which that debate was carried out. Christian truth is 
 not contained in static propositional statements. It is ever changing and  
constantly evolving because it is always an attempt to place a timeless  
experience into the time limited vocabulary of the speaker's generation.  
The future of the Christian faith does not require that we hold tightly to  
yesterday's formulas, but it does require that we be willing to step beyond the 
 patterns of the past in order to embrace new insights. When I finally had 
the  chance to make this point during the interview, Dan Damon said, "But you 
are  upsetting people. People want certainty and you disturb certainty." Marx 
was  correct when he asserted that religion is for many little more than an 
opiate to  allow them to hide from reality. It is sustained by the belief that 
partial  truth is absolute truth. That is the heresy that must be rooted out of 
the  Church if we are to have a future.  
The great value in this BBC program was that I discovered both a Rabbi and an 
 Imam who are doing in their traditions what I seek to do in mine. That was 
worth  the time.  
JSS  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Paul Kennedy from Honolulu, Hawaii, writes:  
Have you read Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris? If so, I  think 
many of us would like to learn what you think of his seemingly well  thought out 
arguments in condemnation of religion.  
Dear Paul,  
I think Sam Harris has a great deal to say to America and I am pleased that  
he is writing. People need to hear the criticism of an honest atheist who is 
not  afraid to speak his mind about what Christianity has come to mean to him. 
The  public face of Christianity in America is already something with which I 
do not  want to be identified. So many people who call themselves Christians 
are  aggressive, hostile, closed minded and insensitive to anyone with whom 
they  disagree. The public face of the Christian Church today is still both  
anti-female and anti-homosexual. Yesterday the public face of Christianity where  
I grew up was pro-segregation and anti-black. I reject the Christianity that 
Sam  Harris rejects. The big difference is that I am aware of another and quite 
 different Christianity. Sam Harris does not appear to be so. When I wrote A  
New Christianity for a New World, I tried to spell out what that different  
Christianity might look like. I believe it makes for a far greater and richer  
dialogue to engage the criticism of Sam Harris than to do what so many  
Christians seem to me to do, namely to search the Scriptures to find a way to  give 
biblical authority to their latest prejudice.  
John Shelby Spong 



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