[Dialogue] 11/11/10, Spong: The Bible - A Divine Gift or an Immoral Treatise?

[Ellie Stock]

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Thursday November 11, 2010 

The Bible — A Divine Gift or an Immoral Treatise?

Cecil B. DeMille, one of the great motion picture producers of the ages, called the Bible "The Greatest Story Ever Told" when he produced and directed a motion picture by that name.
Christopher Hitchens, a well-known transatlantic journalist and political pundit, has recently referred to the Bible in a New York Times review of a book by Philip Pullman, as a "radically immoral book," citing such things from its pages as the promise of a monopoly on heaven for true believers (John 14) while threatening those who waver with the torment of everlasting fire (Matthew 25). He found in the figure of Jesus "not a divine presence, but that of a sorcerer and a fanatic," since the Bible portrayed him as cursing a fig tree for not bearing fruit even though it was not the season for figs (Mark 11) and of inflicting a herd of pigs with demons that produced, not "deviled ham" as one wag suggested, but a stampede of pigs and thus the drowning deaths for the livestock of some poor farmers (Mark 5).
What is the nature of this book that can produce such strong and diametrically-opposed sentiments? There is clearly something both attractive and strange about the book called "sacred scripture," for in its pages conflicts and contradictions abound.
The Bible has been the best-selling book in the Western world every year since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1450. It is also probably the least read, best-selling book in human history and it is surely the least understood. It is also simultaneously the most quoted and the most distorted book. Let me illustrate.
Verses from the Bible still adorn the oratory of politicians designed to give their words both gravitas and authority. It is read in almost every synagogue and church in public worship "wherever two or three people are gathered together." When read in these contexts, these readings are usually proclaimed to be "The Word of the Lord!" Hardly a funeral is conducted in the Western world without some biblical passage being part of the liturgy, whether these funerals are religious or secular. Book titles, and consequently motion picture titles, are frequently direct quotations lifted from the Bible. Elected officials take their oaths of office most often with their hands laid on the Bible. This book not only informs our culture, but it also criticizes it, judges it and blesses it. Yet at the same time there is no book in human history that has been responsible for more pain and suffering in the lives of more people than the book we call "The Holy Bible."
"His blood be upon us and upon our children (Matt 27:25)" are words the Bible attributed to the Jewish crowd at the time of the crucifixion. They have been a factor in a series of killing, anti-Semitic activities throughout the centuries reaching a culmination in a final act of orgiastic frenzy, the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust in the 20th century, in a Western, civilized, ostensibly Christian nation..
"I forbid a woman to have authority over a man (1 Tim 2:12)," or "Woman was created for man (1Cor 11)" and "Wives obey your husbands (Ephesians 5)" are just a few of the texts from the Bible that have been used to dehumanize the feminine half of the human race. In response to the these biblical definitions of what a woman is, higher education was denied to women until the 20th century; the right to vote in national elections was not extended to women until 1920, and the doorways to economic opportunities and just wages have been closed to women until fairly recently. Even in contemporary churches, we Christians still use the definition of a woman as the property of a man in wedding ceremonies, as one man gives the woman away to another man as if either of these men had or would later own her.
"Slaves obey your masters (Col. 3)" are words right out of the Bible. Slaves must be returned to the life of bondage, says Paul's Epistle to Philemon. The injunction against enslaving a fellow Jew is found in the prophets and the direction to Jews to take their slaves from nearby countries is stated in the Torah. Each of these texts has in the past been enlisted in the service of the human institutions of slavery, segregation and apartheid. The Pope, known as the Vicar of Christ, has owned slaves with no qualms of conscience, because biblical words have always been available with which to perfume these human evils. The "Bible Belt" of the South, home of Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist religious exponents, the region of our nation where both church going and Bible reading are clearly saluted as values, is the same part of our nation that first established, then protected and fought to defend slavery. After defeat on the battlefield forced these good, Christian p eople to end slavery, they installed segregation as the law of the land. When segregation was finally declared illegal, these same evangelical Christians employed police dogs, fire hoses, bull horns and even murder as legitimate tactics to keep segregation alive. The Southern police, who refused to arrest the guilty and the Southern juries that refused to return appropriate guilty verdicts were made up largely of those who "acknowledged Jesus as my personal savior." The Bible, they felt, justified this behavior toward those whose true humanity they could not see.
"A man who lies with a man as with a woman is an abomination. Both shall be put to death (Lev. 20)." This is one of nine biblical texts, stretched to the breaking point to cover the visceral, uninformed prejudice that has plagued and victimized gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual people for centuries. At the Wyoming funeral of Matthew Shepard a young gay man set upon by a group of adults, beaten into unconsciousness and hanged on a fence post in sub-freezing weather until he died, a Baptist minister from Topeka, Kansas, carried a picket sign stating "God says fags should die--see Leviticus 20)" In more recent history that same minister with that same message, claiming the right of freedom of speech, asked the Supreme Court of this country to protect him against a lawsuit brought by the parents of a member of the armed forces killed in Iraq after he had picketed their son's funeral ceremony. There are terrible texts in the Bible and some of these texts have without d oubt been used to cause great pain in the lives of many people. Surely we need to face this dark side of our religious past, but that is not the whole story of the Bible's history. Words from the Bible have also been instrumental in creating a quest for learning and thus in forming the great educational institutions in the Western world, from Uppsala University in Sweden, to Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England, to Tubingen and Berlin Universities in Germany, to McGill and Queens Universities in Canada and to Harvard and Yale in the United States. Yet when knowledge challenged religious presuppositions, the Bible-quoting church has been the fiercest critic of knowledge and it became the persecutor of scholars from Galileo to Darwin to Stephen Hawking.
So we have this book that has permeated every aspect of our cultural life and at the same time has caused untold pain, suffering and horror. What are we to make of it? What are we to do with it?
Can we extract its benefits and dismiss its ignorance and its self-serving inspiration to violence? Do we accomplish this by an act of delicate surgery, such as Thomas Jefferson was able to do when, by using his penknife to remove offensive passages, reduced the New Testament to 46 pages of acceptable text? Or do we dismiss it all as little more than the last vestige of a superstitious world that is no longer and then consign the God we meet in this book to the museums of human religions where this deity can take a place beside the gods of the Olympus, and the gods of the fertility cults who encouraged child sacrifice and temple prostitutes during other now embarrassing stages in human development? Or can we see the Bible as an imperfect but unfinished chronicle of the human quest for understanding life, finding meaning and exploring transcendence? Are we able to see the changes in the text that moved our minds from a tribal deity who hated the enemies of the chosen peop le, to a book that enjoins us to love our enemies? This latter path offers, I believe, some hope.
I find these universal truths in the Bible that cause me to want to defend this book with passion, despite the abuse it has encouraged throughout history. Those truths are:
1. Every life is holy. That is the major theme of the Hebrew Scriptures and that is what I mean when I say I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator.
2. Every life is ultimately and totally loved. That is the truth I learn from the Jesus story and what I mean when I say I believe in God the Son.
3. Every life is called to live into the fullness of its potential, to be all that each of us can be. That is what I mean when I say I believe in God the Holy Spirit, who calls each of us to the deepest meaning of life.
Those are the essential human convictions that to me are the gifts given to us from the biblical story. We abandon them at our peril. So my fight is never to destroy the Bible but to transform it, to separate its wheat from its chaff and to make its underlying convictions available to my world. I regard that as a worthy vocation. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Ian Phillips from Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada, writes: 
I have been made to think that we are perhaps like a walnut. We have a soft outer shell or husk, which is our "civilized–self." This is the part of us that makes friends with others and keeps us (relatively) well–behaved. But with minimum pressure, this husk breaks way to reveal a tough shell underneath. This shell, our "survival–self," saves us from getting hurt; it puts food in our bellies and protects us from the dangers that surround us. That is good, but it also prevents us from experiencing the core of our being, our "God–self." This is the part that Jesus' message is all about; only by breaking open and discarding our "survival-self" can we experience God. If we are to follow Jesus' example we must, as best we can, ignore our own needs and open ourselves fully to the needs of others. It is very dangerous as Jesus and those who have successfully tried it have found out. By doing so, however, we and those around us will catch a glimps e of what God means — or what I call a "God experience." I would appreciate your comments on this simile.
Ian Phillips from Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada, writes: 
I have been made to think that we are perhaps like a walnut. We have a soft outer shell or husk, which is our "civilized–self." This is the part of us that makes friends with others and keeps us (relatively) well–behaved. But with minimum pressure, this husk breaks way to reveal a tough shell underneath. This shell, our "survival–self," saves us from getting hurt; it puts food in our bellies and protects us from the dangers that surround us. That is good, but it also prevents us from experiencing the core of our being, our "God–self." This is the part that Jesus' message is all about; only by breaking open and discarding our "survival-self" can we experience God. If we are to follow Jesus' example we must, as best we can, ignore our own needs and open ourselves fully to the needs of others. It is very dangerous as Jesus and those who have successfully tried it have found out. By doing so, however, we and those around us will catch a glimps e of what God means — or what I call a "God experience." I would appreciate your comments on this simile.



Dear Ian, 
I think your simile is wonderful although most people who do not see walnut trees growing are not aware of that soft outer shell. Sigmund Freud had similar thoughts when he wrote about how the super ego protects both the ego and the id. 
The fact is that we are survival–oriented creatures and that is not the result of something called "original sin," it is simply a characteristic of life, raised in human beings alone into self consciousness. 
I think that, at least for me, self consciousness also opens to me the possibility that I am part of the universal consciousness I call God, which means that I am part of who God is and God is part of who I am. Above all, I know that the God defined as an "external, supernatural, miracle–working deity" is dying. Many people seem to think that if this definition of God dies then God has died. That is not my experience. The death of the theistic definition of God has been for me the doorway into the mystical reality of the God who is beyond any definition. Your analogy of the walnut helps to move me in that direction. 
My thanks. 

– John Shelby Spong






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