[Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters

Sat Dec 12 18:00:49 CST 2009

I agree.  I have followed Bishop Spongs spirit journey both at the Jesus
Seminar here when it was located in Santa Rosa and else where and read some
of his books.  I really appreciate ellie providing it on the Oe site.  I
don't care to debate whether we should all search out his web site on a
regular basis.
David Rebstock

2009/12/12 Bill Bailey <bailey03132 at charter.net>

>  Susan, I am very pleased that all of us have the privilege of receiving
> Bishop Spong's news letter. In a time when the churches and people of the
> Christian persuasion are desperately trying to reconstruct an authentic
> Christian spirituality that goes beyond doctrines that were created 4 to 500
> years after the Jesus event, I find Bishop Spong's news letter extremely
> relevant to and for all of us who are participants in the spirit movement of
> this new day.
>
> Grace and Peace, Bill Bailey
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Susan Fertig <susan at gmdtech.com>
> *To:* 'Order Ecumenical Community' <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> *Sent:* Saturday, December 12, 2009 4:51 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New
> Testament,Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters
>
> Why do these things go out to the whole OE community listserv?  Is there
> some way for me to continue on the listserv without getting these messages
> which are easily available on the Spong website?
>
> *Susan*
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] *On
> Behalf Of *elliestock at aol.com
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 10, 2009 4:24 PM
> *To:* Dialogue at wedgeblade.net; OE at wedgeblade.net
> *Subject:* [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New
> Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters
>
>
>
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>  ------------------------------
>  *Thursday December 10, 2009*  The Origins of the New Testament
> Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters Paul was a complicated mixture of many
> things. He was a missionary who traveled hundreds of miles by foot and by
> boat to tell his story. He was, as we noted last week when examining the
> letter to the Galatians, an intense zealot who would fight vigorously to
> defend his understanding of the gospel. He was a theologian who sought to
> put his experience of God into rational thought forms so that they could be
> passed on. Perhaps above all things, however, Paul was a pastor who sought
> to smooth out disputes, confront evil and ease hurt feelings in the
> congregations that he founded and served. When we examine his correspondence
> with the church in Corinth, it is this pastoral side that dominates. Even
> when he discusses issues like the resurrection, his discussion is pastorally
> oriented as he seeks to ease in the people of the Corinthian church their
> anxiety connected with mortality.
> The first thing to note about the two Corinthian letters is that they
> appear to be composites of a more extensive correspondence that perhaps
> reached a total of four or even five Pauline letters. By a careful analysis
> of our two remaining epistles to the Corinthians, scholars have come to the
> conclusion that these "lost letters," to which Paul actually refers in the
> epistles that we do have, have been included, at least in part, in what we
> call II Corinthians. These scholars point to such passages as II
> Cor.6:1-7:1, II Cor.10-13 and even in the extraneous verses in Cor.11:32-33
> that appear to be inserts into the texts that actually break the flow of
> Paul's argument. Despite this strange construction, however, scholars find
> no evidence to suggest that all of II Corinthians is the authentic work of
> Paul.
> We need to remember that preserving letters in the first century was an
> inexact and costly procedure of hand copying, and that no one had yet
> assigned the status of "Holy Scripture" to the writings of Paul. Maybe that
> is why they preserved only what they believed was most important.
> When we turn to the content of these two Corinthian epistles themselves, we
> find Paul, the pastor, dealing with human beings who are acting like human
> beings. Paul knows what every pastor knows, namely, that congregations are
> not made up of angels. At the same time congregations learn very quickly
> that ordination does not bestow perfection on their ordained leader.
> Pastoral care is the sensitive attempt to bring wholeness out of an exchange
> between human passion and human insecurity. It is a delicately nuanced
> balancing act, the job of which is to enhance the humanity of all who are
> involved. If we need a text to describe the goal of all pastoral activity,
> it would be the Fourth Gospel's definition of Jesus' purpose: "I have come,"
> John's Jesus says, "that they might have life and have it abundantly." That
> is finally both the mission of the Christian Church and the hoped-for
> outcome in every pastoral situation. Abundant life, please note, does not
> always mean happiness or even the easing of pain. Many people seek wholeness
> in quite destructive ways, with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex and even
> success being just a few of them. Sometimes abundant life becomes possible
> only in confrontation and brokenness. Real pastoral care is not about making
> it feel good; it is about helping wholeness to be created. Paul understood
> that and every pastor must learn it sooner or later. Wholeness is seen in
> the freedom to be, in the ability to escape the survival mentality that
> inevitably locks us into self-centeredness. Wholeness is found in the
> maturity of being able to live for another by giving our love away. It will
> be through the lens of that understanding of pastoral care that I will seek
> to explore the issues found in the epistles to the Corinthians.
> The Corinthian congregation appears to have had more than its share of
> pastoral needs and even to have exasperated Paul on more than one occasion.
> Some of the issues to which he refers are party lines and divisions among
> the people. Some claimed loyalty to Paul, some to Apollos and still others
> to Peter. Beyond that their rowdy behavior had begun to distort the worship
> of the people. In that early part of Christian history the Eucharist was
> begun with a community meal called "The Agape Feast." The Corinthians,
> however, had turned this common meal into a gluttonous orgy that left some
> of the poor hungry. Then they had turned the Eucharistic wine into an
> occasion of public drunkenness. Paul obviously needed to speak to this
> behavior.
> There was also a dispute in the congregation about the meat served at this
> "Agape Feast." It had been bought at a local butcher shop where, in this
> pagan society, it had been slaughtered in ceremonial offerings to the idols
> of the people. Could Christians eat meat that had been offered to idols?
> Some Corinthian followers of Jesus were offended by this idea. Still others
> had become enamored with Paul's message of salvation as the ultimate
> expression of God's grace and the conviction that this grace, so abundantly
> and freely given, was not dependent on their personal behavior. This meant
> that they had now become what the church came to call "anti-nomianism," that
> is, some were suggesting that the more they sinned, the more God's grace
> abounded. This stance appeared to render any sense of personal ethical
> responsibility completely meaningless. Still others seemed to have a
> hierarchy of value associated with certain activities of the synagogue.
> Prophets who shared their prophetic words with the congregation were deemed
> to be of less value than those who claimed the gift of "glossolalia" or
> "speaking in tongues," that is, the ability to utter words that only God
> could understand. This was, they seemed to think, the highest gift of all
> and thus the most to be honored.
> If this were not enough for one pastor to deal with, there was also a
> gender dispute going on. Some Corinthian women seemed to take seriously
> Paul's words, in his earlier letter to the Galatians, that "in Christ there
> is neither male nor female, but all are one." This new freedom and equality
> for women obviously challenged the patriarchal value system of that ancient
> world. Some women, quite clearly, pushed these boundaries well beyond even
> Paul's comfort level. No one, not even Paul, escapes his or her cultural
> prejudices completely. The extent of this boundary pushing becomes obvious
> when Paul asserts his threatened male authority by saying, "I forbid a woman
> to have authority over a man!" Since no one forbids what has never happened,
> these women were overtly claiming authority over men in the life of the
> church.
> While Paul's prejudiced humanity is in full display in this last conflict,
> on most of the others he rises to the pastoral challenge. Paul begins by
> telling them that Christ alone is their foundation and that any division of
> loyalties among the followers of various leaders was based on the inability
> to understand that these leaders were simply "servants through which you
> believed — I planted, Apollos watered, but only God gave the increase." In
> regard to the Eucharist, Paul upbraids the members of this congregation for
> eating and drinking in such a way that some are hungry and some are drunk.
> He urges them to eat and drink in their own homes and to recognize that the
> act of breaking bread and drinking wine in the Eucharistic feast is "a
> participation in the body of Christ" and what his life of love and sacrifice
> was all about. The Eucharist, he proclaims, is a liturgical way in which
> they participate in Christ's wholeness.
> Paul takes anti-nomianism on directly, reminding them of their mutual
> responsibility to one another. He suggests that immorality, at its heart,
> was to treat another human being as a thing to be used rather than as a
> person to be loved. He defuses the debate about meat offered to idols by
> saying that since idols are nothing, meat offered to idols is meat offered
> to nothing, so there is no prohibition as to its use. He continues, however,
> by stating that this stance misses the point of this dispute. "All things
> are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful but not
> all things build up." It was a subtle, but powerful, distinction. The evil
> in this debate, he continues, is the lack of sensitivity on the part of some
> to the feelings of others. Candy is not evil, but to offer candy to one
> battling with obesity is not loving. It does not build up the person or
> fulfill the goal of Christ.
> Finally, Paul gets to the debate on spiritual gifts. There is no hierarchy
> of gifts, he argues, for all gifts are in the service of the same spirit and
> are expressions of the same God who inspires us all. The gifts of the people
> offered in worship are necessary to the building up of all, he suggests.
> Every gift is for the benefit of the whole community that he calls the body
> of Christ. Following that analogy of the body, he moves on to suggest that
> their bickering as to whose gift is the most important makes as much sense
> as a debate between the eye, the ear, the hand and the foot as to which part
> of the body has the higher value.
> This sets the stage for Paul's writing of what is surely the most
> beautiful, the most memorable and the most quoted passage in the entire
> Pauline corpus. After describing the body in which the various organ and
> parts work together for the good of the whole, Paul says, "I will show you a
> more excellent way." Then he begins his famous ode to love. "Though I speak
> with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong
> or a clanging cymbal." He continues by defining love as patient, kind, not
> boastful or jealous and never ending. He recognized that all human knowledge
> is partial. No one sees God face to face. We all see "through a glass
> darkly." He urges the Corinthians to put away childish things and to grow
> up. Finally, he concludes "that faith, hope and love abide, these three, but
> the greatest of these is love." It is Paul at his insightful best.
> – John Shelby Spong
>
>  ------------------------------
>  *Question and Answer*
> With John Shelby Spong
> **
> John Ford, via the Internet, writes:
> I had to smile when reading your recent newsletter in which you suggest
> that you might be becoming a mystic. I have always read you as a mystic.
> God's peace be with you.
>   Dear John,
> I appreciate your words and even your insight. I don't believe one can
> volunteer to be a mystic, a prophet, a seer, an intellectual or a genius.
> Those are qualities attributed to you by others sometime well after your
> earthly pilgrimage is complete. It is meaningful, however, when another
> attributes one of those titles to you — so thank you.
> Mysticism is to me primarily coming to terms with the limitations of words.
> That seems to be harder to do in religious circles than anywhere else. Words
> are always symbols or pointers. They are not the truth or the essence they
> seek to describe. They are always human, always time bound and always time
> warped. When any human experience is reduced to words, it is always
> distorted by time, place, one's level of knowledge, one's time in history
> and one's culturally conditioned language Nowhere is that more clear than
> when we try to frame who or what God is in the vehicle of human words. A
> horse cannot communicate to another horse what it means to be a human being,
> for a horse cannot escape its horse nature. A human being can never tell
> another human being what it means to be God, because human beings can never
> escape the limits of our human nature. Perhaps that is why all human images
> of God look very much like a great big human being.
> The deeper I experience the reality and presence of God, the less my words
> seem like adequate vehicles to express that truth. Then words cease and one
> enters the experience of wordless wonder. Perhaps that is the realization of
> the mystic.
> – John Shelby Spong
>   ------------------------------
>
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