[Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters
Beret Griffith
beretgriffith at charter.net
Sat Dec 12 20:45:18 CST 2009
Perhaps the cost of $39.80 per person, per year,
to get Spong's material directly from his website
is a factor. We get it free on the listserv. I
looked into getting the mailings directly from
Spong's site when the forwards first started
coming to the listervs. I didn't subscribe to
Spong's online community and chose to continue to
read the material for free as it comes via the
listserv. Subscriptions to Spong's site may raise
a good sum for the promotion of his brand of progressive Christianity.
Beret Griffith
At 03:51 PM 12/12/2009, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=https://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_spong_account.asp>
>My Account
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=https://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_spong_account.asp>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/calendar.asp>
>Calendar
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/calendar.asp>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong>
>Message Boards
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/story_home_spong.asp>
>My Essay Library
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/story_home_spong.asp>
>
>[]
>
>A New Christianity for a New World
>
>[]
>
>[]
>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=~amp~#xA;
>http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/34682.asp~amp~#xA;>Print this Article
>[]
>
>Not a
>member?<http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://clk.atdmt.com/AGM/go/ups0120000005agm/direct/01/>Subscribe
>now!
>
>----------
>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
>
>----------
>
>Send your questions to
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=mailto:support@johnshelbyspong.com>support at johnshelbyspong.com
>
>
>[]
>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/34682.asp>Print
>this Article
>[]
>
>Not a member?
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://clk.atdmt.com/AGM/go/ups0120000005agm/direct/01/>Subscribe
>now!
>
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://www.everydayhealth.com?xid=nl_ANewChristianityForANewWorld_20091210>
>Everyday Health Network
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://www.everydayhealth.com?xid=nl_ANewChristianityForANewWorld_20091210>
>
>Thanks for joining our mailing list,
><mailto:elliestock at aol.com>elliestock at aol.com,
>for A New Christianity For A New World on 11/09/2008
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.asp?email=elliestock@aol.com~amp~nlid=71~amp~hsheml=moc^loa~kcotseille>REMOVE
>me from this list |
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.asp>Add
>me to this list |
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://secure.agoramedia.com/manage_subscriptions.asp?email=elliestock@aol.com>Manage
>my e-mail settings |
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=mailto:support@agoramedia.us>Contact
>Customer Service
>Copyright 2009 Waterfront Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
>4 Marshall Street, North Adams, MA 01247
>Subject to our
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://www.everydayhealth.com/pop_tos.htm?xid=nl_ANewChristianityForANewWorld_20091210>terms
>of service and
><http://tracking.waterfrontmedia.com/nlsclick/t.aspx?k=71&d=2009/12/10&e=elliestock@aol.com&utp=&rd=http://www.everydayhealth.com/pop_privacy.htm?xid=nl_ANewChristianityForANewWorld_20091210>privacy
>policy
>_______________________________________________
>OE mailing list
>OE at wedgeblade.net
>http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20091212/a52a60d7/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the OE
mailing list