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

[David Walter]

I am not as big a fan of Spong as some of the Wesleyan enthusists on
this list but I exercise grace in hitting the delete key.

David Walters


>Bill, the question I was raising is that anye can go to the
 spong
>website
>and read this stuff, so it seems strange (and spammish) to be sending
>it out
>via the listserv.
> 
>Susan
> 
>
>  _____  
>
>From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On
>Behalf
>Of Bill Bailey
>Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 6:39 PM
>To: Order Ecumenical Community
>Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New
>Testament,Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters
>
>
>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 <mailto:susan at gmdtech.com>  
>To: 'Order Ecumenical Community' <mailto: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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