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

[svesjaime at aol.com]

Today's truth was yesterday's heresy and tomorrow's superstition!  Someone said or wrote that, or I did.  No matter.  


If Spong is a heretic, we are overloaded on left field in this listserv.  Good to have you, Susan.  Whether intentionally or not, you remind us to be conscious of where we sit and where we stand, and where we wobble!


Jaime
Saipan



-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Fertig <susan at gmdtech.com>
To: 'Order Ecumenical Community' <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Mon, Dec 14, 2009 10:37 am
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New  Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters


I just googled Spong and got right into his website and his papers.  I guess you're talking about paying to have his stuff sent via email.  Anyway, I think he's a heretic, but, as I said, I'm happy to just hit the delete button.
 
Susan
 



From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Beret Griffith
Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 9:45 PM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters



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




  
             
  
  
    
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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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