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

Mon Dec 14 00:04:18 CST 2009

I guess you'd have to say 'heresy' is in the mind of the reader, pointing to a certain style of authoritarian rigidity and judgmentalism that can't accept an Other interpretation that is perceived as dangerous/destabilizing because it is so deeply contrary to one's own most personal belief system. Something like having your basic life assumptions and fundamental life narrative called into question by another's understanding of the Word about life..
Marshall

________________________________
From: Bill Schlesinger <bschlesinger.pv at tachc.org>
To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Sun, December 13, 2009 5:37:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New  Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters

Curious.  I looked at Spong’s
Corinthian letters piece – where did you see what you call ‘heresy?’ 
Seemed pretty middle of the road to me…

Bill Schlesinger
Project Vida
3607 Rivera Ave
El Paso , TX  79905
(915) 533-7057 x 207
(915) 490-6148 mobile
(915) 533-7158 fax
pvida at whc.net
www.projectvidaelpaso.org

________________________________

From:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Susan Fertig
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2009
5:38 PM
To: 'Order Ecumenical Community'
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

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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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