[Oe List ...] 11/10/11, Spong: Facing the Political Realities of Institutional Church Life in the Launch of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World

[Ellie Stock]

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Facing the Political Realities of Institutional Church Life in the Launch of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World
On November 8, 2011, my publisher, Harper-Collins, released my newest book under the title Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  The date of a book’s release is always a significant day in the life of an author, not unlike, I can at least imagine, the way a mother must feel when she gives birth to a baby.  This book has been a growing part of me for the last three years, but during that time I could still change it, redefine concepts, re-arrange parts, clarify places of confusion, improve a sentence here and there and even re-check a fact or a text.  I still controlled this “baby’s” development.  The publication date, however, signals that those days are over and separation between the parent-creator and the independent offspring has begun.  The book now begins its own life.  People will relate to it in a variety of ways.  Some will find things in it that I did not know were there and did not even intend to be there.  The book will receive a variety of responses, many of which will say more about the responders than they do about it.  If past books are a guide, there will be expressions of appreciation from those who feel that it frees them from some of the restrictive and destructive ideas of their religious past, while others will express hostility since they will experience it as attacking their religious security.
The first questions I will face in its launch will be about my motivation in writing it.  Did I intend to upset the religious sensitivities of my critics?  Is it simply an expression of my hubris that I place myself in opposition to traditional ideas that people assume, falsely I believe, have always marked the Christian faith?  No matter how well prepared I am after years of experience as an author, it still amazes me to read the words of some reviewers and critics, who do not know me personally at all, but who will still ascribe motives of their own creation to my work.  I am reminded once again that I should never underestimate the level of biblical ignorance that marks the lives of so many people, including some who actually head up fundamentalist theological seminaries and who presume to speak for God on television and radio. So before that tide begins to come in, I thought I would introduce this book personally to my readers and recall something of its birth and growth. People might be interested in this first hand bit of background that will put this book into the context that I, as its author, have envisioned for it.
I have always had a dual career.  My calling has been to the life of a priest and my church elected me to act out that calling in the role of a bishop.  For 21 of my 45 year career I worked as a priest in cities like Durham and Tarboro, NC, and Lynchburg and Richmond, VA, and for 24 years I served as a bishop in the exciting and dynamic Diocese of Newark, which contains the suburbs of New York City west of the Hudson River in the seven northernmost counties of New Jersey.  I found my priesthood the most deeply satisfying and personally fulfilling years of my career; while my years as a bishop were the most challenging and stretching.
In both phases of that ministry, however, my life was marked with a hunger for knowledge and a deep thirst to understand and to communicate the symbols of my faith story in the language and concepts of my time in history.  Early in my career, I expanded my ministry to a teaching role at such conference centers as Kanuga in Western North Carolina and then the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York.  I spent summer vacations in places like the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, in graduate classes.  I decided later in both Lynchburg and Richmond that my particular vocation was to introduce the people in my congregation to the world of biblical scholarship.  I discovered that this knowledge when shared was generally welcomed and was received as my giving these people “permission to think” about God, the Bible and religion in ways that they somehow felt had been denied to them in the past.
When I was elected bishop, I determined that I would be a teaching bishop, available to challenge and be challenged by the people I served.  I deliberately went public in books and in lectures to open people to the theological debates of our generation.  I wanted to give the clergy who worked with me the freedom to venture beyond the boundaries behind which so often both they and their congregations hid in a kind of false safety.  To keep up with the scholarship in the field that is necessary to do this task, I did special study units at such eminent theological centers in this nation as Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge and ultimately included stints in the UK in such roles as “Scholar in Residence” in both Magdalen College and Christ Church at Oxford. I was elected Quatercentenary Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1992. I also read voraciously, primarily concentrating on the area of the study of scripture.  Later in my career I was elected “a fellow” in the Jesus Seminar and in 2000 was named the William Belden Noble lecturer at Harvard University. I was invited to teach at Harvard Divinity School, at both the Graduate Theological Union and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA and at the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, NJ.   With one foot in the academic world and one in the institutional church, I became aware of the enormous gap that exists between the two, about which I have spoken in this column just recently.  Things that are essentially commonplace and even “old news” in the academy appear to be controversial and to create enormous tension in the congregations as well as becoming a source of great negativity and suspicion at “denominational headquarters.”
In the academy to treat the Bible literally is regarded as absurd.  In the churches, however, many people know of no other way to read scripture and their clergy actually collude in this ignorance.  Do we really think that our people still believe that a star can travel through the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it?  Can they still believe that God dictated the Ten Commandments when they discover three different and mutually contradictory versions of these Commandments in the Bible?  Do they think that God simply did not get them right the first time? In the church in many places Darwin and evolution are still opposed in the name of “preserving the faith.”  In academic circles evolution is the basis of biology and is assumed in the modern practice of medicine. Even when we get our flu shots we learn that the flu strains evolve from year to year to adapt to the vaccines of yesterday. In the light of what we know today about genetics and reproduction, can people still believe in the Virgin Birth as biology?  In the light of what we know about what happens to a human body within minutes after it dies, can people still think of the resurrection as the resuscitation of a deceased body after three days?  In the light of what we know about astrophysics and the size of our universe, can people still treat the story of the ascension of Jesus to return to God as a literal event?  God has not lived above the sky in the educated Western world since the days of Galileo.
Beyond these conceptual problems if people actually studied the Bible they would be well aware that these treasured books disagree with each other on very essential matters like who constituted Jesus’ twelve disciples and even on the basic details of the Easter story.  There is hardly a detail in the Easter story found in one gospel that is not contradicted in another. Church leaders, who surely must be aware of these realities, seem eager not to allow it to be shared.  Indeed, they tend to suppress this knowledge.  Perhaps this is why there is something like a conspiracy of silence going on in our churches that prevents the knowledge available in the academy from filtering through the pulpit to engage the lives of the people in the pews.  Institutional leaders, including many clergy, seem to fear that truth and scholarship might disturb the faithful and cause the institutions to decline and their revenues to drop.
These leaders, perhaps fearful of controversy, need to realize that the people who are still in our churches do not live in a vacuum and that the number of people who find little or no meaning in the way Christianity is presented is increasing.  Church leaders counter these realities with the assertion that the fundamentalist churches are growing and they offer this as a rationale for not doing the hard work of Christian scholarship.  There is a statistical germ of truth in that assertion, but who among us thinks that ignorance will finally prevail or that cultivating an ecclesiastical fortress mentality that is resistant to new knowledge will finally succeed?  Fundamentalism, in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms, is in fact increasingly ghettoized in our society today and the modern world is becoming increasingly non-religious.
I still believe that Christianity can engage the modern mind in significant dialogue if we dare to take the biblical and theological knowledge that is currently available seriously.  I believe that we ought not to seek to dodge, but to address the questions that impinge upon us daily from the world of knowledge.  I have seen this engagement bear fruit when it has been practiced.  I believe it can happen world-wide.
To be a resource in this effort is why I wrote Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  I want to make the knowledge available in the world of Christian scholarship equally available to the people in the pews and in a language they can understand.
The seminary I attended had these words as its motto. “Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.”  That has also been the motto of my ordained career and this book is published as a part of that same conviction.  Truth and God can never be in conflict.  If they are, either what we call truth is wrong or how we define God is wrong.  I want us to be able to look at both possibilities.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.






New Book On-Sale 11/8/11 !
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.


Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!








Question & Answer
John from Hastings, Nebraska, writes:
Question:
I have just finished Stephen Patterson’s excellent article in “The Fourth R” (thank you for turning me on to this great publication) entitled Was the Resurrection Christianity’s Big Bang? Much of the article reminded me of your arguments concerning how the original Jesus experience was interpreted through the Jewish tradition and liturgy of the first century.
Patterson refers to the second prayer of the Eighteen Benedictions from the traditional Jewish liturgy (Blessed be you, O Lord, who makes the dead to live), serving as a critical lens through which the earliest confession regarding the resurrection surfaced. Would you please comment on this idea?  What are these Eighteen Benedictions and how sure are we that they date back to the first century, making up an important part of the context that found meaning in Jesus’ life and death?
By the way our summer book club at the First Presbyterian Church of Hastings, Nebraska just finished a lively and rewarding study of Jesus for the Non-Religious.  Thanks for your good work and leadership.
Answer:
Dear John,
I share your appreciation for Steve Patterson’s two part series on the Resurrection in “The Fourth R,” which is the quarterly journal of the Westar Institute or the Jesus Seminar.  I thought it was an impressive piece of work and have written Steve to tell him so. I am not sure I would base the story of the resurrection on the Benediction that he mentions, but I think it is fair to say that there was a genuine Jewish interest in life after death in the first century and it was located theologically in a concept of the justice of God.  The Benediction that Steve cites reflected that interest and that conviction.  I see the primary role of the Eighteen Benedictions, however, as serving a later and more crucial interest in the Christian movement.
The Eighteen Benedictions have an interesting history.  Not all sources agree on the details of history regarding these Benedictions, but let me tell you what I, at least, have come to understand.  There was a council meeting of Jewish leaders at a place called Jamnia in the latter half of the first century.  I date it around the year 88 CE.  At that time the Jews were living through a very difficult period of their history.  A war with the Roman Empire had begun in Galilee in 66 CE.  The forces of Rome ignored Galilee and struck instead at the capital city of Jerusalem, entering it and destroying it in 70 CE.  Jewish resistance seems to have lasted three more years in the desert fortress of Masada before it was finally crushed.  For all practical purposes, however, the destruction of Jerusalem brought this Jewish rebellion to an end.  The Jewish nation disappeared from the pages of human history in that year and did not reappear until 1948.  The Temple was destroyed and a pagan temple rebuilt over its ruins.  Jerusalem was repopulated with non-Jewish citizens.
With no nation, no holy city, no Temple and no priesthood, the Jewish religion was hard pressed to survive.  The Jews who were followers of Jesus were still at this time members of the synagogue.  They were busy incorporating Jesus into Jewish worship.  They were thought of as Jewish revisionists, that is, they were tolerated, but not appreciated in traditional Jewish circles.  With the loss of so much of their symbolic life during the war and following the defeat at the hands of the Romans, this tolerance began to fade and was replaced by increased irritation.  Ultimately, the tension got so hostile between the two Jewish groups that at this meeting of Jewish leaders in Jamnia, the more traditional orthodox party of Jews adopted the Eighteen Benedictions, all of which had had an earlier history, for use in the synagogue liturgy.  In these Benedictions anathemas were articulated against the “heretics” who, it seems, believed the things identified with the Jewish Christians. This meant that in synagogue worship the Jewish followers of Jesus had to participate in their own anathematization.   It was the adoption of these Benedictions for synagogue usage that ultimately led to the excommunication of the followers of Jesus from the synagogue, which seems to have occurred near the end of the 9thdecade.  John’s gospel needs to be understood, at least on one level, as the product of the excommunicated Jewish followers of Jesus, which is why the idea of being expelled from the synagogue is mentioned three times in John’s gospel and is the subject of the dialogue with the man born blind in John, chapter nine.  That is also why, I believe, this gospel alone adopts the name of God “I AM” to be the way Jesus identifies himself.
Piecing this story together from ancient sources is not always easy and exactness is often hard to achieve, but I think this is basically accurate and I hope it is helpful.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           My best,
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ~John Shelby Spong






New Book On-Sale 11/8/11 !
RE-CLAIMING THE BIBLE FOR A NON-RELIGIOUS WORLD

John Shelby Spong presents Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, a book designed to take readers into the contemporary academic debate about the Bible. 

A definitive voice for progressive Christianity, Spong frees readers from a literal view of the Bible. He demonstrates that it is possible to be both a deeply committed Christian and an informed twenty-first-century citizen.

Spong’s journey into the heart of the Bible is his attempt to call his readers into their own journeys into the mystery of God.


Order your copy now on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com!








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