Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The World According to Spong

Well, here’s what the guy believes: 

Twelve points

1.     Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

2.     Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3.     The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4.     The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5.     The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6.     The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

7.     Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8.     The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9.     There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10.   Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11.   The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12.   All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
“The guy” is a former Episcopal bishop, John Shelby Spong, who has written a book called The Sins of Scripture, which argues that the Bible cannot and must not be taken literally. So how does one read the Bible, the interviewer asks in the clip below? Spong believes you should read it as a progression, from the tribal beliefs of the Old Testament through the teaching of the life of Christ.
Well, that was interesting enough for me to check out the Reverend Spong in Wikipedia, which is where I got the twelve theses above.
Well, I thought I knew the term “theism,” but did I? Is Spong using the term in some specialized way? Here’s the definition, also by way of Wikipedia:
Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.[1] In a more specific sense, theism is commonly a monotheistic doctrine concerning the nature of a deity, and that deity's relationship to the universe.[2][3][4][5] Theism, in this specific sense, conceives of God as personal, present and active in the governance and organization of the world and the universe. As such theism describes the classical conception of God that is found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and some forms of Hinduism. 
Ummm—I’m a bear of very little brain, especially where religion is concerned, but I’d be curious to know: why is theism dead? And in what way are we to talk about God?
Could it be the ocean, the Goldberg Variations, the love of a mother holding her child moments after birth? Because if that’s God, I might have a shot, here.
Here’s what Spong has to say:


Right—so whatever God is (or are—which to me makes sense theologically, if not grammatically), Jesus is not the incarnation of her / him / it / them. Oh—and I looked up Christology, and yes, it means exactly what you think—the study of the nature and person of Christ. That said, how are we to look at Christ? As the most perfect representation of God?
All of the rest of the theses make perfect sense to me. But apparently, somebody with a better ear for theology didn’t think so; the Reverend Rowan Williams said they embodied “confusion and misinterpretation.”
Spong has various other contentions, some of which are contentious. He’s believed since before Dan Brown that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ. Why? Well, for one thing, Mary Magdalene in one gospel goes to claim the body of Christ—no woman of the time could have done that, were she not his wife.
Spong also decries the fact that “religion,” as it’s commonly seen, has become almost totally a negative thing—the priest abuse scandals, the exclusion of women in many faiths, the prohibition of homosexuality, the total focus on sex, about which he thinks the church knows nothing. Spong feels that two things are happening—the fundamentalist movement is hysterically reaching backward, and the mainstream churches have nothing to offer the rest of us. And so, we’re at a crucial moment when Christianity is going to have to change, to re-invent itself.
And about scripture? Well, first Spong points out that the first gospel of the New Testament was written 50 years after the death of Christ; in addition, it was written in Greek, whereas Christ spoke Aramaic. And he tears through a lot of stuff: nothing, he says, in the scripture paints Mary, the mother of Christ, as a particularly saintly, or even supportive mother, nor is she very prominent in the gospel. Oh, and by the way—the virgin birth stuff? Concocted in the ninth decade, by Matthew; none of the earlier writers ever made the claim. Oh, and he says that no respecting / respected theologian believes it. What’s the source of the confusion? Matthew didn’t know Hebrew, and had to read in Greek. So when he read in Isaiah 7:14 that a virgin shall conceive, he was reading a Greek translation of a Hebrew word that did not mean “virgin” but rather a young woman.
Oh, and another news flash—there weren’t twelve apostles but fifteen. Why? Because there are 15 guys in the New Testament who seem to be apostles, and so we have to assume that Thaddeus was Judas, and they got the names wrong. Poppycock, says Spong. And speaking of disciples—Jesus had both male and female disciples.
Spong says that he started out as a fundamentalist, and only changed when he discovered, at age fourteen, that his fundamentalism was impeding his growth and development. And what does he say now? “God is beyond my human capacity to ever know fully.”
Right—I can get that. In fact, I can buy into all of what Spong says. But I think he’s articulated all of what we shouldn’t be thinking or doing. That’s great, but…
…what is he proposing instead?

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