A Man of God and Catholicism Lite

Three men of God, three men speaking their views on gay people. Which strikes me as a bit odd—has anyone come around and asked Ricky Martin, say, or Anderson Cooper their views on religion? At any rate, we have the pope on record—he’s a sinner, he said, as we all are. And who is he to judge gay people? Here’s his quote, as it appeared in The New York Times:

In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are “socially wounded” because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro, I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: “Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?” We must always consider the person.

OK—it’s a step. It’s better than Benedict, who tended to couple the word “homosexuality” with the phrase “intrinsically evil,” or the like. And we all took the bait—hey, after all those years of Ratzinger, we’re yearning for a pope who gets it, who starts moving the church forward.

And he certainly seems different—living in the guest house, driving a Ford escort, eschewing the pomp that was Benedict’s lifeblood and focusing on the poor. But how liberal is this pope? Here are his views on women, from the same interview:

I am wary of a solution that can be reduced to a kind of “female machismo,” because a woman has a different makeup than a man. But what I hear about the role of women is often inspired by an ideology of machismo. Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops. I say this because we must not confuse the function with the dignity. We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church. We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman. Only by making this step will it be possible to better reflect on their function within the church. The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.

Is it just me, or is anyone else out there confused about that first sentence, and the reference to “female machismo?” I think what he’s saying is something like, “insisting that men and women are equals and should be able to hold the same positions is wrong. Women and men are intrinsically different, and no, dears, no priesthood or God forbid papacy for you!”

And am I the only one who is thoroughly sick of the church’s trotting out Mary every time women raise legitimate questions or demands? Partly because as I understand it, biblically speaking, Mary isn’t an especially likeable character—nor does she seem to figure very prominently in the life of Jesus. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

There is also an incident in which Jesus is sometimes interpreted as rejecting his family. "And his mother and his brothers arrived, and standing outside, they sent in a message asking for him^[Mk 3:21] ... And looking at those who sat in a circle around him, Jesus said, 'These are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.'"

But all this veneration of Mary seems to come with the message: we’re perfectly happy to put you on a pedestal, but not in the priesthood. And notice as well that the pope’s “liberal” views on homosexuality don’t go that far, he hardly comes out and says, “both gay and straight people were made in God’s image, both of their loves are of equal worth, and gay people will have the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals in the Catholic church, including marriage.”

Nonetheless, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon, including the Reverend Timothy M. Dolan, the Archbishop of New York. Here he is, courtesy of The New York Times:

After Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Cardinal Dolan, who has himself softened his language on homosexuality in the past year, likened the pope to the Yankees’ retiring relief pitcher: “I think he’s our Mariano Rivera. He’s a great relief to all of us.”

Ummmm, this is a guy who said the following to The New York Times during Holy Week this year:

“Well, the first thing I’d say to them is: ‘I love you, too. And God loves you. And you are made in God’s image and likeness. And — and we — we want your happiness. But — and you’re entitled to friendship,’” Cardinal Dolan said. “But we also know that God has told us that the way to happiness, that — especially when it comes to sexual love — that is intended only for a man and woman in marriage, where children can come about naturally.”

Yeah? This sounds suspiciously like all those people whose views are “evolving,” and can’t we say it, at last. “Evolving” simply means not sticking your neck out until it’s absolutely imperative—failure to do so will make you look like a complete hypocrite. Great—now we know that God loves us, as well as the Cardinal, but sex with a person of the same gender is a sin.

The person who gets it? Gene Robinson, who just about caused a schism in the church, when he became the first openly gay bishop. And as you’ll see in the clip below, he doesn’t mince words: we’ve done a lot of damage to gay people, and we’re gonna have to work hard to repair the damage. There’s a reason why LGBT people are suspicious and angry. He comes out and says it to a group of Presbyterians who will be giving out glasses of water at the Gay Pride march later in the day: “You are representing the community of Christians, Jews and Muslims who are 95% of the repression we LGBT people have experienced in our lives.”

Or how about, “you are the oppressor offering the cup of water to the oppressed?” Robinson doesn’t pull the punches, or—perhaps a better image—hesitate to go into the temple and lecture to the money lenders. Nor—from the faces of the stony Presbyterians—is his message better received.

And Robinson is out there, walking the talk—passing out the cups of water to drag queens, scantily-clad boys, street performers, and the just-general-folk who drift by.

For all the talk of not focusing on abortion, homosexuality, contraception—what are we hearing? A sort of Catholicism of Nice—we won’t talk about it, we won’t judge, now come into the church but please, lower your voices, don’t rock the boat, no demands.

Congratulations—the Catholic Church has progressed to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

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?