Can a Bishop Be Wrong?: Ten Scholars Challenge John Shelby Spong
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Can a Bishop Be Wrong?: Ten Scholars Challenge John Shelby Spong
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Overview
An eminent group of Episcopal scholars and bishops addresses the core issues raised in Bishop Spong's books and teachings on the Virgin birth, resurrection, sexuality, scripture, sin, Jesus, culture, and God. These essays are incisive responses to an articulate and charismatic public figure whose provocative writings have stirred traditional and non-traditional thinkers alike.
While acknowledging that Spong's writing strikes a chord with lay people in the churches and the general public, the book's authors believe a balanced response is needed. They accomplish this by commending the bishop for having the courage of his convictions while challenging his teachings on the cornerstone beliefs of Christian tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819229700 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/01/1998 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Can a Bishop Be Wrong?
By Peter C. Moore
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 1998 Peter C. MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2970-0
CHAPTER 1
The Essential Spong
James M. Stanton
One evening when I tuned in by chance to the Comedy Channel's Politically Incorrect I noticed Bishop John Shelby Spong. "But who in the world," I asked myself, "could possibly be more politically correct than the bishop of Newark?"
And so it proved. Spong fed his audience just the kind of well-worn gag lines they craved—a thumb to the nose at traditional morality, religious orthodoxy, and the Christian church.
What struck me most at the time was the attitude of the Episcopal Church to all this. Does General Motors pay its executives to go on TV and make tasteless jokes about air bags? But when Spong ridicules traditional Christian morality and beliefs on TV, far from being fired by the body he supposedly serves, he is applauded—not only by the cable TV audience but by some Episcopalians. Isn't it all a little perverse, in the strictest (and nonerotic) sense?
To help us understand what is going on, let us consider this thesis: "If Bishop Spong did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
At face value, the thesis is preposterous, of course. One might immediately ask, "necessary to whom?" To TV talk shows like Oprah and Politically Incorrect? Not really. There are plenty of more interesting and bizarre cases of human interest out there.
Is he necessary to the clergy of his own denomination? I doubt they would miss spending an inordinate amount of time mopping up the debris after Bishop Spong's pronouncements or mollifying scandalized parishioners who are outraged by his provocative blasphemies—and ready to bolt for more traditional church homes? No.
Is he perhaps necessary to those serious biblical scholars and theologians who desperately need his unique gifts for presenting their assured scholarly results to the people? Is Spong, in other words, a sort of heterodox C. S. Lewis, that rare individual with both scholarly acumen to understand and the eloquence to popularize? No, among academics of my acquaintance (liberal, conservative, or so-so), the consensus seems to be that the bishop's scholarship is something of an embarrassment, often either outdated or out of left field, and usually over-simplified. As Tom Wright has written, "Spong sometimes sounds like a 1960s' man born (or at least writing) out of due time."
His prose style is, at best, ordinary and he has bad habits in scholarship, such as
1. shamelessly quoting himself in his own footnotes. (For example, in Living in Sin? of the 63 footnotes, Spong cites himself 17 times. In Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, there are 37 footnotes, 10 of which are self-referencing.)
2. dismissing his critics peremptorily, casting aspersions on their intelligence, intentions, and personalities. (For example, Pope John Paul II, former Presiding Bishop John Maury Allin, former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, and former Bishop of London Graham Leonard are all lumped together as "sexist," well-known bishops of the Episcopal Church are accused of having "no knowledge whatsoever of [recent] biblical studies"; the view of one past dean of an Episcopal seminary is characterized as "strange and antiquated" and "grandly impotent." Spong says of the Virginia Theological Seminary, his own alma mater, as a whole, it is "today more interested in propaganda than in education, more concerned about orthodoxy than truth, more afraid of the future than welcoming of it, and more defensive of its version of Christianity than it is open to the leading of the Holy Spirit.")
3. in general, painting himself as a heroic rescuer of the downtrodden or a sort of Galileo who suffers persecution bravely for the sake of truth. Being a Galileo-like champion is a challenging pose to maintain, especially while enjoying the rank and privileges of a bishop. But it is evident that persecution has changed since Galileo's day.
In short, it is not scholars who need Bishop Spong. As Luke Timothy Johnson has observed, his "readers struggle on to the end through his repetitions, non sequiturs, and narcissistic self-referentiality" only to find that what he has done is to "embrace ... the spirit of modernity with its inability to stomach the miraculous," and comes up with "what all enlightened people think anyhow." And that is, perhaps, the real reason he is necessary. Certain kinds of critical thinking—or whole campaigns of scholarship, some of which span generations—deserve a bad name. Unintentionally, but very effectively, Spong is giving it to them.
The fundamentalist has no better friend than John Shelby Spong. No one demonstrates better the futility of liberal religion. Spong's writing career is a trajectory demonstrating, as a priest once remarked to me, that "liberal theology is the theology of people who are on their way out of the church." Hence the fundamentalist owes Spong a debt of gratitude for demonstrating the essential failure of the liberal, historical-critical tradition to engender a vital Christian faith of any description.
Starting from the mildest of critical views of Scripture, the most easygoing of skepticisms about the details of the Gospel resurrection accounts, Spong has gone on to champion Eros Uber Alles, castigate St. Paul as a self-hating closet homosexual, debunk the whole historical fabric of the Gospels, and finally liberate his flock from the need for theism as a basic tenet of the faith.
How, then, does he recite the Creed when celebrating services? He says he does so with a deep and profound respect for the Creed. He would not vote to change a bit of the wording, or even drop out phrases which he thinks have been responsible for gross injustices done to, for example, the Jews or women. "I do not think any of us can rewrite history," Spong says. But it is the meaning behind the Creed, just as it is the meaning behind the Bible, that sustains Spong. Out of the experience of God in Jesus came the affirmations that found their final form in the Creed. "Jesus was of God. I assert that this is true for me ..." (emphasis added). The bishop writes, "The day has passed for me when, in the name of tolerance to the religious insecurities of others, I will allow my Christ to be defined inside a killing literalism." He claims that he accepts the meaning of these theological statements, but he makes clear that this meaning could only be set free "when the literalism of the symbol had been destroyed."
But was God really in Christ? Is that a true statement of the way things are? Is it objectively true? For Spong, all the theological statements come down to personal truths. He is entirely subjective. Furthermore, no theological statement or biblical narrative means what it appears to mean. The real meaning lies always "under," or "behind" the ostensible one. For those who have the time and the inclination to work through the Creed, or the sacraments, or indeed the Bible itself, and find a comfortable measure of "fit" between the words and what one believes, this may make sense. In reading Spong, one is reminded of the phrase from George Steiner, the "mandarin madness of secondary discourse."
That is not what the church has meant when it has proclaimed that "God was in Christ." Right through Scripture and the church's history, the message is not that we finally depend on our own understanding, our own achievement (however mandarin!) in groping our way to God, but that God comes to us, calls us to turn around ("repent") and deny ourselves, and place our whole trust in his grace. The good news is not that there are some among us, like Bishop Spong, who can work their way to a "meaningful" restatement of what the Creed once represented. It is that Jesus of Nazareth is "the way, the truth, and the life" against which all "my christs" appear pale and ineffectual.
Who Are the Fundamentalists, and What's So Bad About Them?
Spong does not really define the term fundamentalist. But according to him, fundamentalists support segregation of the races and outlaw the teaching of evolution. They fear inquiry and will probably even turn violent when biblical ambiguities, contradictions, and problems are pointed out. They believe the Bible, even though it turns out that they do not really know it or read it—unlike Bishop Spong, who says that he reads it daily.
But for the purpose of this essay, I will attempt to define what Bishop Spong thinks a fundamentalist is. The essential characteristic is revealed by the term he uses for them: literalists. The villainous person from whom Jack Spong intends to rescue the Bible is precisely that person who trusts the plain meaning of the Bible, who, in other words, regards it as truthful.
Put another way, for Jack Spong, a fundamentalist is anyone who takes the Bible's statements more seriously than he does. This is actually a very large and diverse group: it includes almost everyone who is well known in religion from Athanasius to Augustine to Aquinas, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Billy Graham to Billy the Kid. It even includes Edgar Cayce and the National Enquirer (known among other things for its cover stories on "Healing Herbs from the Bible"). By Spong's implicit definition, Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide, who credits the historical reality of Jesus' resurrection, is a fundamentalist. In Spong's terms, it is really difficult to find a nonfundamentalist, at least among those who give a hoot about the Bible one way or another. Indeed, it is hard to imagine why anyone who took the plain meaning of the Bible less seriously than Spong would bother to read it at all.
Historically, of course, the term fundamentalism meant something more specific. Historical American fundamentalism lay on one side of a basic cultural rift between the heartland attitudes and values of the Midwest and the cultured despisers of the same who tended to inhabit the Eastern Seaboard academies and imitate European trends. In reaction to liberal critics of traditional Protestant Christianity, a group arose to assert the "fundamentals" of the faith. Their fundamentals were not restricted to the classical credal tenets: dispensationalism and premillennial eschatology were mixed in with the theory of inerrancy of Scripture, which many of us now equate with "fundamentalism."
While reflecting on Bishop Spong's campaign to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism, it's worth remembering that historical fundamentalism itself was an effort to rescue the Scriptures and Christianity from liberalism. And, in turn, liberalism was an attempt to rescue Christianity from the hazard of being outdated in the face of Darwinism and other nineteenth-century scientific theories. The nineteenth-century liberals predicted that the capacity for supernatural faith would inevitably wither away in the twentieth century. The church was supposed to prepare itself to offer a nonsupematural version of its faith.
But history played a trick on the liberals. Based on their predictions, we would expect the thriving churches of our own time to be those that are equipped with liberal modernist gospels. Those benighted churches that clung to the beliefs of the fundamentalists should have withered away in the face of history. But anyone with eyes to see or statisticians to count can observe that almost the opposite is true. Liberalism, which married the spirit of the age, is eking out a poor living on a widow's pension of sentiment and endowments. Literalists hold sway, even when their proclamations are not as doctrinally refined or theologically balanced as their own scholars might wish. Alister McGrath notes that a liberal like Spong can no longer believe that his message will be rewarded with popularity; on the contrary, there is almost a stoic death wish in it, an apprehension of dwindling resources and empty choirs. People like Spong can comfort themselves only with being part of the Faithful Remnant who hold out against the forces of darkness.
Spong as a Fundamentalist
I wonder whether Bishop Spong realizes that, in his own way, he is a fundamentalist. Certainly, his list of fundamentals would read differently than that of the people he opposes. The straw man fundamentalist that Spong depicts swallows Scripture's literal meaning like the camel in Jesus's figure of speech. In fact, the fundamentalist actually assumes that Jesus really said that!
Spong, on the other hand, would question Scripture's assertion that Jesus really delivered that one-liner and would denigrate the acumen of the fundamentalist who accepted such testimony on face value. But don't get the idea that the bishop's skepticism is consistently applied. It is not. If, as he reports it, the medical researchers at Cornell are "convinced that sexual orientation is inborn," Spong takes that opinion as ... well, as gospel. If Elaine Pagels or Rosemary Radford Ruether or Michael Goulder (the "nonaggressive atheist" biblical scholar whose work underlies Spong's book Liberating the Gospels) publishes a minority opinion that commends itself to Spong's view of church history as one prolonged suppression of minorities and the distortion of primeval "religious experience," as Spong reconstructs it—well, then these opinions are revelations by which all other views must be judged. Never mind that the "assured opinions" of scholars rise and fall almost as frequently as hemlines.
The irony is that Spong in his own way is a fundamentalist. The charge can be demonstrated from his own method of critiquing the Bible.
Spong articulates what may be called a hermeneutical principle: "Without awareness of the original source and motivations of a text ... the Bible cannot be used with integrity nor can it be quoted in debate to prove some point that in all probability the original authors would never have considered" (LS, 105). It is by means of this principle that he proceeds to debunk what most of the Bible has to say about sexuality. The biblical writers were so caught up in their own prejudices that they could not recognize the possibility of meaningful "mutual" forms of sexual relationships beyond marriage. Therefore, one could not use their laws to justify, for example, disallowing homosexual unions as understood today.
For instance, according to Spong, the Priestly writer in the Pentateuch, whom critical scholars refer to as "P," was the latest of the redactors in ancient Israel who worked over the biblical texts held to come down from Moses. He was, therefore, at the point farthest removed from the "original" form of Hebrew religion. Furthermore, as can be shown from a careful analysis of his work, P was a wholly disreputable guy (or guys). Spong can hardly find words equal to the task of describing this legalistic, patriarchal figure bent on retaining and imposing priestly power on the poor unfortunates dependent on his reworking of the faith.
After Spong has revealed to us the whole sick, distorted, myopic efforts of the Bible writers from P to Paul, he asks, What enduring message does the Bible have to convey? What "Word" do we come to through the flawed and fallible words of the Bible?
The enduring Word, he says, "is heard in the biblical story of creation": "It is the Word proclaiming that life is good, that everything that is shares in the divine origin and must therefore be celebrated and affirmed" (LS, 156).
But where does this canon within the Canon come from? In the first chapter of Genesis, we find the formula, "And God saw that it was good." Yet the first chapter is also ascribed to P. Now, by Spong's own principle, we cannot interpret a biblical passage in a way that cannot be supported by the original writer's intention! If P was the legalistic and inhospitable author of the "laws" of Israel, condemning among other things the very sexual liberties that the bishop wishes to promote, then clearly he cannot be interpreted to support the notion that "everything ... must there fore be celebrated and affirmed." P could never be interpreted to condone a new sexual ethic.
Yet Spong does precisely this. He uses a biblical author to justify a position which "in all probability the original authors would never have considered." Since this is what he accuses fundamentalists of doing, it is only fair to draw the conclusion that Spong himself is a fundamentalist!
The Don Quixote of Newark
When his views "lifted [him] as an author onto both a national and international stage," Spong says he found himself "hated and feared by some and at the same time a kind of religious hero for others." He assures readers of Resurrection: Myth or Reality? that he truly "coveted neither response." Coming from the man who shared condom jokes on TV with Doctor Ruth, this is significantly harder to believe than the sun's standing still for Joshua. So what kind of "religious hero" is he?
Perhaps he is a bit of a Don Quixote, self-appointed and misunderstood knight-errant defending his Beloved Lady, the Scriptures and the Christian faith, against the captivity and aspersions of the literalists. At first glance, this may be hard to believe. Isn't Spong actually saying that his Lady is somewhat dishonest? After all, he is the one who asserts that the Bible really is false, that it does lie—at least literally. Is he not the one who says that the giants really are just windmills He is intent on rescuing her from those literalists who say—falsely, Spong believes—that she tells the truth on a literal level.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Can a Bishop Be Wrong? by Peter C. Moore. Copyright © 1998 Peter C. Moore. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Introduction Peter C. Moore, xi,
1 The Essential Spong James M. Stanton, 1,
2 Flight from Transcendence William G. Witt, 20,
3 Modernity or Christianity? John Spong's Culture of Disbelief C. FitzSimons Allison, 40,
4 Rescuing the Bible from Bishop Spong Ephraim Radner, 55,
5 The Sin of Faith Russell R. Reno, 74,
6 From Castle to Bungalow: Bishop Spong and the Virgin Birth Edith M. Humphrey, 93,
7 Turtles All the Way Down: Did Jesus Rise from the Grave? George R. Sumner, Jr., 114,
8 The Joy of (Newark) Sex David A. Scott, 132,
9 Inside the Whirlwind: Christian Theism and the Monism of John Spong Stephen M. Smith, 151,
10 Euthanasia and the Newark Way of Death Daniel A. Westberg, 169,
11 Contributors, 186,