The Sins of Scripture (30 page)
Read The Sins of Scripture Online
Authors: John Shelby Spong
In the kingdom of God for which our world yearns, every person will have a better opportunity to live fully and thus to worship the God who is the Source of Life; every person will be freed to love wastefully and thus to worship the God who is the Source of Love; and every person will have a better chance to be all that each person can be in the infinite variety of our humanity—every race, ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation—for that is what it means to worship the God who is the Ground of All Being. That is the Christ function and to serve this Christ is the only ministry that the church, which calls itself the Body of Christ, has. All else is human folly born out of human survival games.
Jesus, according to the Fourth Gospel, did not come to make us religious, to make us righteous or moral, or even to make us orthodox. All of those are demonstrably killing formulas throughout our world. John said Jesus had only one purpose and that was to call us into life more abundantly (10:10). That is the meaning of God in our post-tribal and even post-religious world.
The use of the Bible to justify our prejudices must be abandoned. We do not abandon that sacred story in which the sins of scripture are embedded in the “terrible texts,” however. We rather claim it for our own. We recognize its humble tribal birthplace. We celebrate its growth, its breaking of barriers and boundaries. We watch it move from tribal deity to universal deity, and even beyond. Then we observe that in the person of Jesus this God presence drew near and entered our humanity, calling us beyond limits into a new consciousness. We place ourselves in this ever-expanding epic and write the next chapter as we embrace that new humanity. We have entered into the consciousness of God. That is what it means to discover that we are now God’s dwelling place. There is no supernatural deity beyond the sky working miracles. There is only a God-infused humanity through whom the Source of Life, the Source of Love and the Ground of Being lives. We are the God-bearers of the world. We must rise to our new vocation and be God for one another. For in each of us is the promise of “Emmanuel,” which means God with us. The only way that God can be with us now and through the ages is for each of us to allow God to live and love through us, through our humanity.
This why I am a Christian and why I treasure the Holy Scriptures that chronicle my journey through time to this moment of both reformation and revelation. That is why we need now to write the next chapter of our universal epic.
Shalom.
Section 1
1.
Paul Tillich,
The Protestant Era,
p. 226. See bibliography for details.
2.
Among my treasured guides in this study were Gerhard Von Rad’s work on Genesis entitled
Genesis: A Commentary,
Brevard Childs’ and Martin Noth’s works on Exodus, George B. Caird’s and Hans Conzelmann’s works on Luke and Michael Goulder’s monumental two-volume commentary on Luke, titled
Luke: A New Paradigm,
which I discovered later in life. Ernst Haenchen led me through my study of Acts. Edwin Hoskyns, C. H. Dodd, William Temple and later Raymond Brown guided my work on the Fourth Gospel. Samuel Terrien introduced me to the book of Psalms, and James Muilenburg to the prophets and the theology of the Old Testament. My Pauline studies were guided by a series of scholars as old as Martin Luther and as modern as Rudolf Bultmann, with additional help coming from Krister Stendahl, Paul Van Buren, Samuel Sandmel and a host of others. The details for each of these authors are contained in the bibliography.
3.
Dr. Bailey Smith was the gentleman’s name. It was in the early 1990s.
4.
Jean Holloway, “Scripture,” written to be sung to the tune
Aurelia
or the tune
Munich.
Used by permission.
5.
President Bill Clinton.
6.
A good example might be to compare Mark 3:7–10, where the author of this gospel writes in typically garbled Marcan prose (here from the RSV):
Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great multitude from Galilee followed; also from Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from about Tyre and Sidon a great multitude, hearing all that he did, came to him. And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they should crush him; for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him.
…with Luke’s edited version in 6:17–18:
And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases.
7.
John Greenleaf Whittier put this biblical episode into a poem that later became a hymn (taken from Hymn 435 in the Episcopal hymnal, 1940, published by the Church Pension Fund, New York, 1943):
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.
Breathe through the heat of our desire
Thy coolness and thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still small voice of calm.
Section 2
1.
Frank McCourt,
Angela’s Ashes,
chap. 1. See bibliography for details.
2.
The account of Agatha Yarnell is based on a true story well publicized in the press and television. I have not used her real name, however, to keep from adding one more bit of notoriety to those family members who have endured so much. I have also altered the details but not the substance of this tragedy.
3.
I will explain the relationship between the oldest story of creation, which begins with Gen. 2:4 and goes through Adam and Eve, and the newest story of creation, which is in Gen. 1:1–23, as the text of this chapter unfolds.
4.
Even though I will not take time to analyze this text, I think it is important to note the interesting use of pronouns found here. This is the product of a very patriarchal age, and yet this ancient story has God speak of the divine self in the plural. Let us make man in
our
own image. The text goes on to say God created man in
his
own image, in the image of God created
he
him. Male and female created
he them
. In the older version of the creation story, which begins with Gen. 2:4, only the man is created in God’s image, then the animals and finally the woman out of Adam’s rib. I will return to this text in a subsequent chapter. Here I simply want to note the unusual use of pronouns.
5.
Pike was a former Episcopal/Anglican bishop of California who while dean at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, prior to being elected bishop, led the fight inside the Episcopal Church to see birth control and family planning as a moral option not an immoral practice.
6.
James Russell Lowell, 1845. Hymn 519 in the Episcopal hymnal, 1940. See bibliography for details.
7.
Jürgen Moltmann,
God in Creation,
p. 21. See bibliography for details.
8.
This is quoted from the annual report of a stockholders’ meeting of this company.
9.
Quoted from a statement by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), Dec. 1, 2000. Taken from
Nature’s Way
by Ed McGaa, Eagle Man, chapter 9 in particular. See bibliography for details.
10.
Many of the details from this paragraph and the next are taken from chapter 8 of the book
Nature’s Way
by Ed McGaa, Eagle Man. See bibliography for details.
11.
Andrew C. Revkin, “Glacier Loss Seen as Clear Signs of Human Role in Global Warming,” Reuters, Feb. 19, 2001.
12.
From an Associated Press story, Jan. 22, 2001.
13.
Mr. Putin reversed himself just prior to this book’s publication and signed the Kyoto Treaty on behalf of Russia.
14.
Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crises,”
Science
155 (1967): 1203–1207, part of a compendium of essays.
15.
Charles Birch,
Faith, Science and the Future
(Geneva: Church and Society, 1978), quoted from Moltman, p. 50.
16.
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring.
See bibliography for details.
17.
Canon 4 of Rite II of the Holy Eucharist in the 1979 version of the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer refers to “Our Island Home.”
18.
Wendell Willkie’s
One World
was published in 1943.
19.
Ed McGaa, Eagle Man,
Nature’s Way,
p. xiii. See bibliography for details.
20.
Jürgen Moltmann,
God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God,
pp. 49–50. See bibliography for details.
Section 3
1.
Tertullian,
De Cultu Feminarum,
book 1, chap. 1.
2.
All of the above quotations about the relationship between men and women were taken directly off the Internet from women in the religions of the world.
3.
Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers,
The Power of Myth.
See bibliography for details.
4.
Television evangelist Pat Robertson in a 1992 fundraising letter.
5.
“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12).
6.
This issue became crucial in the nineteenth century in Catholic theology because in the eighteenth century scientists had conclusively documented the existence of the egg cell in the woman, which made her cocreator of every life that has ever been born. Jesus was assumed now to have received 50 percent of his genetic makeup from his mother. Since she too was a child of Adam, she too carried the stain of original sin. So in order for Jesus to be born sinless, Mary herself had to have a special birth. The Immaculate Conception solved that problem.
7.
Carl Jung,
Aion,
chap. 4
.
See bibliography for details.
8.
St. Jerome, from his commentary on Ephesians 3:5. Quoted from Marina Warner,
Alone of All Her Sex,
p. 73. See bibliography for details.
9.
St. Jerome, from his commentary on Zechariah. Quoted from Marina Warner,
Alone of All Her Sex,
p. 76. See bibliography for details.
10.
U.S. Supreme Court case,
Bradford v. the State of Illinois
(1873). Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase was the sole voice of dissent.
11.
Quoted from Marina Warner,
Alone of All Her Sex,
p. 76. See bibliography for details.
12.
Dionysius, letter to Basilides, canon 2.
13.
A ninth-century Islamic scholar, Al-Razi, made reference to this while commenting on Qur’an 4:11. The citation can be found on the Internet under “Citations: The Position of Women in Islam.”
14.
See Joan Morris,
The Lady Was a Bishop,
pp. 105–112. See bibliography for details.
15.
Teresa Heinz Kerry, July 2004. Quoted from her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
16.
See Matt. 27:56, 61; 28:1; Mark 15:40, 47; 16:1; Luke 8:2, 24; 10; John 19:25; 20:18.
Section 4
1.
Television evangelist Pat Robertson on the
700 Club
television program. Dec. 24, 1973.
2.
Before this book went to press the Reverend Dr. Jeffrey John was appointed and installed as dean of St. Alban’s Cathedral in the Church of England. It was compensation for the shameful way he was treated in this process. Oxford lost a great bishop; St. Alban’s gained a great dean. The Church of England appears to be saying that an honest homosexual is prohibited from being a bishop but allowed to be a dean. The rationality of that position escapes me.
3.
The Right Reverend John Howe of Central Florida to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold. This correspondence was copied to all the bishops following the General Convention in September 2003.
4.
Pat Robertson on the
700 Club
television program, Dec. 24, 1973.
5.
The Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson, an acknowledged gay man whose fourteen-year partnership is a matter of public record, was elected by the clergy and people in the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire and confirmed by the General Convention of the entire Episcopal Church in 2003.
6.
Taken from a speech given by Dean Moore and printed on the Internet in 2003.
7.
Michael Massing, “Bishop Lee’s Choice,”
New York Times
magazine, Jan. 4, 2004.
Section 5
1.
Billy Graham,
Just As I Am,
pp. 7 and 19. See bibliography for details.
2.
A reading from Proverbs occurs only once in the three-year lectionary used by many Christian bodies. It is not on a Sunday, but on the Feast of St. Matthew, observed on September 21. That reading from the Hebrew scriptures is Proverbs 3:1–6. Otherwise Proverbs is never read in this liturgical cycle.
3.
Isaiah 40–55: the work of an unknown prophet that was attached to the scroll of Isaiah.
4.
James Dobson,
A New Dare to Discipline
and
Temper Your Child’s Tantrums
. See bibliography for details.
5.
Philip J. Greven,
Spare the Child.
See bibliography for details.
6.
The Journals of Merriwether Lewis and William Clark,
Oct. 15, 1804. Read on the Internet.
7.
Charles Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby;
Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;
and William F. Buckley,
Saving the Queen: A Blackford Oakes Mystery
. See bibliography for details.
8.
New York Times,
May 6, 2004, p. A10.
9.
This was true in the Buckley novel
Saving the Queen,
which was set in an upper-class English boarding school.