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Conference lgp30::christian-perspective

Title:Discussions from a Christian Perspective
Notice:Prostitutes and tax collectors welcome!
Moderator:CSC32::J_CHRISTIE
Created:Mon Sep 17 1990
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:1362
Total number of notes:61362

420.0. "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism - SRO" by CSC32::J_CHRISTIE (Peace: the Final Frontier) Sat Mar 14 1992 01:27

"A Bishop rethinks the meaning of Scripture"

by Bishop John Shelby Spong

I recently checked out this book from the public library.  And so far,
I've found it to be written from a spiritually refreshing Christian
perspective.  Those excerpts I've used so far (Notes 18.305, 11.122,
& 91.807) are from just the first few pages.

What I intend to do is give a running commentary on the book every few
chapters, which I propose doing here.

I realize there is another topic that this might well fit into, but I felt
this book deserved a topic of its own.

Peace,
Richard
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420.1CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierMon Mar 16 1992 18:5214
	I have to agree with Spong that most mainline Protestants as well
as a majority of Catholics are biblically ignorant.  In addition to possessing
only a spotty knowledge of what Scripture actually says, most possess any
number of false notions about how the Old and New Testaments evolved.

	Most of the first few chapters of Spong's book provide examples for
not accepting the Bible as literal and inerrant.

	At the same time Spong is beginning to build a foundation for a richer
understanding of Scripture than is possible via the literal or inerrant
paradigm.

Peace,
Richard
420.2CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierMon Mar 16 1992 21:1425
There are two distinct Genesis stories, one of which was not written down
until well after most of the rest of the Old Testament.

There are 3 irreconcilable versions of the 10 Commandments contained
within the Old Testament.

Job, Ruth and Jonah were written as protests against the more dominant
thinking of their times.

The oldest parts of the New Testament were not the Gospels.  The oldest
parts of the New Testament were letters written by Paul.  In their time,
these were not elevated to the status of Scripture.  They were just what they
were - letters from a beloved brother in the faith.  It is highly likely that
Paul never read any of the Gospels.

Mark, apparently not fluent in Greek, suffers from syntax errors and other
grammatical problems.

Luke and Matthew felt free to alter Markan texts as they saw fit.

These are but a handful of the revelations offered by Bishop Spong to
begin shedding a different light on the Scriptures.

Peace,
Richard
420.3The Man from TarsusCSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierMon Mar 30 1992 22:5614
I've read a little further in "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism."

Spong has presented a portrait of Paul, but he presented nothing I hadn't
learned before.  Spong did announce at the outset of his book that he would
present nothing new.

Spong does explore the theory that Paul may have been sexually attracted
to members of his own sex, that he was repulsed by his feelings, and that
he probably never acted on them.  To provide elaboration here would be
doing Spong a disservice.  You need to read the book.  I will report that
while I found it an intriguing theory, and one which would explain much,
I personally didn't find it very convincing.

Richard
420.4CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierWed Apr 01 1992 21:5619
Spong takes the position that Mark was most likely the first Gospel
to be written.  This matches what I was taught when I took a course
on the history of the New Testament at UCCS.  There are doubtlessly
other theories concerning the order in which the Gospels were written,
but this one is probably the most widely accepted.

Matthew and Luke both drew upon Mark in compiling their versions of
the Gospel; Matthew changing Mark's "kingdom of God" to a phrase
more acceptable to his primarily Jewish readers, "kingdom of Heaven."
Luke did the same kind of editing (or tailoring), using "Master" instead
of "Lord," for example.

I hadn't appreciated, before reading the Spong's book, the great lengths
to which Matthew went in order to make his Gospel fit certain criteria
based upon the Old Testament and rabbinical traditions, which he evidently
knew his intended audience would require.

Peace,
Richard
420.5A quote from the bookCSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierThu Apr 02 1992 19:5017
I came across this very interesting quote while reading through the
chapter which examines the strengths and weaknesses of the
Gospel of Luke:

	"Both the sacred Scriptures and the creeds of the Christian
church can point to but they can never finally capture eternal truth.
The attempt to make either Bible or tradition "infallible" is an attempt
to shore up ecclesiastical power and control.  It is never an attempt to
preserve truth.  Indeed, those who would freeze truth in any words,
concepts, or creed will guarantee a time warp that will finally doom
the truth to extinction.  Only truth that is freed from its captivity
from time and words and allowed to float in the sea of relativity will
survive the ravages of subjectivity.  Only truth that can constantly
call out new words capable of lifting yesterday's experience into today's
mind-set will finally survive."

					- Bishop John Spong
420.6Another interesting quoteCSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierMon Apr 06 1992 20:4122
"The task of the modern Christian is to learn how to read [the Bible]
with an open heart, to hear it beneath the level of a narrow literalism.
The task of the modern Christian is to have the living Word that moves
beneath the literal words of the Bible erupt to call people into life
and into the task of building an inclusive community where Christ is
seen in all persons, where those in Christ can begin to respect the
dignity of every human being, and where all people can begin to respond
to the presence of God that is over, under, around, and through all of
life.

God is and was an omnipresent God.  Yet this God was seen with burning
intensity in the full humanity of the one we call Jesus of Nazareth.
This God calls those who have been divinely created in this God's image
to be the persons God created them to be, for in the fullness of humanity
the presence of God can still be experienced.  A literal view of Holy
Scripture can never lead to this vision.

Fundamentalism is so limited.  This is surely why Paul wrote that
'the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life' (2 Cor 3:6)"

				- Bishop John Spong
				  "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism"
420.7CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierMon Apr 06 1992 22:5613
	"I do not believe I can make a case for a single word attributed
to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel to be a literal word actually spoken by
the historic Jesus.  Yet I also believe that this Gospel writer understood
Jesus and his ultimate meaning better than any other......

	Literalize John and you will lose the Gospel.  For that which is
literalized becomes nonsense, while truth that is approached through
sign and symbol becomes the very doorway into God.  It is a pity that
those who seek to defend biblical truth so often fail to comprehend its
message."

				- Bishop John Spong
				  "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism"
420.8My favorite quotes from the bookCSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierTue Apr 07 1992 18:3335
	"No barriers could be erected around the love of God that was seen
in the life of Jesus.  It was a terrifying, barrier-free love that rendered
our religious security systems no longer operative.  Such a love called
for profound changes in the human psyche.  Such a love called for openness,
for the death of prejudice, for the radical insecurity of a fully accessible
humanity, for the end of any human isolation.  Such love could not be
tolerated; rather, it had to be eliminated.  The cross was a necessity if
human life was unwilling to be opened this widely, and human life was,
in the first century, quite unwilling to be made so vulnerable.

	Human life is still unwilling to be so vulnerable.  Every assault
on human or religious prejudice today elicits anew that incredible human
anger of an insecure creature.  We clutch our defining limitations to our
breasts like sweet sicknesses from which we dare not be purged.  For years
we convinced ourselves of the subhuman status of black people, women,
homosexual people.  We reacted to those persons with AIDS as our spiritual
ancestors had reached to the lepers.  We built churches to house the righteous
while relegating the sinners to the ranks of the rejected as our pharisaic
forebears did so many years ago.

	We cannot, however, escape the power of the fact that Jesus
means love -- divine, penetrating, opening, life-giving, ecstatic love.
Such love is the very essence of what we mean by God.  God is love.
God was in Christ.  This was the experience that sought to find verbal
forms in such creedal concepts as the Holy Trinity, the incarnation,
the virgin birth.  It is not the creedal words that are sacred but the
reality of the experience that lies behind the words.  That is where
holiness is met.  The God who is love cannot be approached in worship
except through the experience of living that unconditional quality of
love.  That is why the church must be broken open and freed of its
noninclusive prejudices.  That is why slavery, segregation, sexism,
bigotry, and homophobia tear at the very soul of the church."

				- Bishop John Spong
				  "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism"
420.9CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierTue Apr 07 1992 22:2526
	I've now completed reading "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism".
Bishop Spong maintains that the Bible is a vivid and valid source of
spiritual inspiration and that it is a profound instrument for finding
the living God.

	Spong accuses fundamentalism of holding the Bible captive and
confining Scripture to the straightjacket of inerrant literalism.  Spong
also criticizes those Christians who do not share the fundamentalist view
of Scripture for allowing themselves to remain biblically ignorant and buying
into the notion that the fundamentalist view is true and correct.

	It is true that Spong's is a liberal agenda.  Spong makes no apology
for that.  It may well be true that Spong is no logician.  He demonstrates
his points through the use of examples; hundreds of examples, and reason
in the light of contemporary knowledge of the universe.

	Spong does love the Bible, but his loves for the Bible is superceded
by his love for the One to Whom the Bible points.  Spong, unlike some of the
televangelists with whom he takes exception, seeks no fame or fortune for
himself.  Rather, Spong's goal is to regenerate interest in the Bible and to
encourage study and understanding of the Bible among those who have kept
their Bibles on their bookshelves as a quaint relic, only read and quoted
by religious fanatics.

Peace,
Richard
420.10How many times I've experienced this!!CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierTue Apr 07 1992 22:2719
	"I am not impressed by what passes for adult education in most
churches.  Many a church Bible class is little more than a pooling of
ignorance.  Few clery that I observe are willing to give the time necessary
to become competent teachers of the Bible in their congregations.  When
they do, the biblical ignorance of the ages rises up to haunt them, for
scholarship challenges the pious, simple faith of those who do not want
to be bothered by disturbing truth......

	So I hold the Bible before my readers seeking boldly to free it
from the clutches of literalism and, at the same time, presenting it as
a dramatic and exciting document whose relevance for our day is both
mighty and real.  My witness is consistent.  I have met the living God
in my engagement with Scripture and I have heard the living Word of this
God speaking to me through the words of Scripture.  It is that God and
that Word to which I want my life and this book to point."

				- Bishop John Spong
				  "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism"

420.11CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierTue May 12 1992 01:4423
	I've had some time now to digest the book "Rescuing the Bible from
Fundamentalism."

	In reflection, I'd say that I now have a clearer overview of the
Bible for having read Bishop Spong's book.  Rather than diminishing my
esteem for Scripture, Spong's book has actually encouraged within me a
deeper appreciation of Scripture.

	"Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism" is not an indepth study
of the Bible, nor it is meant to be.  Rather, it is an attempt to draw
to the Bible people who have come to believe that there simply exists no
valid or legitimate view of the Bible beyond that which Fundamentalism
promotes.  A significant number of people have bought into the paradigm
that the Bible was wholly dictated by the Almighty from beginning to end,
and is, therefore, literal, complete and flawlessly accurate.  Spong refutes
this paradigm while urging his reader to seek a deeper, and consequently
more substantial, meaning.

	Moreover, Spong revitalizes the appeal of Holy Scripture by making
it relevant to those who do not embrace the Fundamentalist perspective.

Peace,
Richard
420.12CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace: the Final FrontierFri May 15 1992 00:5416
	I wanted to share a couple learnings I personally found of interest
while reading "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism."

	o  The identity of persons in the Old Testament was inseparably
	   interwoven with the identity of the clan or group.

	o  The commandments were for internal purposes only.  That is to
	   say, the laws regarding killing, stealing, and coveting, etc.,
	   were understood to be intra-community.  Originally, there existed
	   no such standards toward the ethical treatment of foreigners
	   and other outsiders.  It was not considered a serious offense
	   to kill an non-member of the community, or to wipe out whole
	   communities of outsiders, for that matter.

Peace,
Richard
420.13CSC32::J_CHRISTIEPeace WarriorWed Dec 30 1992 19:448
I have changed this note to SET NOTE/WRITE.  Replies are enabled.

I request that noters observe that this string is SRO - for supportive
replies only.  The string adjacent to this one (Note 421) is designated
for general discussion.

Peace,
Richard