UNDERSTANDING THE TIMES
 

John Shelby Spong’s The Sins of Scripture

Evening Worship

June 26, 2005

Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III

Well, ole Jack Spong is at it again. The controversial former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, now retired,  is making the most of his golden years by inflicting on us a boatload of books, all aiming to liberate us from old fashioned biblical Christianity.

       You remember him.  He gave us such classic books as Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture; and, Why Christianity Must Change or Die; or, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Role of Women in a Male-Dominated Church; and, he also wrote A New Christianity for a New World.

       Well, now Spong has just released his latest diatribe: The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.  It is, as you would expect, filled with his usual thoughtful fulminations.

       The Sins of Scripture is a series of essays on passages in the Bible that Spong says have been used to justify immoral attitudes and behaviors, such as anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, homophobia, child abuse, and, worst of all, Christian exclusivism.

       The title he had wanted to give the book was The Terrible Texts of the Bible, but his publisher renamed it.  Spong said he wrote the book because this subject needed to be addressed by someone who was within the Christian community and clearly loves the Bible.  Unfortunately, Spong mistook himself for that person.

       Spong argues that the Bible gets off to a wrong start right from the beginning, in the first chapters of Genesis, where God commands the first human beings to be fruitful and multiply. From that we get over-breeding and excessive population, Spong opines onerously.

       Furthermore, he says, the opening chapters of Genesis undermine the equality of the sexes, and this mistake is confirmed (according to Spong) by the Ten Commandments, which treat wives as a form of property.   

       Spong believes the God of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) was a tribal deity created by the ancient Hebrews to support their prejudices against the Egyptians and others, but that the Minor Prophets (like Hosea and Micah) helped to raise the consciousness of the Bible by improving the Hebrew God concept in depicting God’s love for all people. This, Spong tells us, set the stage for the more inclusive message of Jesus.

        Spong is a one-man traveling freak show of offensive and hysterical assertions that seem designed to provoke anyone with any shred of respect for Christianity and the Bible.  He assures us, for instance, that the Apostle Paul was a self-loathing homosexual.  He also chafes over the evangelical emphasis on the sinfulness and fallen-ness of human beings, noting that even popular songs like Amazing Grace make the point that the person singing them was a “wretch” before God saved them.

       Spong wants Christians to talk about God positively, without talking about humanity negatively.  “I don’t know about you,” Spong says, “but I’m tired of going to church and hearing my humanity insulted.  On the contrary,” Spong says, “people need to be encouraged to be all that they can be, and anything that diminishes the life of any human being is wrong; and anything that enhances the life of any human being is right and good.”

       Ironically, though a self-proclaimed liberal, Spong’s theology here is very close to that of popular “positive thinkers” like Norman Vincent Peale or Robert Schuller, or Joel Osteen.       

    Spong has been called the leading spokesman for liberal Christianity, but I would suggest that he is not sufficiently radical with either his liberalism or his Christianity.  Spong’s liberalism refuses to give up God, even though he has undermined the biblical foundations of a Christian view of God; and Spong’s Christianity looks curiously like the latest poll of what the majority of people in Berkeley think about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, life and death.  In other words, his liberalism is not radical enough because he doesn’t have the guts to go where his own views ought to take him: that is, to the rejection of any concept of God and religion.

       No, he wants a God-concept as long as we can all define it however we wish, and as long as religion looks like something of a spiritual version of the United Nations.

       And his Christianity is not radical enough because it lacks a prophetic voice.  It merely apes the current fads and ends up looking like a thinly-veiled spiritualized re-run of The New York Times op-ed pages. 

       And if that is not bad enough news for Mr. Spong, he’s even losing the number game. Even though he has suggested that traditional faith is dying, and that a new inter-faith movement is the way of the future, the statistics say just the opposite.  You see, this is the truth even in his own 77 million member Episcopal communion. The average Anglican pastor is not a hardened Ivy League liberal, but an African evangelical who loves John Stott and believes in biblical infallibility. And the average Anglican church member is not a militant American gay-rights advocate, but a devout and orthodox 25-year-old from sub-Saharan Africa.

       It is the explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in the developing world that is the story of the century.  Liberal Christianity now only exists in Western universities and left-wing seminaries, or in graying congregations that have endowments to keep the doors open.

       Spong is about to learn the old adage the hard way: “He who marries the spirit of this age is doomed to be a widower in the next.”

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