Rescuing the Bible from Bishop Spong... again

Some time ago I wrote a review of John Spong's book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. It was recently excerpted on Beliefnet, so I'm re-issuing my review of it.

In the 1964 presidential election, John Kenneth Galbraith said that he would support the "leftward-most viable candidate". In his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco: Harper Collins (1991)), Bp. Spong appears to have taken his cue from Galbraith by embracing the "leftward-most conceivable position".

Let me make it quite clear at the beginning that I am not a fundamentalist; I believe that fundamentalism is intellectually and spiritually bankrupt. Yet I cannot make common cause with Bp. Spong. Although a church historian, I have studied the Old and New Testaments and taught survey courses of each, so I have some familiarity with contemporary biblical scholarship. Bp. Spong has clearly done his homework by studying many of today's most eminent scholars of the Bible, but he consistently chooses (as I said at the beginning) the leftward-most position and leaves his readers with the feeling that this is the only truly "scholarly" opinion. The fact is that Bp. Spong stands outside the mainstream of contemporary biblical scholarship.

In spite of my disagreement with much of what Bp. Spong writes, there are things that I like and admire in his book. Bp. Spong's four chapters dealing with the four gospel writers are excellent. He does a first rate job of showing us the unique perspectives that each evangelist brings to the story of Jesus. If only more of the book came up to the level of these four chapters!

The general problem I have with Rescuing the Bible has already been stated: Bp. Spong's tendency to assume the leftward-most position and to imply that the weight of scholarship tends in this direction. That simply is not the case.

An illustration of this is what he does with the famous controversy over the use of Isaiah 7.14 in Matthew's infancy narrative. St. Matthew quotes the Greek version of Isaiah 7.14: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive..." Bp. Spong writes:

"...neither the word virgin nor the concept of virginity appears in the Hebrew text of Isaiah that Matthew quoted to undergird his account of Jesus' virgin birth.... I had to face early on in my priestly career the startling possibility that the virgin tradition so deep in Christianity may well rest upon something as fragile as the weak reed of a mistranslation. " (p. 16)

The issue can be put simply: The text of Isaiah exists in two forms: the original Hebrew (Masoretic text) and a pre-Christian Greek translation (the Septuagint). The latter version is the text that would have been used by the early Christian community and presumably by the author of Matthew's gospel. In the Hebrew version "young woman" is almah which simply means "a young woman of marriageable age"; virginity is not necessarily implied. In the Greek version "young woman" is parthenos, a word that means "virgin". Later in the book, Bp. Spong goes on to say that the purpose for which Matthew quotes Isaiah was "to prove the virgin birth tradition". (Emphasis added.) (p. 213) Nothing could be further from the truth. Matthew did not quote Isaiah to prove that Jesus' mother was a virgin. The writer of Matthew's gospel was convinced (rightly or wrongly) that Jesus was virginally conceived. Convinced of that fact he then cited Isaiah 7.14 to show that Jesus' virginal conception had been prophetically foretold. That the original Hebrew does not use the word "virgin" does not disprove the virgin birth; it only shows that the virgin birth was not foretold.

One of his basic premises (a premise that I share) is that "the Bible is not a scientific textbook.... The medical understanding among biblical writers was the common wisdom of their time and place, not remotely close to our understanding of medical science". (p. 25) True enough. But it does not follow, as Bp. Spong sometimes seems to imply, that the writers of the Bible lacked common sense or that they did not understand cause and effect. The great Anglican theologian Austin Farrer of Oxford was accustomed to ask his New Testament students to write an essay on the topic "Just how ignorant was the average first century Jew?" They were ignorant of germs and bacteria, to be sure, but they did know that women do not conceive babies without sexual intercourse and yet they affirmed that Mary did so. They may have been mistaken, but they were not naive about where babies come from.

Bp. Spong's treatment of Matthew's use of Isaiah 7.14 is a good example of the way he seems to delight in scandalizing those of simple faith. It is bad scholarship and worse pastoral care.

I also have a few problems with Bp. Spong's treatment of the Resurrection. Several years ago, when I served as assistant director of the Religion Department at the Chautauqua Institution, Bp. Spong was with us for a week to lecture on the topic, "Easter . . . Something Happened". At the end of the week I was convinced that Bp. Spong believed that nothing had happened. Looking back, I now realize that that was not quite fair to Bp. Spong; he does believe in the Resurrection, but he believes that the Resurrection of Jesus was entirely spiritual and non-physical.

Bp. Spong writes: "The experience of Jesus as risen Lord, the breaker of the barrier of death, the living, empowering presence in the life of the church underlies every verse of the Christian writings". (p. 222) That is a wonderful way of describing the power of the Resurrection, yet Bp. Spong goes on to say that the experience of the Risen Lord gave rise to the narratives rather than the other way around:

"When the experience of Easter was first put into words, it was simply a proclamation without narrative. Jesus lives! Death cannot contain him! Proclamations, however, never remain simply simply proclamations; they inevitably create a narrative to explain them. Jesus lives! became "we have seen the Lord" and gave rise in time to all of the appearance stories." (p. 225)

This is not the way that the minds of the New Testament writers worked. They did not begin with an idea; they began with an event.

It is true, as Bp. Spong writes, that the various accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus cannot be reconciled, but that is not at all the same thing as saying that we can know nothing about what happened. No historical event is completely recoverable; the best we can do is establish probabilities. However, the New Testament makes certain historical claims that can be evaluated. To begin with it is important to realize that there are five accounts of the Resurrection: the four gospels and St. Paul. St. Paul's most detailed account of the Resurrection is in I Cor. 15, and all New Testament scholars regard it as earlier than the four gospels. The New Testament makes the following three claims about the Resurrection, and I give them in descending order of historical probability: (1) The followers of Jesus experienced him as alive again following his Crucifixion; (2) the first witnesses of the Resurrection were women; and (3) the tomb of Jesus was found to be empty. No one seriously doubts the first statement. The second is also virtually beyond doubt. Why would the gospel writers say that the first witnesses of the Resurrection were women if that were not the case? The testimony of women was not acceptable in legal proceedings. The third point is seriously debated, because although all four gospels claim that the tomb of Jesus was empty, St. Paul does not mention the empty tomb. However, St. Paul also fails to mention that women were the first witnesses of the Resurrection, so if we conclude that the tomb was not empty on the grounds that St. Paul does not mention it, then we must also conclude that women were not the first witnesses of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is beyond historical analysis; no one was there with a Polaroid camera, and we cannot interview those who claimed that the tomb was empty and said that they saw the Risen Lord. But we can analyze the documentary evidence. Bp. Spong may be correct in denying that the tomb was empty, but he is certainly wrong when he claims that the proclamation gave rise to the narrative.

Bp. Spong leaves his readers with the feeling that the best of biblical scholarship has virtually done away with the historical Jesus. On the contrary, biblical scholarship in this century has done a great deal to support the historical accuracy of much of the Bible. There is a lot of the Bible that is unhistorical and inaccurate, but the Bible still remains a fairly reliable guide to much of the history that its writers witnessed. The great church historian Roland Bainton once remarked to me that when he matriculated at Yale Divinity School that many New Testament scholars privately wondered whether or not Jesus had ever existed. Now, he said, the existence of Jesus is beyond question. Not only is the existence of Jesus beyond question, but scholarship has vindicated the historicity of much of the Bible. A good example of the tendency of a great deal of contemporary scholarship to vindicate the basic historicity of the biblical narratives is the fine book, The Evidence for Jesus by distinguished New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn, Professor of Divinity at England's University of Durham. He writes, "... when the Gospel writers intended to provide historical information, that information can be trusted as reliable". (James D.G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press (1985), p. 1.)

There are some intriguing similarities between Bp. Spong and the fundamentalists he so despises.

First, he displays a rock-firm certainty about matters which simply do not admit of such certainty. This is very characteristic of many fundamentalists. For example, Bp. Spong writes:

"Stars do not wander, angels do not sing, virgins do not give birth, magi do not travel to a distant land to present gifts to a baby, and shepherds do not go in search of a newborn savior. " (p. 215)

Well, "stars do not wander" . . . I can go along with that, but I do not know about the rest. I just do not have as much knowledge of magi, shepherds, and virgin births as Bp. Spong claims to have. And I am intrigued by his apparent first-hand knowledge of angels. Is this knowledge imparted to bishops while it is withheld from lowly Episcopalian priests?

Bp. Spong confuses size and age with significance. He writes:

"If human life was the purpose for the earth's creation, it certainly took a while for it to appear. This earth may well exist for billions of years beyond the age of the mammals, including human life. It is thus hard to argue that human life is the sole, or even primary, purpose for which creation occurred." (p. 32)

And elsewhere, he writes:

"The biblical writers had no sense at all of the sweep of historic times, nor did they have any concept even of the size of the earth." (p. 37)

If size were really important, then the fundamentalists' "mega-churches" would be considerably more important than most Episcopal churches. Somehow I do not think that Bp. Spong would agree. Human life is certainly a late arrival on earth and the earth undoubtedly is dwarfed in comparison to Jupiter, not to mention even the smallest star, but does that really tell us anything about the significance of the earth or of human life? If size did determine significance, then that would have dire consequences for social justice. Power, size, and wealth would determine the significance of individuals. I know that Bp. Spong would disagree.

Thirdly, Bp. Spong makes a classic fundamentalist error in reading his own biases back into the Bible. The most infamous part of Bp. Spong's book is his speculation that St. Paul was a homosexual.

"Paul felt tremendous guilt and shame, which produced in him self-loathing. The presence of homosexuality would have created this response among Jewish people in that period of history. Nothing else, in my opinion, could account for Paul's self-judging rhetoric, his negative feeling toward his own body, and his sense of being controlled by something he had no power to change." (p. 117)

In terms of scholarship this is also the most indefensible part of his book. There are serious scholars who believe that St. Paul was married at one time. I am not offended by idle speculation that St. Paul might have been gay, but it does offend me to have such speculation presented as serious scholarship. There is absolutely no evidence for the assertion that St. Paul was a homosexual.

Bp. Spong seems to have forgotten that St. Paul was a first century Jew rather than a twentieth century intellectual. In his famous 1963 article, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West", Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, points out the fallacy of reasoning such as Bp. Spong's

"...we look in vain for a statement in which Paul would speak about himself as an actual sinner. When he speaks about his conscience, he witnesses to his good conscience before men and God.... The "thorn in the flesh" ... was presumably some physical handicap -- some have guessed at epilepsy -- which interfered with his effectiveness and, what was more important, with his apostolic authority, as we can see from Gal. 4.13, cf. 1 Cor. 11.30. Sickness was seen as a sign of insufficient spiritual endowment. But there is no indication that Paul ever thought of this and other "weaknesses" as sins for which he was responsible. (Krister Stendahl, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West", in The Writings of St. Paul (Wayne A. Meeks, ed.), New York: W.W. Norton and Co. (1972), p. 430.)

To rescue the Bible from fundamentalism is a noble goal. Bp. Spong does an excellent job of demolishing fundamentalism and its handmaiden, literalism, but he fails to construct a positive alternative. Rescuing the Bible leaves the fundamentalists with no refuge, but for those whose doubts and fears have led them to the Bible, it offers little solace and hope. And to offer solace and hope is the great function of the Bible and should be the main task of bishops.