Spirit in Action

The Sins of Scripture - John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong is the retired Episcopal archbishop of New Jersey and author of 15 books including "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism" and "The Sins of Scripture".

70 minute phone interview with a dynamic, progressive thinker!

Duration:: 1h 10m
Broadcast on:: 21 Aug 2005
Audio Format:: mp3

I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep No hay critique but yours to try the eyes of those who weep I have no eyes but yours with which to hold One's grown weary from the struggle We're all weak with growing old I have no voice but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am lost And love is every day I have no way to feed the hungry spouse No clothes to give the nitty The pregnant and the gold No being my heart, my hands, my tongue For you are with me, darling Fingers had I none to have one time It tangled up in twisted chains The strength of your mind Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands being shared between our many neighbors on this planet Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes Set the two and show them how to trust the inner John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, is a leading spokesperson for an open, scholarly and progressive Christianity He's the author of 15 books including Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest, The Sins of Scripture He is a thoughtful, provocative and fearless advocate for justice and a deep encounter with religion in the Bible, urging us ever toward a deeper connection with God He joins us today from North Carolina Welcome John Thank you Mark, good to be with you Thanks for joining me here today I was very impressed by the two talks I heard you give at the Friends General Conference Gathering in early July, and I'm thankful that you're willing to take the time for this interview, given the incredibly active, retired lifestyle you are living What a phase of life What are you doing down in North Carolina? I'm doing some lectures on Monday and Thursday nights, and two little communities that are sort of summer resort communities, and people come here from mostly all over the South We've got about 300 people out for the lecture on Tuesday, Monday and Thursday night, and it's really very provocative and lots of fun Do you ever actually slow down? Well, I also love what I do, Mark, that I don't consider it work, as a matter of fact My wife and I just walked 192 miles through England about a month ago, and we didn't do a thing in that period except walk Took us about 18 days to complete the joint from the Irish Sea to the North Sea It was really great fun, our daughter was with us, who had just come home from Iraq She's a Marine, and she's just gone back to Iraq last Monday, so it was wonderful to have that time with her Can you relay anything that she had to say about the situation there, her experience of it? Well, she's a helicopter pilot, and I think she believes that they're making more progress than I believe they're making, but that's another issue, she's there and sees things She believes the infrastructure of the country is being significantly upgraded and that people will ultimately find some more positive way of looking at the war and the occupation because the life of that country is going to get better, but she's also quite discouraged that the insurgency is so constant and that nobody seems to be addressing the causes of it and you can't really defeat an insurgency with military power, I think that's a lesson we've learned so many times, but somehow this administration doesn't seem to know it I take it, you might have some specifically found a view about peace, what the Bible's view of peace is was the driving motivation at every level of life, plant life and animal life and all other life and I think we human beings are hardwired for that, so I think peace represents a new development of consciousness and evolution into a new stage of what it means to be human and it's not going to be easy, I think the easiest response is to react to somebody who threatens you on any level with attacking them or killing them and I keep hoping that human beings might have made it a little higher in the evolutionary chain than our behavior seems to indicate, but I think we had a throwback period of history at this moment and part of it is that the fear of terrorism and the 9/11 attack, but I really am discouraged about the direction my nation is going and the direction that the peace of the world is going and I hear the war drums being beaten right now for a war against Iran and even possibly North Korea and I remember that our president identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the axis of terror and one is down and two are to go and the rumble in Iran seems to me particularly to get louder and louder, I don't know all the details obviously and I don't know how far you can go to develop nuclear power for peaceful uses and not be potentially developing a nuclear weapon for non-peace for uses and that's something I hope that diplomacy will be able to adjudicate and keep Iran from becoming the next hot spot in our relentless wars. I'm afraid that there is a strong fundamentalist position which emphasizes that we're in the end times. In fact, you mentioned the former secretary, the Interior James Watt, how meant about not needing to preserve our national parks because the end is imminent and I've got a brother who mentions the end game scenario as portrayed in revelations as the reason why it's hopeless to work for world peace since that will come only after the second coming. How would you answer such people with the worldviews? We just have to say that that's ignorance, that's an attempt to read the Bible magically as if it's predicting the future. I want to respect everybody's opinion but I'm not going to respect everybody's use of their own facts. I think that's another matter. My concern would be that if that mentality ever becomes the mentality that governs foreign policy of this country, then I think this country is in serious, serious trouble. I keep hoping that we're not moving in that direction but I think if people are afraid then anybody that offers them security and I don't care how false the security is, that's a popular appeal and I think that's where we are as a nation and perhaps as a world at this moment. I find it a scary time. I almost think we're in a new dark ages. I understand that point of view. When we are at the FGC gathering, my wife and I bought three of your books and I've finished reading The Sins of the Scripture. I'm certain that some folks will interpret this book as demeaning of the Bible, though you make it clear that's not your intent. Would you care to tell us why you chose to write that book? Yes, I see the Bible being used in a myriad of ways that are quite destructive both in the life of my own country at this moment and in the life of the world historically. What I've done in that book is to trace some of what I call the terrible text of the Bible and to show the pain that they've caused, everything from degrading our environment, overpopulating the world, using a text, be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth to justify that kind of activity, to condemning Galileo because his view of the universe was quite different from the established churches view in the 17th century. To condemning Darwin, we still have people including the Cardinal Archbishop of Austria, Vienna, who wants to put something called intelligent design and counter Darwin in the name of Catholic doctrine. I just think that's ignorance and I don't know what to do about that. I think evolution is so deeply established that the time has come for us to begin to see what we can learn from the evolutionary process, and I think there's much to be learned in the religious and Christian arenas, but to spend your energy refighting the scopes trial under various guys' creation, science, intelligent design, I regard all of them as just manifestations of continued ignorance in the life of our society. I think we ought to take Darwin seriously and begin to look at the way we've understood human life. We believed because we have a very different view of how our human life began, a biblical view about the good creation and the fall into sin and the need for redemption, which is the background against which we tell the Christ story today, and I don't think that's right. I think what that amounts to is that we wind up in the name of God making people feel guilty so that they'll have some yearning for God's deliverance, and I don't think that's very healthy. I don't believe that you can help people become full human beings by telling them how wretched, miserable, sinful, fallen, debased, immoral, and whatever else we've said about them. And when we wind up saying that it's your sins and my sins that cause the death of Jesus on the cross, I think that's a guilt trip of enormous proportions. The idea that's something I did cause God to punish Jesus, I don't want to live under that kind of burden. Now if you look at the Darwinian view of life that says we emerged out of the evolutionary soup and that we are akin to the plants and the animals, not just one or the other, we're akin to cabbages and to the great apes, then you have an idea of human life that has not yet become fully human. And the task of the Christian faith, I think, is to empower human beings to become more deeply and fully human so they don't have to build their security by killing other people, which is what we do and this war ultimately comes from. That's what prejudice ultimately comes from. I make myself feel superior by making someone else look or feel inferior. We play that game all through history. We play it religiously. My God is better than your God so I believe I'll kill you. If you don't agree with me, I'll burn you at the stake. We'll have a 30 years religious war. We'll kill each other in the West Bank because my God's better than your God. I think that's a very destructive view of religion. I'd like to get people to look back and see that human life was never perfect. It did not fall into sin. It does not need to be rescued. Human life is incomplete. It needs to be empowered to become more deeply and fully human. And I believe that I can tell the Christ story against that background and the Christ story becomes a powerful symbol of the things that we need to do to begin to help people become so human that they can love each other instead of hating each other. In the sins of scripture, you identify a whole range of areas of life which have been used for oppression based on the texts of the Bible. Homophobia, women's oppression, child abuse, anti-Semitism. Are there any of these where you think we've essentially won the battle? For instance, the Bible, there's quotes from Paul, you know, these slaves should obey their masters. And we don't really believe in slavery even though that was a passage that was quoted to support slavery in the past. Are there any of these areas where you think we've essentially won or are close to winning the battle? Yeah, I think there are. And I think I don't want to be discouraging about that. In my lifetime, I grew up in an Episcopal Church in Charlotte, North Carolina that taught me the segregation was the will of God and quoted the Bible to prove it. Now, my church in North Carolina has an African-American bishop elected by the people of North Carolina. And I would guess that there are not more than 10 or 11 percent of the Episcopalians in North Carolina who are African-American. So this man, Michael Curry, is his name, had to be elected by a majority of white people. Now, that's enormous progress in one lifetime to go from a segregated church to a church that has an African-American as its only bishop. In the, another area I was raised by, and a church that taught me that men were superior to women, quoted the Bible to prove that, and acted it out. Women were not allowed in my church to do anything liturgically. Women could not serve on any governing board, could not represent the congregation in any decision-making function. And today, my church has 40 percent of its clergy who are female, 15 of our bishops are women, and women are in every area of our life. I think that's an enormous step forward, that's enormous progress. When I was a kid, I was taught that all other religions were pagan religions or evil religions, and especially the Jews, and so it was okay to hate them because God hated them. And anti-Semitism is a great gift that Christians have given to the world to the destruction, not only of the Jews whose destruction has been terrific, but I think also the destruction of the soul of the Christian church, because I don't think you can hate people, and act out prejudice without killing yourself in the process. Now, the last time my church revised its pre-book in 1979, before we published the Good Friday Liturgies, we got a panel of rabbis together, and asked them to look at this liturgy, and if they discerned any hidden or unconscious aspect of anti-Semitism, pleased to point it out, because we no longer want to be feeding those things into the bloodstream of our society. Now, that's, again, an enormous step forward. And the homosexual battle, you know, when I was a kid, homosexuals, I didn't even know we had homosexuals. That was a word I hardly ever heard in the South. But when I did finally understand that we had gay and lesbian people, I accepted the definition that was given to me by my church and by my culture. Homosexuals are either mentally sick people who should be cured or pitted, or they were morally depraved people who should be oppressed or punished. And I grew up quite comfortable with that definition. And the Bible was, of course, quoted, and I can tell you all the texts that they used to justify that. Today, I've lived long enough to see my church elect a gay man to be the bishop of New Hampshire to confirm his election with a majority of the votes of our bishops, our priests, and our laypeople in general convention. But there's a great debate about it, but that's because they lost. Of course, there's a debate. But the great majority supported that man. And when I retired as the bishop of Newark, I had 35 out of the closet gay and lesbian clergy, serving churches in the diocese of Newark, and 31 of them lived openly with their partners, and they were treated as couples. And they were wonderful people on this tell you. And I never had a complaint about sexual misbehavior against any gay or lesbian priest as long as I was a bishop. And I can't say that about my heterosexual clergy. I'm grateful to say I didn't have many, but we had some difficulties with heterosexual clergy who seemed to violate the boundaries of their professional lives with women in their congregations. But I never had any difficulty with my homosexual clergy. Now, those are just four areas where I've seen enormous progress. Does that mean that the battle's over? Is there no racism left in our society? No. It's still present, but I think it's back has been broken. I regard the religious right as in some ways a deeply racist movement. To me, they're nothing but the George Wallace vote of yesterday perfumed, and they're now turned into family value Republican. They were George Wallace Democrats 25, 30 years ago. So racism's still around. Anti-feminist feelings are still around. This will be an interesting test if Senator Clinton of New York is the nominee of the Democratic Party. I have no idea whether she'll be the nominee. I have no idea whether she could be elected. But I think the fascinating thing will be to see how this country responds to a woman if she grasps the mantle of the highest office politically in this land. And then we'll see how much latent sexism is still present in our society. And I think you can look at all of the areas. There's a rising tide of anti-Islamic feelings in this country that's sort of taking the place of our anti-Semitism and is based on experiences of terror and hostility and hatred. Religion doesn't have a very good record. Now on the other side, I think it's important to note that the Bible has been used in public debate since the 13th century and almost always the Bible has lost. And I think people ought to recognize that. In 1215, the Bible was quoted to assure the divine right of kings and to oppose the Magna Carter. Well clearly the Magna Carter won and the divine right of kings has almost disappeared from the face of the earth. The Bible was quoted to condemn Galileo in the 17th century. The Bible lost. We now do space travel because Galileo was right and even the Vatican put out a paper in 1991 that said we now believe that Galileo was correct. It was only 400 years late but at least they got around to it. And the Bible was quoted to condemn Darwin. The Bible is losing that battle. The Bible was quoted to keep women from voting and we gave women the vote in this country in 1920. The Bible was quoted to keep women from practicing law, from going to universities. Today 50% of our students are female, 50% of our law school students are female. In every area the Bible has lost when it's been quoted to sort of impede a change where a new consciousness was being born in the world. And I think it's going on today in the homosexual battle. That battle is pretty well over as far as the culture is concerned. Only in the church is that a great big battle still. And it's a battle because there's a new consciousness emerging that says people do not choose their sexual orientation. They simply awaken to it. We know more choose to be heterosexual or homosexual than we choose to be right handed or left handed or white skinned or black skinned or male or female. That is not a choice. We simply awaken to our identity. And we have always persecuted people that we thought were abnormal. Whether their skin was black or whether they were women or whether they were albino people or whether they were left handed people, we've always persecuted them because we didn't understand. We don't like difference. And so we've been persecuting gay and lesbian people. But the consciousness, the scientific development is so clear that homosexuality is one more variety in the human experience. It seems to be the reality for some percentage of the population that I would place between five and 10% of the population at all times and all places in all centuries and all cultures, it's a standard part of what it means to be human. And the day is going to come and it's coming very soon. When we're going to get over that prejudice and it's going to go the way of witchcraft, we used to execute witches up in Salem, Massachusetts in the 18th century. Now we're embarrassed about that. But that's because we've developed a different consciousness and that's going on. So I'm encouraged that things are moving but they're moving slowly and they never move in a straight line. And I really think that we're in a reaction period brought about by fear. I hope it doesn't last too long. But I'd like to be on with it soon. And maybe we're beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel. And if a man named Tom DeLay can tell the people of Florida when their wife can be allowed to die, who's been on an artificial life support system for 14 years, then I think the government has gotten way out of bounds. And I think the Terri Shavo case I think put a shock into the American system that said, my goodness, this religion and politics movement has gone to the place where I don't want it to go. And I'm going to stand up against it. And there's been an enormous reaction to that. It would be interesting to see how that plays out politically. When you say things like, you know, the Bible lost particular battles with our culture, I imagine it makes a lot of people really mad. You're attacking their sacred cows. How do you deal with that? What kind of fire do you get directed at you? I get a good bit, but I must say I don't pay much attention to it. Once again, I think everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but nobody's entitled to their own facts. If the fact is that this world operates on Galileo's principles today, this world operates on the Magna Carta's principles. We have a conservative president who wants to spread democracy around the world. Democracy was born with the Magna Carta. You know, there's no doubt that the Bible lost. And you know, people say, well, it's not the Bible. It's the way the Bible has been interpreted. That's the way they try to preserve this idolatry about this book that suggests that it's the book that's God and not God. Well, there's some things in the Bible that if you read it seriously, it would curl your hair. I did a debate with a Southern Baptist head of this, of the Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His name is Albert Mueller. And he began the debate by saying that I believe that every word of the Bible is the literal word of God. And I responded, have you ever read it? I mean, my goodness, what do you want to do? You want to attribute everything in that book to God? What about when Paul says to the Galatians, I hope those that bother you will mutilate themselves? Is that God speaking? That's an angry Paul speaking. What about Leviticus when it says that homosexual people ought to be put to death? Now, even the most rigorous homophobic fundamentalist doesn't go that far today. What about the idea that if you talk back to your parents, you ought to be put to death? Is that the word of God? How many of us would still be alive? Can be put to death, according to the Book of Leviticus, for cussing, for committing adultery, for worshiping a false God, for having sex with your mother-in-law, for all sorts of things? Now, none of those things might be good things to do. I wouldn't be advocating for those, but the idea that you make capital punishment that because the Bible says so. Why even the executioners in Texas would be working over time if we were literal about the Bible? I just don't understand that. The Bible came into written form between about 1,000 BCE or BCE and about 135 CE. I don't know anybody that would take a book of medicine and practice medicine based upon those years. They act as if we have had no knowledge since 135 of this common era or any other discipline. Jesus is even quoted as thinking that epilepsy is caused by a demon possession. Well, if Jerry Falwell or some biblical fundamentalist had an epileptic child and took that child to a doctor, and the doctor treated that child as saying, "Come out of him." I don't believe that even a fundamentalist would go back to that doctor. We know much more about epilepsy today than that, so that the idea that somebody would think that the Bible was dictated by God and was inerrant and perfect. To me, that's just such profound ignorance that I don't even want to engage it. Now, you're welcome to that opinion mark if somebody wants to have it, but you can't enforce that opinion on everybody else because it's not based on any fact or any knowledge that is available for people to look at. People don't even recognize that when the gospels were written, they were written 40 to 70 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end. They were written in a language that Jesus did not speak, written in Greek. They've since been translated into English. They were hand-copied from the time they were written until the Gutenberg press brought printing into the process, and you know that in that many hundreds of years of having a manuscript hand-copied that someone made a mistake. The idea that you would attribute infallibility to this manuscript, one of the things that people don't recognize is that when the gospels are written in Greek, they didn't use any punctuation, no capital letters, no periods. It was just line after line of type, and if a word got to the end of the line and it was only two letters in the word, they wouldn't put a dash. They would just start the next line with the rest, and so every division between every word in the gospels, every paragraph, every comma, every capital, every period, all of that has been imposed on that text much, much later in Christian history, and once again, nobody could assume rationally that all of that was done without ever making a mistake, that every translation was perfect, and that every grammatical imposition we put them on that text was perfect. You know, I treasure the Bible. I've studied it all my life. I think it's a fantastic book, but I don't worship it. It's not God. It is not infallible. God didn't dictate it. It's got an enormous amount of humanity in it, in some of which is not even moral. The idea that God hated the Egyptians so bad that God would kill the first born Egyptian in every household on the night of the Passover is a tribal idea that is repugnant to the consciousness of Christian people in our world today. I don't know how you play that game, and I don't have a lot of time. I'm not going to engage that, and that's to me like arguing with somebody who's a member of the Flat Earth Society. I'm just not going to spend a lot of my time doing that, so I don't pay much attention to that. I will resist it every time it appears politically, and I think one of the tragedies of the present life in this country is that religion is somehow in the political arena, so that if you attack a point of view, you're thought to be anti-religious, and I refuse to allow that to be a definition that I will accept. It's in the name of Christ that I want to attack this administration's war in Iraq. It's in the name of Christ that I want to attack this administration's division of its tax policy that is made upper-middle class and well-to-do people wealthier and is made the poor, poorer. There's something about that that's basically anti-Christian to me, and I could go on and on and on to even suggest that this country would ever amend the constitution so that we can discriminate against gay and lesbian people is anathema to me. That's what we're proposing. The constitution has been amended a number of times. Every time it's been amended, it has been to extend more freedom to a larger number of people, to women, to slaves, to all sorts of people, to establish the rights of young people to make us able to vote at age 18, because we're able to die in Iraq. Why shouldn't we vote for our president? Every amendment has been to make the constitution more applicable to a larger number of people to make democracy work. If we were to turn that around and decide now we're going to amend the constitution to discriminate against our gay and lesbian citizens, I think that would be a signal at the end of democracy, because if the majority can discriminate in the constitution against a minority today, what we all need to recognize is that whatever constitutes tomorrow's majority might discriminate against us who might be in tomorrow's minority. You never know where that's going to stand if you don't protect the rights of the minorities. You certainly have very cogently and powerfully outlined summaries of the Bible which have been misused, which have been used to attack people of any number of minorities. Are there parts of the Bible that are most powerful and positive for you? Yes, there really are. I think there are three things about the biblical story that I don't ever want my church or my society to forget. One is the basic theme that I see in the Hebrew tradition, which says that God is the creator of all and that all life is holy. That's the basic lesson I learned from my Hebrew ancestors, and so that means I've got to treat all life as if it's holy, and I don't ever want to lose that. The big thing I see in the Jesus story and the reason that I'm a Christian is that what the Jesus story says to me is that all life is loved. Jesus really says there's nothing you can ever do and there's nothing you can ever be that will cause me to love you less, even when you kill the love of God in the person of Jesus, the love of God still loves you. I think that's a lesson that we all need to learn. So the second thing that I don't want to lose is that not only are we holy, but we are loved. That's the very nature of God. The third thing that I learned from the scriptures, and I learned this from what we Christians call the Holy Spirit, but it comes in that part of the Bible that talks about the life of the Christian community, the book of Acts and the various epistles and then the 2000 years of church history, which we say is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but what Holy Spirit means is that you are called to be all that you can be. The Holy Spirit is the source of life. When we say our creeds as Christian people, we say I believe in the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, to worship God as Holy Spirit means that you've got to live in the life of this world in such a way that every person has the ability to become all that they can be. So anything that diminishes the life of any person becomes evil. Anything that enhances the life of any person makes that person more whole and more holy, more aware of the love that is present for them becomes good. So on those three principles, and I don't know that I want to live in a nation that doesn't understand that every person's life is holy and that you have that wonderful biblical story of the judgment which says you're not judged on whether you believe properly or not you're judged by whether or not you see God in the face of the least of these your brothers and sisters. So I don't see how we can ignore the poor and the down and out and the distraught and think that we are somehow living out the biblical message. So those things are really important to me and my understanding of the future of the church is not that we exist to try to make the world religious but that we exist to try to transform the world so that everybody in the world has a better opportunity to live fully and to love wastefully and to be all that they can be. That's what the proclamation of the Christian gospel means to me and it has nothing to do with all of the petty issues that we seem to think are the terribly important religious issues of our day. How have your beliefs changed over the years? Have you always been so open and so relatively free of clinging to these old prejudices or did you have a conversion experience? Neither of those is true. I began my life as I said earlier in a very fundamentalistic evangelical church in Charlotte, North Carolina and I was racist and I was male chauvinist and I was homophobic and I was anti-Semite. I learned all of those things in my church and so my life has been a sort of constant experience of casting out one prejudice after another and I can remember when I was no more than three years old that my father who had taught me that I must say sir every time I addressed someone who was my elder, a sir or man and we had an African-American bricklayer working in our yard one day and he was an older man with white hair and he said something to me and I said yes sir or no sir to him as I had been taught and my father took me into the house and lectured me vigorously and said you do not say sir to what he called a Negro. Well that was an interesting experience to me because I didn't understand what that meant. I knew that I had done what my father had taught me was good manners and I knew that somehow I had been disciplined for it and I just became what someone later called a pebble in my shoe. It was the beginning of my understanding that maybe I didn't understand all the facts of this world. I'll never forget when I was about 10 years old and World War II had begun and my school got an invitation to send a representative group from my school to another school in Charlotte for a patriotic assembly. Everybody was quite patriotic as we always are when our nation is attacked. I didn't even know I was going to a segregated school at the time. Never occurred to me to wonder why there were no black children. There were no black children in my life anywhere but anyway I was chosen so I went over to this school and when I got there I couldn't believe that I saw all these little black children and black teachers. It was the first time I had ever experienced that there was such a thing as a segregated school. Anyway we went into the assembly program and we were seated up on the stage as guests of honor and we stood up and we said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and I was a cup scout so I knew how to do that. I felt very proud to stand up there with my hand over my heart and then we all remained standing and said together the Lord's Prayer. That was quite legitimate in North Carolina in the 1940s. Nobody raised any questions about that but at the end of that experience it suddenly dawned on me that here were black children and white children saying the same prayer to the same God and yet we lived in a world that told us we couldn't worship together. That black people were not welcome to come into my church. That's a very strange idea so that became another pebble and out a series of experiences like that that when I finally reached my maturity I became quite dedicated to the cause of removing all vestiges of segregation and I was a young priest in Tarboro, North Carolina when the order from the Supreme Court came down that we had to desegregate Tarboro's white schools and the anxiety and the fear was just rampant in our community and because I was the only one that seemed to support that idea I was named public enemy number one by the Ku Klux Klan and went through a lot of rather fascinating experiences that I don't care to go through again but I at that point I knew that you have to stand for what is true you can't waffle in the face of injustice and if it costs you your life it costs you your life you know and I know what it means to have Klansman call me up in the middle of the night threaten my life and threaten to have my little girls who were six three and one at the time raped by the biggest blackest and they'd use the N word I know what it means to live through all of that and you know you have to make a decision is it worth it well yes I think it is worth it because I think if you dehumanize any child of God with your prejudice ultimately you violate the whole world including your own humanity now that's just on the area of getting over my racism I was also a male chauvinist and God blessed me with four wonderful daughters and you know there's nothing that'll challenge a man's chauvinism more than to have four wonderful daughters and my daughters today are very professional women I mentioned my youngest daughter who's a captain in the United States Marine Corps and doing her third tour of duty in Iraq at this moment my next daughter has a PhD in physics from Stanford University and she's in the high tech industry my second daughter is a lawyer teaching the law school at the University of Richmond and my oldest daughter is a managing director of a company called Trusco which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Trust in Atlanta in Orlando a major southern bank these are not unusual women in the sense that lots of people in their generation are doing things that women in my mother's generation could never have conceived doing and so I moved with my daughters and I'm ever so proud that my church got over its phobia about women and started ordaining women to the priesthood and I had about 40% of my clergy were female when I retired as the Bishop of Newark and I was just enormously proud of them and they were just great human beings they were great priests and you could go on you know I engaged a rabbi in Richmond Virginia in a dialogue when I was a rector in that town and I think we turned the whole town on its ear and made them aware of anti-Semitism and people say we're not anti-Semitic and richmen oh yes we are Jews lived in certain neighborhoods they were not encouraged to move outside those neighborhoods they were called Jewish neighborhoods and Jews were not members of the major social clubs in Richmond Virginia it was an anti-Semitic town and we really engaged that and the the rabbi is still one of my closest friends and he still lives in Richmond and on the homosexual issue I ordained an out of the closet gay men to the priesthood on December the 16th 1989 he lived openly with his partner indeed his partner took part in the ordination ceremony and we wrote an enormous tide of hostility around this country but the fact is that we did what was right and eventually my church got to the place we'd agreed with me we would not have elected a gay man to be the Bishop of New Hampshire had my church not come to my position so I see the change but the change agent is always going to pay a price and that doesn't bother me you know I think it's worth it I think it's worth it do your children tell you to be quiet and sit down or have they done that over the years or have they come along with you as you've grown you know I think a good parent raises his or her children to be free and independent so I'm not interested in my children emulating my point of view on any subject I know one year when only three of my daughters were a voting age that one of them voted for Clinton and one of them voted for Perot and one of them voted for George Bush the first and now I saw the proud of the fact that my children think for themselves but it's you know I'd say that they loved me and I'd say that they're proud of me and and I remember a time when I took on a member of the City Council of Richmond when I was a rector there and I took him on because busing was the issue busing to achieve racial balance and and he was leading public rallies and saying incredibly hostile things and on one occasion he said that the governor of Virginia who was a Republican named Lynn would hope and at the time he said the governor has not stood up for the people of the state and we ought to have euthanasia practiced on him well I think that's as out of bounds as common as I've ever heard a city council member calling for somebody to do a mercy killing on the governor of your state and I was sort of amazed at no other politicians no Republicans no Democrats no nobody in Virginia challenged that man for three full days and I couldn't take it anymore so I challenged him on Sunday morning in a statement and I have made sure that the press was present I handed this statement out it was a big story in the Monday newspaper and I began to have incredibly abusive telephone calls and my children would answer the phones and they would listen to profanity that they had never heard before at least that I didn't think they had ever heard before and our house is under police guard for about six months after that experience but the fact is that I was right nobody ought to live in a town where a member of the city council of that town has the right to engage in off-the-wall politics by calling for a mercy killing on an elected official of our state whether you agree with the governor or not that's just out of the bounds it seems to me politically and I would say the same thing was true when I moved to ordained a gay man and to begin to move my church to the degree that I could into an acceptance of the holiness of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and the abuse was incredible let me tell you one story that solid illustrates it my first wife died of cancer in 1988 and in 1988 she died about three months after I had brought a book out called living in sin which was the first time anybody in the American Christian church had called for a new understanding of the way we were treating gay and lesbian people and even call for endorsing blessing their civil unions and giving them all the benefits of marriage so there was this enormous hostility that I was getting maybe 5,000 letters a week of most of them pretty angry and my wife died in the midst of that and when you're in public life people don't much care about your private life but your private life is still quite real and so we had a funeral service for my wife in the diocese of Newark where all of my clergy and the people I was serving gathered around and held me up and then we took her body back to Richmond to be buried because that's where my children lived and that's where I owned a burial plot and that was sort of the place we had planned to retire to that was sort of our home and when we went back to Richmond and had a second service there before her internment I was sitting on the front pew of that church with my daughters and about two or three minutes before the service began this woman I've never seen before elderly woman I'd say in her 70s opened the back door of that church and walked down the aisle and came to where my wife's casket was and pushed her casket aside and took her umbrella and cracked me over the back with it and then she said if your lissness will pardon this but it's a direct quotation then she said to me you son of a bitch and then she kept right on walking I had no idea who this lady was or what her agenda was and as she walked out through my Paul Barrows all of whom were clergy from the diocese of Newark except one and he was a clergyman who had been my classmate and very close friend and as she walked through my Paul Barrow she said and I quote I've been wanting to tell that bastard what I think of him for years and I finally got the opportunity well that's a pretty interesting thing to have happen when you're in grief with your wife's body right beside you and your daughter's mother they are it's a rather interesting thing to go through two or three minutes later we thought it recovered from that two three minutes later the doors of the church opened and the choir came in singing led by the cross that surprised me because this was sort of supposed to be just a quiet family service and I hadn't asked for a choir there was this 30-force choir singing at the top of their voices beautifully I must say and as they walked past me I looked at them and I didn't recognize a person in the choir and I thought that was strange because I'd been the director of that church and I didn't think the choir would have turned over that dramatically in the years that I'd been gone so I didn't know where the quiet come from and when the service is over I went looking for somebody in the choir so that I could thank them for being there and I found the young man who had carried the cross and I went up to him and said I'm Jack Spong and I'd like to thank you for being here today it meant a great deal to me and my family to have a choir here and he looked at me and he said Bishop you don't know me but we know you you might be interested to know that every member of the choir today was a member of the Richmond chapter of integrity which is in a fiscal organization for gay and lesbian people and then he said to me we would do anything for you because of what you have done for us so I had to put together in my mind this angry woman who would violate my privacy and my grief by attacking me with her umbrella and being profane I had to put that against this young man and that choir who somehow it felt from what I had done a new welcome back into the life of the Christian church and I had to decide and say to myself you know is it worth it well I believe I take a thousand umbrellas from angry women if I could be the cause for opening the door to one marginalized person who had felt the church is prejudiced and opened that person to coming back into the life the church it is worth it as all I'm saying and I don't believe I could live with myself if I did not stand up for the people that I believe God loves it's just so very basic to me that certainly is some powerful testimony in your book you write about some very to me they were new ideas I'm not sure if they're new out there in the field of scholarship one of the compelling ideas that you brought up was the possibility that Paul was gay I first read that possibility in a book written by a man named Arthur Knox in 1937 so it's not exactly a new idea I think the reason that it wasn't an idea that anybody wanted to entertain was that in that period of time we considered homosexuality to be either a sickness or a sin and we thought of Paul as a saint and so you didn't want to combine sickness and sin with the saint they just didn't quite go together but if we come to a new understanding that homosexuality is simply a minority but perfectly normal aspect of humanity that it's not morally good or morally bad it's morally neutral you can live it out in a positive way you can live it out in a negative way just like heterosexuality then the idea that people who you look upon as heroes might be gay is not to mix apples and oranges it's a very different way I read that idea in a book by Arthur Knox and it was published in 1937 and I said well that's an intriguing idea let me take the Pauline corpus in the New Testament and reread it with the possibility in my mind it's written by a deeply repressed gay man and I must say that when I did that it opened it up in a way I'd never imagined before and that's when you go back and you look at what Paul says it Paul talks about a war going on in his body that his body worships or follows one law and his mind follows another law he's so self-negative he says oh wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the burden of this death from the body of this death he says sin dwells in my members my members will not obey the law of my mind he never got married he obviously was uncomfortable with women he was a religious fanatic in the sense that he persecuted the Christian church because the Christian church threatened something about his life and so I began to look at what it was that Christianity might have threatened when I did that it was it's rather interesting because the law for the Jew and especially a rigid Jew like Paul the law was something he bound himself with and it kept all these undesirable aspects of his person under heavy heavy seals so that they didn't get out to haunt him I was reading in the book of Maccabees which not many people read today but which was very popular in Paul's day and I would be quite confident that Paul read and studied the books that we call Maccabees and the Apocrypha and in the Maccabees it'll say if you worship God properly then all desires can be controlled and I think that's an interesting thing for Paul to be under the influence of now in addition to that when you look at the first chapter of Romans which is one of the texts that people use to condemn homosexuality it's a fascinating story Paul says in the first chapter of Romans that homosexuality is God's punishment handed out to those who do not worship God properly well that's a very strange idea I wondered if that was autobiographical then I read the rest of the Pauline corpus looking for autobiographical details and what I find is that here is a man who struggles with all his being to make sure he worships God properly he calls himself a Hebrew of the Hebrews he says that I have obeyed every jot and tittle of the law he said I've advanced in piety beyond all of my peers this is a man driven to worship properly and he writes that if you don't worship God properly God might confuse your sexual identity so I began to think that that passage in Romans chapter one might be autobiographical when you put it all together Paul talks about having a thorn in the flesh there's something he can't control any praise God to remove it and God responds that that God's grace is sufficient for Paul's weakness and then I think the final thing that tipped the scale for me is that when Paul talks about on the other side of his conversion experience about what it means to be in Christ he says that now I know that nothing can separate me from the love of God not height not depths not angels not principalities not things present not things to come and in this long litany he says not even my own nakedness can separate me from the love of God I think that's a very revealing text now I don't know that Paul was gay I have no reason to think that Paul ever acted out his homosexuality because I think he read Leviticus literally and Leviticus says if you're homosexual you ought to be put to death but I think he's struggle with his sexual identity and I think that his understanding of Christ is that Christ loves him no matter who he is no matter what he does it's Paul that gave us the primary concept of grace which means God loves you no matter who you are and I think it's a rather interesting idea that a man like Paul if he were not gay he had some deep emotional hangup that's not yet been determined but Paul gives us that understanding of the grace of God now everybody's not gay but everybody does have a dark side what Carl Jung called the shadow side and Carl Jung says unless you not only love your shadow your dark side and incorporate your dark side into yourself so that it's part of who you are and not a part of something you deny that you'll never be a whole person so I would say that now that we know that that's true about human life it's a rather wonderful rather remarkable idea that maybe it was a deeply repressed self-hating gay man named Paul who gave us the idea that God's love was sufficient to love even the dark side of our lives which is what you have to have before you can ever go into being an integrated person and a whole person you know the great text in the Bible that I use more than any other is Jesus saying that my purpose is not to make you religious or moral or righteous or orthodox my purpose is to give your life and to give it to you abundantly that fits in with being able to accept yourself as you are because you know the God loves you as you are with all your warts and that's the lesson we learned from Paul so I find that speculating about what it is that is Paul's thorn in the flesh leads us to understand that the love of God is there for us in all of our human weaknesses and even loving that part of ourselves which we find very difficult to love because most people basically don't like something about themselves and try to keep it hidden and I think that's a pathway toward death. You make a pretty compelling case for the evolution of thought the evolution of belief that happens as you go through the Bible as a quicker I've always believed that continuing revelation is what things are about and I find it rather offensive that at a certain point they close the books on the Bible they said okay it's done no more books and God's been on a sabbatical for almost two thousand years and it gets a strange idea. Are there books that you'd add in? Oh yes I think that was a great tragedy that when we close the scriptures what books I'd add? I'd add Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail to the Christian community spelling out what the difference is between a moral law and a moral law. I think that's an epistle that we ought to read. I'd go back and pick up some of the women's forces that have been repressed in Christian history like Julian of Norwich, a hilder of Bingham, some of the great female mystics of the church. I'm deeply attracted to the writings of Daghammer Shield who used to be the head of the UN in his book Markings. He was a profoundly religious man not exactly cut in the mode of a rigid Christian orthodoxy but a profoundly religious man and I think his insights need to be preserved and you know there are a lot of... how would you do about doing that? I don't think there's ever any way we'll open the canon again because I can't imagine the Christians of the world ever coming together and agreeing on what books ought to go in the Bible. So I think we have to just accept the fact that history has made the Bible a closed book and we need to treasure it for what it is. We do not need to worship it as something that's infallible. It reflects its times. It believed that the earth was the center of the universe. It believed that women were inferior to men. It believed that slavery was a legitimate institution. It believed that homosexuals ought to be put to death and I think we ought to recognize that those were the things that a period of our history believed I think now wrongly but they're incorporated into our sacred story and you've got to be very careful that you don't endow that sacred story with those attitudes with anything like the permanence of being God's eternal teaching. I think a lot of things that we could add but the most important thing we need to do is to say that God has not stopped acting in this world and the way I think churches will do that is that we will continue to read the Bible. I hope we'll continue to read the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the Christian writings but a lot of churches add what they call a contemporary reading to their worship services and they read from contemporary people who have insights into life that are very powerful and I think ought to be used in worship and I think that's probably the best way that we'll be able to keep the Bible as a growing and open and loving book. Part of what I try to do with my writing is to break open that attitude to the Bible that says somehow God dictated it and God stopped dictating in about 135 AD or CE when the second epistle of Peter got finally into the canon. There's some things in the Bible that you surely don't want to blame on God. I quote him all the time and I don't understand why people just don't pick up the book and read it but I don't know anybody that thinks genocide is a good idea today and yet if you read in the book of Samuel the prophet Samuel goes up to King Saul and in the name of God instructs King Saul to make war against the Amalekites and to kill every man, woman, child, ox, and ass among the Amalekites. Well Mark that's genocide. I don't care what else you call it that's genocide. Now I do not intend to read that on Sunday morning in any church that I'm serving and when I finish reading where God is instructing Saul to kill every man, woman, ox, and ass among the people of the nation you don't like to say at the end of that reading. This is the word of the Lord. That's the word of a tribal deity that thank God we've transcended and when you talk about when you may mention of the fact that I say the Bible is always evolving. Yes that's true. The Bible starts with a very tribal God who plays favorites. He has eight chosen people and everybody else is unchosen. He hates all the enemies of the chosen people. That's not a very edifying God but that's not where the Bible stops. The Bible begins to develop other ideas about God. You've got Hosea that develops God as love. You get Amos who develops God as justice. You get Micah who develops God as interested in how you live not how you worship. You get Malachi who says from the rising of the sun to its setting God's name will be great among the Gentiles and you're suddenly out of this tribal identity and you're moving into a universalism and then you get Jesus who is in the great prophetic tradition and Jesus says folks it's not just a matter of loving the people that love you and they'll like you. You've got to finally love your enemies and you've got to bless those who curse you and persecute you so that the biblical God, I don't know that God ever changes but our perception of God is always changing and I think as we grow older that I mean in time that we have a different perspective on God. Certainly I do. What is showing up in our world today is that instead of trying to convert the Muslims and the Jews and the Hindus and the Buddhists today Christians are increasingly moving into having dialogue with these great religions of the world so that we can learn from one another and I would say that we are evolving toward a world consciousness and part of that world consciousness will be a religious consciousness and I think that's the way we ought to be going and I think what do I think we're good to encourage that. You certainly speak powerfully about your encounter with the Bible. You take real strong issue with the designation of it as the word of God. Could you tell our listeners what you mean by that? I think that that phrase leads people into literalism when I was ordained a deacon and a priest and a bishop in my church. We took something called the oath of conformity and that oath of conformity says I do believe the holy scriptures of the old and new testament to be the word of God and to contain all things necessary for salvation. Now I must say I said that three times at each stage in my life without any qualms of conscience because I'd gone to one of the accredited seminaries of my church and I'd been taught a very critical approach to the Bible and so I assume that oath of conformity had to be compatible with the way I'd been taught scripture in the seminaries of my church so that you just were misunderstanding it if you took it to be literal. But I've come to the conclusion that people use that to undergird their prejudices and I think that's quite an illegitimate use for holy scripture. I treasure the Bible. I work on it every day of my life and I have since I was 12 years old and I know it backwards and forwards and upside down. I know it far better than so many of the fundamentalists who like to quote it all the time seem to know it because I know it's dark side as well as it's positive side. Do I hear God speaking to me through the words of scripture? Yes I do. Do I hear God speaking to me through the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Birmingham jail? Yes I do. I don't think anybody can put a boundary on what is the arena through which God can speak. I think God speaks through all of the events of history but God speaks to me in a very specific way through the scriptures and the voice of God that I hear in my study of the scriptures is that all life is holy, all life is loved and all life is called to be all that it can be. That's my Trinity. That's Father, Son and Holy Spirit to me but I'm not going to ever take that kind of mentality and use it to justify denigrating another human life so that when people say it's in it's in the Bible that homosexuals are to be condemned I say well that's frankly not the Bible I read and when I wrote the sentence of scripture I took every text that I've ever heard anybody use to condemn homosexual people and I went from point by point by point and I'd like to tell you that if anybody could use those words to condemn homosexual people then every person in the world is at risk because you can find some words to condemn every human being in the Bible if you search far enough so I think that's a total misuse of holy scripture and I think it's time we stop pussyfooting around and say that there's a biblical idolatry that's abroad in our land today and I'm not going to put up with it. I'm going to be very loud in opposing it and the unusual thing about my career is that I oppose it as a believing Christian. I'm a bishop of my church. I'm not an academician who has intellectual ideas about the Bible. I'm a worshiper. I'm in church every Sunday God is the center of my life. Jesus is clearly the Lord of my life and when I say that there's a different way to read the Bible and even to appreciate the Bible from this kind of pathetic literalism that's used to condemn homosexual people, used to condemn people who want to make reasonable decisions at the end of their lives, used to condemn women who get caught in the exigencies of life and don't know how to turn and will seek an illegal or unsafe abortion if there's not a legal and safe abortion to be had for them. I think in all of these areas that we've got some sort of religious curious to want to preserve their understanding of the Bible is the literal word of God and they don't really care the price that's paid in human suffering because of that strange mentality. Now you can't love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself and use the Bible as a weapon to denigrate another human being. Not the Bible that I read and the Bible that I study and the Bible that I treasure. In Quaker circles when someone says something is compellingly that is in our heart we say that friend speaks my mind and that's just what you've done. Well thank you Mark I appreciate that. In John I'd like to ask you just one more question and then maybe let you to go off to maybe hike up another amount. If you could bring about one fundamental change in thinking about religion or the scriptures in terms of habits most Americans what would it be? That's a good question. I think what I'd like to do is to have people get into the experience that produce the scriptures instead of getting into the letter of the scriptures. I like to remind people that there's a great difference between the experience of God and the way we explain the experience of God and what we have done in the Bible is to take the first century explanation of God and literalize it and set our explanations the same as the experience and I don't think that's accurate. What I want to know is not whether or not Jesus is born of a virgin but what was there about Jesus that caused people to say that human life by itself could never have produced what we have experienced in this person Jesus and Nazareth. I'm not really interested in whether the resurrection is physiological resuscitation or some sort of spiritual experience. What I'm really interested in is what was there about this Jesus that convinced people that he could transcend the boundary between life and death and that they could experience his life long after his death as a powerful life-changing presence. That's what's important. I want to get into the experience. I want to travel through the letter into the experience and make that experience something that's still open and available to people living in the 21st century because that's where the heart of the Christian gospel is in my lecture tonight. What I'm going to do is try to look at the power of the Christ as it manifested itself in terms of breaking barriers, breaking barriers between Jew and Gentile, breaking barriers between Jew and Samaritan, breaking barriers between men and women and ultimately even breaking barriers between one religious tradition and another religious tradition because I think barriers are always set to preserve our will to overcome our insecurity, to make us feel secure and erratically insecure world. And what I think Jesus calls us to do is to step beyond our security and accept the fact that insecurity is the plight of our humanity and learn to live with integrity in an uncertain world and an insecure world and to learn to live in the power of love with those people who are different from you and for whom you are basically afraid about whom you are basically afraid because it's almost it's almost hardwired into the human system to be fearful of anybody who's somehow different from who you are. And those are the boundaries that I think we need to transcend and those are the ways that I think we ought to read the scripture and that's what I'll try to communicate to my audience tonight. John, I know that you have to go on to your preparations for your lecture. How can folks find more information on you or how can they contact you? Well, I write a weekly column on the web for a company called Waterfront Media and they can get to that at www.johnshellbespong.com. They can even communicate with me through that. They've set up a channel through that. So when people write my column, it's like letters to the editor and I get them and have a chance to respond to them. My column comes at every Wednesday night and it's two things. It's an essay and then I answer the questions of my readers. So it's a question and answer format. And I'm going to say I enjoy doing it, but it's a very demanding schedule to put out a column on. So I look at some of my friends who work for the New York Times and put two columns out a week and I honestly don't know how they do it. They must not do anything else except because that one column a week takes me an enormous amount of time. I file it every Friday night by six o'clock and I've still got that one to finish before tomorrow night at six o'clock. So every week it comes up, but I love doing it. So that's the primary way I would say or just go to John Shubberspong on the web and you can read thousands of articles that some of which they got wonderful, some of which they got the worst thing since Satan. Maybe they think I am Satan. So these are something like 50,000, 75,000 pieces of information that have been put on there. So I don't bother to read it, but maybe somebody will be doing that. John, I want to thank you again for a life of witness that you've given both your church and so many of us in the nation. And I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me. Pleasure. I always enjoyed doing things with members of the Quaker tradition because I think they've been 11 in the lump for a long, long time keeping our world a better place to live. So thank you for that witness. Thank you. We've been talking with John Shubberspong, the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark. His latest book is The Sins of Scripture. He has written books rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism, why Christianity must change or die, and 12 others. If you want to find out more about him, you can go to johnshubberspong.com. That's J-O-H-N S-H-E-L-B-Y S-P-O-N-G.com. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ I have no eye on who you've been made ♪ ♪ To love and serve your neighbor ♪ ♪ Enjoy and love your neighbor ♪ ♪ Enjoy and love your neighbor ♪