Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062098696
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

In Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, bishop and social activist John Shelby Spong argues that 200 years of biblical scholarship has been withheld from lay Christians. In this brilliant follow-up to Spong's previous books Eternal Life and Jesus for the Non-Religious, Spong not only reveals the crucial truths that have long been kept hidden from the public eye, but also explores what the history of the Bible can teach us about reading its stories today and living our lives for tomorrow.

Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up With God: A Love Story, applauds John Shelby Spong's Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, writing that "pulsing beneath his brilliant, thought-provoking, passionate book is this question: can Christianity survive the education of its believers?…A question Bishop Spong answers with a resounding yes."

PART I

Setting the Stage:
Posing the Problem

Chapter 1
Examining the Bible’s Mystique

In the southern culture in which I was raised a special reverence was accorded to the book we called the “Holy Bible.” For good reason this region of the country was and is called the “Bible Belt.” Few homes would be without a family Bible as part of their permanent furnishings. In my childhood home that Bible was always prominently displayed on the coffee table in our living room, where no one could miss seeing it. I do not recall, however, that it was ever read, either silently or out loud. Its primary function seemed to be little more than a volume in which special moments in life’s transitions were recorded.

We opened that Bible to fill in baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial dates. It was the repository of our family history. That alone appeared to be enough to endow this book with a sense of sanctity. There was, however, far more than this attached to the Bible in the life of our culture, and all of us breathed much of that “more” daily into our psyches. This book was called “God’s Word.” It was meant to be revered. No object could ever be placed on top of this book. Such behavior would constitute nothing less than a sacrilege. The place where this book had a unique position of honor, however, was inside the familiar institution called “the church.”

I also cannot remember a time in my life when I did not regularly attend Sunday school, so it was there, not in our family, that my siblings and I began to learn the content of the Bible. Sunday school did not, however, give us anything close to an ordered kind of learning. We certainly got the message that all of the Bible’s content was terribly important, although we were never introduced to most of that content. We concentrated primarily on the familiar stories to which we could relate. The birth of Jesus was first and foremost in importance, probably because Christmas was by far the most popular holiday. So we knew about the star in the east, the magi, the angels and the shepherds. We frequently saw pictures of the manger with the Virgin Mary kneeling beside it, her eyes cast down in the familiar pose. I had no idea at that time what the word “virgin” meant. Perhaps it was just Mary’s first name. Most of the girls I knew in the South had double names—Bobbie Sue, Martha Ann, so why not Virgin Mary?

The second story in importance was the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pictures of Jesus on the cross were also familiar to me, but I never understood why Jesus had to die for my sins as I was so regularly told that he did. Nonetheless, we learned the details of the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter and the doubt of Thomas, and we heard the accounts of the penitent thief, Joseph of Arimathea and the women at the empty tomb. There were, however, no Easter pageants in which we could participate or see these stories dramatized, and so these details were not nearly as vivid as the Christmas ones.

We also learned by memory such things as the Ten Commandments, even though I had no idea what it meant to covet, and committing adultery brought up no mental images for me whatsoever! The stories from the Bible were reinforced by hymns that I learned in church, which seemed to narrate them to music. I was always moved by the hymn that invited us to “Go to dark Gethsemane,”1 where we might observe the Lord’s anguish. It was clear that we were supposed to feel guilt as we recalled the final events in Jesus’ life.

So deep was the Bible’s presence in our cultural life that we actually made fun of it and enjoyed the mischief of singing about some of its stories, especially if they had the power to titillate our imagination. Perhaps this was a way of creating intimacy with the holy—at least I think that was one of our motivations. At church camp one of our favorite songs to sing around the campfire was entitled “The Baptist Sunday School.” It was special fun to laugh about the Baptists. This was not an attempt to be religious bigots or to make fun of our Baptist friends; it was just taking cognizance of the fact that the Baptists were in our part of the world numerically larger than any other Christian tradition, so we always defined ourselves against them. We used to say, “The Baptists are outnumbered only by the sparrows.” The chorus to that campfire song went like this:

Young folks, old folks everybody come

Join the Baptist Sunday school and have a lot
of fun.

Please check your chewing gum and marbles
at the door 2

And you’ll hear some Bible stories that you’ve never heard before!

In the verses of this song we came to the content of particular Bible stories, which followed a four-sentence form that had a limerick-like quality to them. There were numerous verses and, if one knew the Bible well enough, one might actually make up new ones! The ones that were particularly popular with us were just a little “naughty,” just a bit off color. I am certain that is why they appealed. The two I remember best illustrate this appeal:

Pharaoh had a daughter, she had a winsome smile,

She found the baby Moses a-floating in the Nile.

She took him home to Poppa with that same old tale

Which is just about as probable as Jonah and the Whale!

And:

Salome was a dancer, she danced before the King.

She wiggled and she wobbled and she shook most everything.

The King said, “Salome, there’ll be no scandal here.”

Salome said, “To heck with that,” and kicked the chandelier.

Yes, at our church camp we took liberties, made fun of and with the Bible and felt rebelliously sinful in doing so.

Later, when I first heard George and Ira Gershwin’s classic American opera Porgy and Bess, I would hear that same rebellious note in their song about the Bible, sung by a character named “Sportin’ Life.” The song was entitled “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” which suggested that even the stories one read in the Bible were themselves not “necessarily so.” One verse of those lyrics again contained the naughty-sexy theme:

Methus’lah lived nine hundred years

Methus’lah lived nine hundred years

But who calls dat livin’ when no gal’ll give in

To no man what’s nine hundred years.

While doubts about the Bible’s authority were allowed in fun or at play, once we went into church, we discovered that the Bible brooked no challenges. When scripture was read in our church worship services, the end of that reading would be accompanied by some version of the phrase: “The Word of the Lord,” or “This is the Word of the Lord,” or “May God add a blessing to the reading of his [sic] Word,” to which members of the congregation might respond, as if on cue like well-trained kindergartners, with some version of the refrain: “Thanks be to God.” One did not go far in my young world without encountering this assertion that the words of the Bible were identical with the “Word of God.” It was and is a bold claim. It is also a claim, I was destined to learn, that depended for its sustenance on a great amount of biblical ignorance. One surely does not want to read much of the Bible if that claim is to remain intact. Perhaps that is why so many people in the Bible Belt pay only lip service to the call to read this book. The fact is that in the Bible Belt the Bible is not read with any regularity. If that had ever been done, then far too many unanswered questions would have been raised about just what kind of God it was who would say and do the things recorded in Holy Scripture.

If the Bible is God’s Word, for example, how would we deal with a passage in which the prophet Samuel instructed Saul, the king of the Jews, in God’s name, to engage in a war of genocide against the Amalekites, in which he was to kill every man, woman, child, suckling, ox and ass among the Amalekites (I Sam. 15:1–9)? How can this passage be called the “Word of God”? If it is God’s Word, why would we want to worship such a God? What kind of God could inspire the psalmist to write in God’s “holy Word” that the people of Israel would not be happy until they had dashed the heads of the children of their Babylonian enemies against the rocks (Ps. 137:8–9)? Beyond those rather bizarre episodes, what is one to do with the biblical definitions of women as subhuman, the biblical acceptance of slavery as a legitimate social institution and the biblical admonitions to execute homosexual persons? All of these attitudes are quite clearly present in the Bible. For people to maintain with any real conviction the claim that the Bible is the “Word of God” means that their minds have to be closed to truth that has in our time become universally accepted. Certainly no thinking person can today still view the Bible as a revelation of God that dropped from heaven, fully written, divided into chapters and verses and bearing the divine imprimatur.

We know now that the Bible is a small library of books composed over a period of about one thousand years between roughly 1000 BCE and 135 CE. Many of these biblical books did not have a single author. Some of them were edited and re-edited over as long a period of time as five hundred years before they reached the form in which they found inclusion in the Bible. Can the “Word of God” actually be edited? Why did God not get it right the first time? What human being would have had the hubris to add to or delete from the “Word of God”? Yet that kind of editing happened, we now know, probably in every book in the Bible. Another fact to embrace is that none of the authors of the books in the Bible wrote thinking that they were writing the “Word of God.” That was something decided much later by someone else. Have we ever wondered by whom these decisions were made and on what basis? Among those who still make this claim for the literal sacredness of the entire Bible, we need to know whether they are suggesting that each book of the Bible is equally holy, or that each reflects the “Word of God” with equal fidelity. The mainstream Christian churches do not seem to believe that, for the lectionaries that guide the reading of the scriptures in their worship leave out some books altogether! Can one skip a portion of the “Word of God” as no longer worthy of being heard? Such attitudes reflect uninformed claims for the Bible that are universally dismissed in the circles of biblical scholarship. Why is this scholarship not communicated to the Sunday worshipers of the world?

Let me be specific with certain popular assumptions: Moses did not write the documents we call the “books of Moses,” or the Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy)! Indeed, Moses had been dead some three hundred years before the first word of the Torah was put into written form. David did not write the book of Psalms! Solomon did not write Proverbs! The gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but by at least the second and, in the case of the Fourth Gospel (as the book of John is often called), perhaps even the third generation of believers. The book of Revelation does not predict the end of the world or convey any hidden messages about modern-day history! Why do we still allow ourselves to be tyrannized by this kind of uninformed biblical non-sense, regardless of the “authority” claimed for that book by the mouths that still utter these claims?

During the era in which the books of the Bible were written almost everyone believed—indeed, did not even question—the assumed fact that the earth was the center of a three-tiered universe and that God lived just above the sky. How else could God vigilantly watch human behavior and keep the divine record books up to date and ready for Judgment Day? No one in that time had any idea that the sun was part of a galaxy that contained two hundred billion other stars. No one had ever heard of a germ or virus, so in the Bible sickness was interpreted as punishment from the all-seeing God. The bubonic plague in the fourteenth century was viewed as a particularly violent expression of God’s anger and was popularly blamed on a scandal in the papacy, which produced a pope in Rome and a pope in Avignon. Weather patterns, from heat waves to hurricanes and tornadoes, which seemed to come out of the same sky that God was thought to inhabit, were regarded as expressions of this same divine wrath. Even today this perspective remains in fundamentalist religious circles. The killing earthquake that rocked Haiti in January 2010, causing the death of some two hundred and thirty thousand people and devastating the whole nation, was explained by one televangelist as God punishing the Haitians for “making a pact with the devil and throwing the French out,” events that occurred in the early years of the nineteenth century! In the Bible mental illness and epilepsy were also assumed to be (and were interpreted as the result of) demon possession. Can any modern doctor believe that?

Given these realities, we need to ask just how the claim made by anyone that the Bible in any sense is the “Word of God” can be sustained even for a moment without violating every rational faculty that human beings possess. Yet this claim is still made by religious voices, and it is frequently made without apology. Religious representatives not only say these things, but they also act them out in public with neither embarrassment nor shame. In fact this biblical mentality, frequently worn as a badge of honor, has played a large role in America’s national life.

In the history of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the Democratic Party that wore this badge, nominating on three different occasions (1896, 1900 and 1908) a biblical fundamentalist named William Jennings Bryan to be their presidential candidate. Three different Republicans, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, defeated him and thus kept this attitude from getting established in the highest political office of this country. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, this mentality shifted to Republican candidates, and one president, George W. Bush, actually asserted that God had chosen him to be president! President Bush’s mentality was not an isolated claim in his party, as those who came to be called “the religious right” found a home in religious Republicanism, packaged as “family values,” and they produced a plethora of candidates who opposed evolution, saw the turmoil in the Middle East as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and sought to impose a narrow religious agenda on this complex nation. An Arkansas Baptist preacher actually became a viable presidential candidate.3

How is it possible that such irrational and, at least in scholarly circles, such universally dismissed attitudes toward the Bible can still in the twenty-first century have such power and even appeal? To answer these questions we will have to journey deep into our religious origins.

A worthy starting place would be to seek to understand why we have historically built around the Bible such a firm aura or defense shield to protect it from any serious investigation. That aura is quite distinguishable and that defense shield is far more powerful than most of us can imagine, for it is constantly reinforced.

Look first at how the Bible is treated in church. In the more liturgical churches the choir and the officiants process in at the start of worship, and one of them will normally carry the Bible high as if it is to be worshiped or adored. If this action registers at all on the worshipers it heightens a definition that this book itself somehow participates in the holiness of God, which would of course preclude anyone from being critical of it in any way without facing the charge of being sacrilegious. Next, when the gospel selection for the day is read there is frequently a second procession, this time into the congregation, with the Bible or a book of gospel readings once more elevated. Then the reader, who is normally an ordained person, a practice that seems to say that only officially designated “holy people” can read the “holy gospel,” will announce: “The Holy Gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, according to ______,” filling in the blank with the name of the evangelist to whom that day’s reading is ascribed. The congregation responds with the words: “Glory be to you, O Lord.” While this is going on the reader may make the sign of the cross on the gospel and then on his or her head, lips and heart. The reader may even spread the smoke of incense over the gospel book. It is hard to know what these magical gestures mean to the reader or to the congregation, but they do all tend to communicate that the reading about to be heard is of the greatest and gravest significance, thereby enhancing the aura around the Bible. When the gospel reading is complete, the reader then proclaims: “This is the Gospel of the Lord,” to which the cong...