John Shelby Spong: Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism

Despite my attraction to his message, I was feeling rather ambivalent about Spong's style until an inspired passage more than halfway through clarified it all for me. I can think of no better endorsement of this message than to quote it directly:

Both the Sacred Scriptures and the creeds of the Christian church can point to but they can never finally capture eternal truth. The attempt to make either Bible or tradition "infallible" is an attempt to shore up ecclesiastical power and control. It is never an attempt to preserve truth . . . Only truth that can constantly call out new words capable of lifting yesterday's experience into today's mind-set will finally survive.The formulations of today or tomorrow will be no more eternal than the formulations of first-century people. this is not a plea to give up inadequate ancient words for ultimately inadequate modern words. It is to force upon us the realization that all words are, in the last analysis, inadequate (169).

Spong, despite a slightly muddled delivery, succeeds in communicating several important perspectives: first, that the Bible cannot possibly be taken literally. I would add that nobody even believes in a fastidiuously literal Bible, no matter what they might say. Even the most ardent fundamentalists can appreciate the beauty of the Bible's copious figurative and metaphorical language. Furthermore, a Bible that was delivered word for word from the mouth of God with no iota of filtration through human perspective would have no need of four gospels. The fact that the four gospels differ by so much as a single word (let alone other clear stylistic elements that are attributable to human authorial influence) is evidence enough that they are told through a human perspective. The fact that they differ by more than a little and are, in places, contradictory, only strengthens this position. Secondly, Spong argues that enshrinement of the Bible as infallible and verbatim Divine revelation is nothing short of idolatry, and that God is far too expansive to be thus described. All the Bible can do is give us a second-hand account of God through the pens of those who had an intimate experience of the God-essence. Once we recognize this, and release the Bible from chains of literality, the message is accessible to thinking and credulous persons alike.

This is not to say that I support Spong wholeheartedly. I endorse his perspective of the Bible, but it leads him to an impassioned plea for rengagement of the Christian community. I cannot deny that the Bible is "alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword" (Heb 4:12). I have frequently been laid low, abased, and pierced to the very bowels by the words of this electric book. I cannot, however, wrap my mind around the declaration that it and it alone is an authentic, notarized expression of the Divine. I percieve that Spong is setting his sights too low by trying to breathe inclusivity and expansiveness into the Christian community. It is my fervent belief that the more organized a religion becomes, the more it must, by necessity, stifle dissent and indiviual epiphany. This is not to say that organized religion has no place, simply that the second it becomes organized it loses something personal and alive even as it gains power and stability. This is especially ironic, because the very epiphanies and revelations that make any dissenting opinion possible were at one time necessary to the establishment of the church; it is only now that the church has something to lose that they must be labelled heretical and dangerous. The key, then, is to maintain constant contact with the dangerous and heretical for only there can exponential growth of understanding be experienced, but also to keep ones spiritual feet on the ground, and to have some harbor of doctrine to return to after a period of expansive and revealing postulating. This is the only way for organized religion to have any merit to the honest individual.