Scriptures, when you begin to understand them, were never intended to be read literally,” claimed John Shelby Spong, a retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. In a radio interview about his new book, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, Spong explained his view that broad acceptance of a revised, symbolic interpretation of scripture “will stop the exodus of people from religion.”
In the 1980’s and 1990’s Spong wrote books suggesting the Virgin Mary was a prostitute and that the body of Jesus was torn apart by wild dogs rather than resurrected. He has insisted the church must abandon traditional teachings to survive. But Spong’s Newark Diocese suffered a 40 percent membership loss during his term.
In his radio interview, Spong repeated his usual complaint that “[people] don’t want to park their brains at the door of the church. They can’t think in church because it’s all sort of ancient or medieval.” Instead, the bishop claimed scriptures “weren’t written literally, they’re written to discern some aspects of life and of our own humanity that you can only talk about symbolically.”
Beyond just a disagreement within the church, Spong said biblical interpretation is a “conflict that goes on in our culture today between a literal fundamental understanding of the Bible that causes us to go off on strange tangents like birth control debates, abortion debates, and homosexuality debates, and the alternative in our world is to give up religion, the church, and the Bible altogether and become part of the secular society.” In Spong’s view, “both of them miss the point.” He would like orthodox Christians to abandon their beliefs in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and for secularists to accept the “basis of the Jesus story,” which Spong claimed is: “all life is love.”
According to Spong, the traditional story of Jesus as told in the Gospels is merely “interpretations of the second generation of Christian people relating the Jesus story to the scriptures of the Hebrew people.” They did this, he asserted, because the early Christians “worshiped in the synagogue every Sabbath and they related the Jesus story to the scriptures that were being read to them. By the time two generations had passed, they had formed an interpretive bridge between Jesus and these Old Testament scriptures, and that’s what shows up in the Gospels.”
Spong told how this “interpretive bridge” was reinforced “back in the 14th and 15th centuries,” as illiterate people “got their primary understanding of the Jesus story from looking at pictures.” Supposedly “the painters put the literalistic interpretation of [scripture] into the entire mind of people.” This “literalistic” interpretation was further cemented “in the Middle Ages [because] people had the stations of the cross … where the illiterate population could walk through the stations of the cross and visualize the last moment of Jesus from the time he takes his cross until the time they take him off the cross.” In our time, however, when people are literate and enlightened, according to Spong, people should realize that scripture is “symbolic.”
The retired bishop asserted people still subscribe to Christianity today despite its supposed irrationality because “religion basically fills in the security needs of human life.” He explained, “We are more interested in finding security than we are in finding truth, and for 2,000 years we have found security in what we call the ‘revealed word of God.’” What the “Bible says underneath its literal words,” is what matters to Spong. Until now, though, people have not been able to access the meaning “underneath” because “the church has never been happy with people reading the scriptures on their own.”
If people were to explore the symbolic meaning of scripture apart from the church “hierarchy,” they would discover things like “the subtle meaning of the Holy Spirit.” According to Spong, the Holy Spirit is not the third person of the Trinity, but is simply a symbol meaning that “every life is called to be everything that it can be.” Further, Spong’s interpretation of the virgin birth “is that we have found in Jesus something that we don’t believe human life ever could have created.”
The bishop said he believes “if the Christian church is dedicated to proclaiming the holiness of all life, the fact that God loves every living thing and that we fulfill our destiny by becoming all that we are capable of being, it becomes very life affirming.” Through Spong’s interpretation of Scripture, he finds that ”the heart of the Christian story says that somehow people experience the presence of God in the life of a man named Jesus of Nazareth.” “That’s the experience,” he said, which was ruined when the writers of the Gospels “tried to explain it.”
By “re-claiming the Bible,” Spong aims to “bring people into the experience of whatever God means,” which to him means people “are enabled to live more fully and love more deeply … and be all we are capable of being.” Ultimately, the bishop hopes to “build a world where everybody can be who they are without imposing standards.”
No comments yet
