Bishop Spong on the Bible as a source of truth

[Rose]

Bishop John Spong speaks about his book The Sins of Scripture covering the topics of sexism, and homophobia in the Bible.

[Rose]

Scripture is a human creation...every religion begins with a tribal mentality and a god calling a people...~Bishop Spong

[David M]

HERE WE GO AGAIN PLUGGING THE SAME OLD GRIPE

[Richard Amiel McGough]

HERE WE GO AGAIN PLUGGING THE SAME OLD GRIPE

Well, the "gripe" is as old as the book itself and if it didn't contain things like genocide, sexism, and so forth, there would be nothing to gripe about. So I don't think the problem lies with the messenger.

Of course, I remember how I used to despise John Shelby Spong as an enemy of God, the Bible, and Christianity. I have a couple of his books in which I left very disparaging comments in the margin. Now he seems to me to be very reasonable which just goes to show, yet again, how our presuppositions affect our perceptions and judgments. I think this is the most important issue. Before we commit ourselves to any particular belief, we need to understand the psychology of belief.

Note that he begins by criticizing "institutional religion." You agree with him wholeheartedly on this point, don't you? And then he talks about religions in general, how they start with tribal identity. This is true of your religion as well as most others. This is why Christianity looks so much like a man-made religion to me. Sure, it contains elements of the highest quality but they are mixed with things that must be rejected as wrong, and other things that look like the most primitive superstitions (e.g. sacrifice and blood atonement). This doesn't mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater - but that's hard not to do if we can't identify the "baby." John Spong seems to think the Bible is very valuable, he just says it's not God, and not the "Word of God" in the sense that fundamentalists would have it. And it seems that the lion's share of the evidence supports his view.

If the Bible is the Word of God in any sense, then perhaps it contains the bad things to make it impossible to idolize the book as if it were perfect. I'm always bemused by the fact that people claim the Bible is God's Word even as they reject the idea that God was free to produce whatever kind of book would suit his purpose. They impose their own fallible human doctrines upon it, saying that it is "inerrant and infallible" for example. What if God chose to allow error in his book to cause idolators to "stumble at the Word?" When I was a Christian I dealt with these problems by saying that God designed the Bible so that the believer would have everything necessary to believe, and the unbeliever would have everything necessary to unbelieve. But now I see that all dogmatic religions have one thing in common: they are all based on beliefs that cannot be proven. This is probably the central thing that makes Christianity indistinguishable from all other dogmatic religions. We are given a book filled with dogmas and told that we can be right with God only if we "believe" those dogmas.