The Sins of Scripture (2 page)

I want to thank my publishers at WaterfrontMedia.com, Mike Kerakos and Ben Wolin, as well as my editors Mark Roberts and Tony Brancato for their encouragement in the use of my weekly columns to hammer out these ideas in that forum, and my subscribers who through their letters have engaged, challenged and deepened my thinking. Others at HarperCollins for whom my gratitude is great are Stephen Hanselman, John Loudon, Kris Ashley, Michael Maudlin, Lisa Zuniga, Cindy DiTiberio, Margery Buchanan, Claudia Boutote and Julie Rae Mitchell. These people have undoubtedly made me a better writer than I ever could have been apart from them, and their friendship has been sustaining. I look forward to other proposed projects with them in the future.

Finally, there are a number of individuals who assisted in the production of this book in ways the reader would never know unless I gave them the credit they are due. The Reverend Dr. Larry Meredith, the former head of the Department of Religion at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, who served as my expert on motion pictures, novels and Broadway plays, especially as they reveal biblical phrases and themes; Steven Blackburn, the librarian at the Hartford Theological Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, who has been enormously helpful in locating not just the quotations that open each chapter but in finding their sources for proper footnotes; Mabel and Gus Allen, who came up with the subtitle; Marilyn (Lyn) Conrad, who was my executive secretary when I was the bishop, and who put retirement aside and undertook the task of translating my legal-pad notes into Microsoft Word. It was a joy to work with Lyn once more on what will be the sixth book of mine to bear her imprint; and Rosemary Halstead, secretary at St. Paul’s Church in Morris Plains, New Jersey, who has worked for me part-time in my retirement and who makes my weekly column possible. I am most grateful to each of these people.

Finally, I pay tribute to my wife Christine, to whom this book is dedicated. If this book’s title page were accurate it would say “written with the cooperation, editorial skills and brilliance of Christine Mary Spong.” Not only is this lady my beloved and treasured wife; she is also my editor, my source of encouragement, the refiner of my ideas, the organizer of my professional life, an extra pair of eyes and ears wherever I speak and the person without whom I could not possibly live the life I lead. Not every author is in love with his editor, but I am, and I am unbelievably fortunate that she is also my wife.

Christine and our primary family members Ellen Spong and her husband Gus Epps, Katharine Spong and her husband Jack Catlett, Jaquelin Spong, Brian Barney and his wife Julieann, and Rachel Barney make up the first generation of that family. Shelby, Jay, John, Lydia, Katherine and Colin are the grandchildren who extend that family to the next generation. We love them all and of each of them I am forever proud.

—John Shelby Spong

    Morris Plains, New Jersey, 2005

I
t is a mysterious book, this Bible. It possesses a strange kind of power. It has been the best-selling book in the world every year since printing began. It comes as no surprise to recall that when the Gutenberg press was invented, it was the Bible that first bore the imprint of its metal letters. There is hardly a language or a dialect in the world today into which the words of the Bible have not been translated. Its stories, its words and its phrases have permeated our culture, infiltrating even our subconscious minds. One thinks of motion picture titles that are direct quotations from scripture:
Lilies of the Field
(Matt. 6:28), a 1968 film that earned Sidney Poitier an Oscar for best actor;
Inherit the Wind
(Prov. 11:29), the classic film about the Scopes trial set in the Tennessee of 1925 with Spencer Tracy starring as Clarence Darrow and Fredric March as William Jennings Bryan; and
Through a Glass Darkly
(1 Cor. 13:12), an Ingmar Bergman masterpiece. Beyond these titles there have also been motion pictures dramatizing biblical epics, frequently in overblown Hollywood style:
The Ten Commandments,
Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Barabbas
and in more recent days
The Passion of the Christ.

Beyond overt references, biblical allusions are constantly used in literature. Without some knowledge of the sacred text, many expressions in our language would be meaningless. John Steinbeck’s novel
East of Eden
comes to mind, along with
Exodus
by Leon Uris,
The Green Pastures
by Marc Connelly and
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, which became a motion picture directed by Vincent Minnelli.

The words of the Bible enrich our everyday speech whether we are aware of it or not: “for crying out loud,” which refers to Jesus on the cross; “land of Goshen,” a reference to that section of Egypt which housed the Jewish slaves; “sour grapes,” a phrase which derives from Jeremiah 31:39 that is widely used to explain behavior; and “the olive branch” as a sign of peace, which comes from the story of Noah. Far more than anyone realizes, all of Western life has been deeply shaped by the fact that the content of this Bible has washed over our civilization for more than two thousand years. Biblical concepts are so deeply written into our individual and corporate psyches that even nonbelievers accept them as both inevitable and simply a part of the way life is.

In the history of the Western world, however, this Bible has also left a trail of pain, horror, blood and death that is undeniable. Yet this fact is not often allowed to rise to consciousness. Biblical words have been used not only to kill, but even to justify that killing. This book has been relentlessly employed by those who say they believe it to be God’s Word, to oppress others who have been, according to these believers, defined in the “hallowed” pages of this text as somehow subhuman. Quotations from the Bible have been cited to bless the bloodiest of wars. People committed to the Bible have not refrained from using the cruelest forms of torture on those whom they believe to have been revealed as the enemies of God in these “sacred” scriptures. A museum display that premiered in Florence in 1983, and later traveled to the San Diego Museum of Man in 2003, featured the instruments used on heretics by Christians during the Inquisition. They included stretching machines designed literally to pull a person apart, iron collars with spikes to penetrate the throat, and instruments that were used to impale the victims. The Bible has been quoted throughout Western history to justify the violence done to racial minorities, women, Jews and homosexuals. It might be difficult for some Christians to understand, but it is not difficult to document the terror enacted by believers in the name of the Bible.

How is it possible, we must ultimately wonder, that this book, which is almost universally revered in Western religious circles, could also be the source of so much evil? Can that use of the Bible be turned around and brought to an end? Can the Bible once again be viewed as a source—even an ultimate source—of life? Or is it too late and the Bible too stained? Those are the themes I will seek to address in this volume.

My qualifications for telling this story are twofold: first, I have had a lifetime love affair with this Bible; and second, I am a church insider, who yearns to see the church become what it was meant to be. I will not give up on the Bible or the church easily, but I will insist that the Bible be looked at honestly in the light of the best scholarship available and that the church consciously own its historical destructiveness.

I do not know exactly when my love affair with the Bible began. Perhaps its first seeds were planted when I was a child and began to notice that the family Bible was displayed prominently on the coffee table in our modest living room. I do not recall my parents ever reading it, but there was no question that it was revered. I did see it used to record the family’s history in a special section that bore titles like “Births,” “Deaths” and “Marriages.” Nothing was ever to be placed on top of that holy volume—not another book, not a glass or a bottle, not even a piece of mail. This sanctified book could brook no cover, nor could it be seen as secondary in any way to any other entity. This attitude was certainly encouraged and my passion for this book was enhanced by the schools, both weekday and Sunday, that I attended eagerly as a young pupil.

Yes, as hard as it is for citizens of the twenty-first century to imagine this scenario, stories from the Bible were read or told to the children of my generation in both church school and public school with regularity. I suspect that if one had to compare the two places, it would be the public schools in my region that were even more fervent about revering the Bible than were my church’s Sunday school sessions. There is a sense in which the public schools in the southern part of the United States where I grew up were, in an earlier day, little more than Protestant parochial schools. Every public school day in my childhood began with both a Bible story and a prayer, most often the Lord’s Prayer, led by a teacher. I suppose that a sense of awe was communicated to me during this daily opening exercise, for inattentiveness was said to be “rude to God.” Following these opening religious rituals we recited the pledge of allegiance to the flag. Devotion to both God and my nation were regularly placed side by side with God always coming first. Indeed, my nation was said to be the instrument through which God worked in this world. These sentiments were not far from a concept of America being a new divinely chosen people.

The intensity of these public school religious exercises depended to some degree on the piety of the particular teacher. To this day I can bring to mind indelible memories of the public school teacher I had when I was ten years old. Her name was Mrs. Owens—Claire Yates Owens, to be specific. She started our class each day by reading a chapter from a children’s Bible storybook. These tales were not unlike radio soap operas in that they left the listener hanging in anticipation of what the next episode would reveal. Most of us could not wait to see what was going to happen to Moses in the midst of the Red Sea or to Joshua in the battle of Jericho. We hung on Paul’s every adventure and reveled in his most recent shipwreck or snakebite. The stories from this book were so natural to our lives and so deeply a part of our culture that none of us could imagine a time when the Supreme Court of our land would declare this activity to be unconstitutional. Mrs. Owens even required us to memorize the Ten Commandments in the long form directly from the book of Exodus. None of those
Reader’s Digest
shortened versions would do for her! That meant we had to repeat all of those intimate details found in the second commandment about how the “sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.” We all hoped our great-grandparents had been virtuous people lest we be forced to pay the price of their evildoing. There was also that long list of both people and creatures that the fourth commandment ordered to refrain from labor on the Sabbath. Memorizing these convoluted and intricate passages was worth the reward of special public commendation that Mrs. Owens both promised and delivered. If one wanted extra credit in this class, or at least the satisfaction of impressing our demanding teacher and being recognized as extraordinary by our peers, we were encouraged, although not required, to memorize in order all of the sixty-six books in our King James Protestant version of the scriptures. I passed that test then and can still recite them to this day.

Yet from even that early date as I perused the sacred text I would come across a narrative from time to time that was brutal or insensitive. Still, no matter what I discovered on those hallowed pages, the fact that it was in the Bible surrounded each passage with an aura that was designed to reaffirm my trust in the ultimate goodness of all its words. I recall even in this early part of my life asking questions about the Bible. Those questions, however, were still relatively safe. “Why,” I wondered, “was the language of the Bible different from all of the other books we read?” By “language” I really meant “English,” since that was the only language I knew. “Why was this book filled with words like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ or verbs like ‘shalt’ and ‘beseecheth’?” “Why was it that in the Bible when Jesus wanted to make an important pronouncement, he would introduce it by saying: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you…’?” I could not imagine anyone else saying such stilted, silly-sounding words in any other setting. These unusual words and phrases communicated to me that this book was somehow profoundly different from all others. I had not yet confronted the Elizabethan English of William Shakespeare and knew nothing about how my native tongue had developed. I suppose my classmates and I made lots of unconscious assumptions. I know I identified this holy-sounding language of the Bible with the language of God. Perhaps, I reasoned, God was so old that the divine language was the classical English of long ago. The idea that God or Jesus had spoken anything other than English had not yet dawned on me. I was told this book revealed God’s language and that assumption was reinforced in my mind every time someone referred to this book as the “Word of God.”

There were other issues about this book that were different, but I did not yet even wonder, much less ask, about them. For instance, why was this book typically printed with two columns of type on each page? Sometimes these columns were separated by a simple line, but on other occasions by a narrow center section that ran down the entire page and was filled with small, italicized type and other strange hieroglyphics. No other books that I knew of except dictionaries and encyclopedias were printed this way. This was a particularly interesting insight when it finally dawned on me that no one was ever supposed to sit down and
read
a dictionary or an encyclopedia. These were, rather, resource books to which one turned to get specific answers to particular queries. Was the Bible printed this way to encourage me to think of it as a kind of holy dictionary or sacred encyclopedia that possessed all the answers to all the questions that I might ever ask? Even now when I raise these possibilities they sound a bit sinister, so you may be sure they were not allowed to enter my mind as a child. But I still wonder if this was a conscious or an unconscious decision. Did that layout reflect the position of the hierarchy in the Western Catholic tradition? Was that part of the church leaders’ campaign to keep the Bible from being read, at least not by the uneducated masses? Does that printed style itself reflect their need to guard the Bible’s secrets in order to protect their authority? I suspect it does and that even then I was being trained, quite unconsciously, to view the Bible as a resource book to which I would turn only to get the final answers to my questions, and thus to accustom myself to think of the Bible as an ultimate, undebatable authority from which there was no further appeal in the quest for truth. That is certainly consistent with the way the Bible has been used in Western history. Whatever the motives were which produced these realities, conscious or unconscious, they surely worked on me. The Bible was different from every other book in its ultimate power.

I approached this book and its holiness rather tangentially as a child. Children’s Bible storybooks were my absolute favorites. The more graphic the pictures, the better I liked them. I am sure that both this affinity and my affection for Bible stories were noticed and encouraged by my mother, for on the Christmas following my twelfth birthday—perhaps not coincidentally it was also the Christmas following the death of my father—I received as my primary present, my “Santa gift” as our family called it, my very own personal copy of the Holy Bible.

I was thrilled with this gift. Nothing could have pleased me more. This particular Bible was large in size with gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages and a cross on its leather cover. That cover was both thin and pliable, so that my Bible could be held in one hand with its cover and pages flopping down on each side of the hand of the holder just as they did when preachers held the Bible while expounding on its various texts at revivals and from church pulpits. This Bible also had a concordance in the back that would guide me to places where particular words or characters might be located. It possessed all kinds of introductory material and page after page of notes. Included in its appendix were colored maps of the Holy Land. On one of those maps I could see visually the boundaries of each of the twelve tribes of Israel and could even locate the little-known lands of Naphtali, Dan and Benjamin. On another map I could follow in minute detail both the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem and the travels of Paul, first into the desert of Arabia and later across the lands contiguous to the Mediterranean Sea. Most special of all to me was the fact that this Bible was a “red letter edition,” in which all the words believed to have been spoken by Jesus were printed in red, so that these words literally leaped off the pages in importance. I am sure that part of my excitement over this Christmas gift was contained in the realization that it was in some sense an acknowledgment on my mother’s part that I was growing up and that the time had come for me to give up childish things like children’s Bible storybooks and to start feeding my soul on the “red meat” of the Bible’s own words. Whatever motives were operating in my psyche or even my mother’s psyche, I took to this book like a duck to water and immediately began to immerse myself in its content. I cannot imagine my grandchildren today responding in a similar fashion.