It is not fair to expect secular journalists to be biblical scholars, nor should it be anticipated that they would spend the necessary time to research the issue. It is for that reason that they tend to accept uncritically the oft-repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti-gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro-slavery and anti-women.
There is also a widely accepted mentality that if the Bible is opposed, the idea must be wrong. That is little more than nonsensical fundamentalism. The rise of democracy was contrary to the "clear teaching of the Bible," as the debate over the forced signing of the Magna Carta by King John of England in 1215 revealed. The Bible was quoted to prove that Galileo was wrong; that Darwin was wrong; that Freud was wrong; that allowing women to be educated, to vote, to enter the professions and to be ordained was wrong. So the fact that the Bible is quoted to prove that homosexuality is evil and to be condemned is hardly a strong argument, given the history of how many times the Bible has been wrong. I believe that most bishops know this but the Episcopal Church has some fundamentalist bishops and a few who are "fellow travelers" with fundamentalists.
The Bible was written between the years 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E. Our knowledge of almost everything has increased exponentially since that time. It is the height of ignorance to continue using the Bible as an encyclopedia of knowledge to keep dying prejudices intact. The media seems to cooperate in perpetuating that long ago abandoned biblical attitude.
That is not surprising since the religious people keep quoting it to justify their continued state of unenlightenment. That attitude is hardly worthy of the time it takes to engage it. I do not debate with members of the flat earth society either. Prejudices all die. The first sign that death is imminent comes when the prejudice is debated publicly. ---Bishop John Shelby Spong
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And for all Spong’s iconoclastic claims, there is something strangely familiar about this Jesus. A Jesus who champions inclusiveness and tolerance is a Jesus who looks suspiciously like – well, like ourselves. Presumably Spong’s readers will already identify with the Western liberal values of tolerance and inclusiveness. We did not learn those values from Jesus, but, thanks to Spong, we discover subsequently that Jesus himself is also committed to the same values.
The function of Spong’s Jesus is thus simply to maintain the social and political status quo. He takes our own most cherished and self-evident Western values, and he provides them with a theological justification. Thus our own values are made absolute and unimpeachable – they are elevated to the status of ideology. Simply put, Spong tells us that political correctness is correct, since even Jesus was politically correct.
That bolded part looks suspiciously similar to the claim 'society has changed and therefore society supercedes the Bible'.
It is much more difficult to find an issue that Spong is “right” about, than to find one he is “wrong” about. It is a travesty that he associates himself with Christianity to any degree. The following points are illustrative of his skeptical mentality.
Spong’s view of God
Spong’s “god” is not the God of the Hebrew/Christian Scriptures. According to a sympathetic reviewer, the ex-bishop believes that the traditional view2 of God is dead and that “most theological God-talk today is meaningless.”
Spong’s idea3 is that Jehovah is not even an independent entity; rather, the god-essence — whatever that is — is merely something “deep within us.” This is not biblical theism; it is a form of paganistic “pantheism”.
Such aspersions, however, trouble the gentleman not at all. He claims5 there are passages in the Gospels that portray Jesus as “narrow-minded, vindictive, and even hypocritical.”
The former Anglican bishop rejects the biblical proposition that Jesus was conceived in the body of a virgin. He does not believe Christ performed miracles, or that he possessed the very nature of deity. He repudiates the unshakable truth that the Lord was raised from the dead6.
Though Spong claims to have studied the Bible with great “intensity,” his writings reveal an abysmal lack of knowledge of the sacred text. His ignorance is exceeded only by his arrogant disrespect for the time-tested volume. If the Bible continues to be viewed literally, he asserts, it is “doomed to be cast aside as both dated and irrelevant” — an exercise which he has mastered already7. One can hardly suppress the conviction that the world’s best-selling Book will be revered still — long after Spong’s memory is but a faintly lingering stench.
It is a nauseating labor to review the spiritual foibles of this delusional theological celebrity. Spong happily defends a number of vile sexual evils, e.g., fornication, adultery, and homosexuality. He is much in favor of same-sex “marriages,” as if arbitrarily calling a sexual aberration “marriage” makes it so.
Not everything that parades under the name “Christian” is deserving of that appellation. And there is no better example of that maxim than that of John Shelby Spong, the rogue “priest” who has made a career of bashing the Son of God and disgracing that sacred name before an uninformed public.
Source
Yeah, Spong is not 'good words' or even Christian words. Probably one of the worst role models you could have picked but very telling of your belief system.
GD, do you think my argument is illogical because God, not society, wrote the Bible? In a previous thread, you wrote
Hypothetically, imagine a society that has decided that raping and murder is acceptable. Using your own logic, is that society right while the Bible is wrong - because society has 'moved on'?
It seems that you view "The Bible" and "society" as mutually exclusive. Is that the case?
Likely you will blow a bowel here and refuse to answer, continuing to respond that I am just an illogical poopy pants with a fat face but this truly is the very heart of this discussion.
Some other notes from the other thread...
I'd had multiple anti-social personality traits by multiple people
if I'd ever been voted off an open forum discussion site
So now majority rules is OK? I thought you told me otherwise. I guess that means that 97 percent of climate scientists are now correct:)
from diverse areas.
What diversity? It's a gun blog where everyone thinks exactly the same way. It's never "I"...always "we." You do the same thing here. No one is allowed to think anything other than purity in terms of the 2nd amendment. Show me one person from that site that is an outlier in terms of gun rights. Or from their view on government. You all have a pathological hatred of the federal government and congregate there to escape the real world.
Of course, you're projecting and flipping again and there's an easy way to prove it. It will also prove how "open" that forum is. Debate me in an unbiased forum with a wider audience that is not exclusively made up of people that all agree with each other. That will put to rest who is anti social and who is not...who is logical and who is not...who is Brave Sir Robin and who is not...
6Kings,
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html
Both you and your link. I challenge you to refute Bishop Sprong's points yourself, using context and evidence from the Bible and actualy scholarly research.
Both you and your link. I challenge you to refute Bishop Sprong's points yourself, using context and evidence from the Bible and actualy scholarly research.
This is a good summary of research which addresses his and apparently your skepticism.
http://www.christian-apologetics.org/html/Whats_wrong_Spong.htm
Yes!
If society is the sole arbiter of morality, then in a hypothetical society, what that society decides is right and wrong is what's right and wrong.
If you were an ancient Viking or Mongol - rape and murder would have been perfectly acceptable.
And in a hypothetical future 'Viking' society the same could be true.
If you view the Bible not as a constant, not as truth and not as written by God - but instead as written by fallible men, in an old archaic society, frequently wrong and able to have it's 'wrongs' replaced by what your current society considers 'right' then you could have a hypothetical society of 'Mongols' who claim to be Christian and running around raping and murdering.
When you say the Bible is wrong about something and use as your reason that it is wrong because society has changed - then you lay out the same logic of that hypothetical society that has 'changed' and views murder and rape as acceptable and 'the Bible has to be wrong about murder and rape because our society has advanced and the Bible was written a long time ago.....'
Now, I'm not saying you are wrong when you say the Bible is wrong about certain things. What I am saying is that you rejected your own argument. You used the above logic. I showed you how that logic applied. You rejected most vociferously that application. Therefore you rejected your own logic. So, to you, your own logic is invalid and the proper course of action is for you to go back and re-examine the basis for your own argument.
Which you sort of did. You didn't admit that your argument was wrong, and you are still trying to use it, but you did come up with another argument. But that argument doesn't actually argue in favour of your original contention.....
continuing to respond that I am just an illogical poopy pants with a fat face but this truly is the very heart of this discussion
You get what you give.
Well, GD, at least you spent some time in commenting not talking about me:)
The problem (as always) is that you are dealing in absolutes and the world is not a place of black and white. It doesn't have to be that ALL of the Bible is right or ALL of it is wrong. Or ALL of society is right in the things it does or ALL of it does is wrong. It's always a gray area because the world is gray.
Some parts of the Bible are God talking and some parts are man talking. The latter is particularly true in the NT. It's up to us to study what is being said and what the context is of how it is presented. For example, how does one reconcile that in the OT is was OK to kill you child if they mouthed off to you? (I have a post going up about this soon). God said it was OK and it's in the Bible. Society went with it. So, what changed because that is currently no longer acceptable? God or society? Or both?
I get that you are trying to do with the games and all but murder is part of the Ten Commandments. Those are the only laws that still apply to Christians today. The rest of the silly laws from the OT do not. A society can't decided that murder is suddenly OK because of the sacred nature of the Ten Commandments. But they can decide if it's OK for the daughter of a priest who engages in prostitution to be burned alive until dead (Leviticus 21:9). The Ten Commandments are clearly in a category by themselves and are transcultural. The New Commandment is in that same category. Jesus's instructions in Matthew 5 are in that category. Paul's (if it even was him) instructions on gender roles for women in a certain area of the world in the new Christian Church are not. So, society can indeed change them.
Ok, so by what metric do you decide the Bible is wrong?
When you say this:
It's up to us to study what is being said and what the context is of how it is presented.
You have said that the parts that you are able to determine are not applicable to a changed society are able to be determined by reading the Bible. In that case the 'rules' and who it applies to are directly contained within the book. If the book says that, then it's not wrong because it's the one telling you who and what applies to who and what.
So how can the Bible be 'wrong' about a subject because society has 'moved on' if the Bible tells you that subject doesn't apply to your society?
Do you see the contradiction in what you are saying?
Some parts of the Bible are God talking and some parts are man talking.
How exactly does that happen M? How does God speak in some parts but not all?
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