1 of 2
It is easy for believers in historic Christianity to be angry with John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop for the Diocese of Newark. His publisher's press releases proudly trumpet that his "name is virtually synonymous with the word controversy." He has publicly argued for the permissibility of sexual relations outside of marriage for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, maintaining that "sex outside of marriage can be holy and lifegiving in some circumstances." He has written a book that denies that Jesus was born of a virgin and another that denies that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead. He has campaigned semi-successfully for the ordination of practicing homosexuals. He has lobbied hard for abortion rights on the grounds that abortion restrictions are oppressive to women.
Spong not only holds many positions that I find deeply mistaken and disturbing; he defends those positions in a grandstanding manner that produces understandable anger among his critics. Nevertheless, when I recently had a chance for public dialogue with the bishop, I found I could not summon up much righteous indignation. The overwhelming emotion I felt was compassion. I came to see Bishop Spong as a victim.
Please don't get me wrong. I am no fan of the way people compete for the status of "victim" in our society so as to evade responsibility for their actions and even to demand special status and compensation for past wrongs. I am no friend of the kind of pop psychology that eliminates personal responsibility.
I don't doubt that the bishop--like myself--has much to answer for. However, even while holding out for personal responsibility, there is a place for compassion and understanding.
Bishop Spong and I appeared jointly on a radio call-in talk show that emanates from Chicago, called The Dick Staub Show. (A rather interesting show, by the way; quite different from most of what passes for intelligent conversation on the radio.) We were there to publicize recent books each of us had authored on the problem of the historical reliability of the Gospels.
Even before the show, I began to feel some pity for Spong. The book Spong was pushing comes near to winning the prize this year for "most skeptical book on the historical Jesus," a hotly contested honor in these days of the Jesus Seminar. In it he claims that all we can really know about the historical Jesus is that he was born, lived, and died, and evidently had some kind of profound influence on his followers. The argument of the book is so weak that I don't think I could repeat it without appearing to caricature it. So I initially felt some sympathy for Spong's plight as the author of a half-baked piece of scholarship, stuck defending it on a multicity publicity tour. I certainly would not have wanted to be in his shoes.
However, as we talked I came to feel sorry for him in a deeper way. I discovered that Bishop Spong and I actually had a lot in common. We both grew up in Southern fundamentalist homes. As I listened to him talk about his background, the old comment about the man walking to the gallows flashed through my mind: "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
I see Spong as a double victim. As he tells the tale, the church in which he grew up was harsh and racist. He says, for example, that he was not taught that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish, with the exception of Judas. The Bible was read in a specially literal and unthinking manner, and Christianity was presented to him as containing a nest of doctrines that contradicted what any person with a reasonable scientific education knew to be true about the world.
share this page
RSS Feed
