Book Briefs: November 4, 1988

Out Of The Closet, Into The Chancel

Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality, by John S. Spong. (Harper & Row, 256 pp., $15.95, hardcover). Reviewed by John R. Throop, executive director, Episcopalians United for Revelation, Renewal and Reformation.

The controversial bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, revels in the prophetic role he has carved for himself in his diverse denomination. He has challenged traditional teaching about the uniqueness of Jesus as Messiah, and his resurrection from the dead.

Bishop Spong is also deeply interested in ethical matters. In Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality, he takes on the Christian church’s teaching on sexual morality. His is a biting, bitter indictment of what he considers to be the church’s historic oppression of women, homosexual men and women, and those who would not adhere to its moral precepts.

Sprong proposes fundamental changes in the church’s teaching and practice about sexual diversity, for he believes that this is the fundamental ethical issue for the church at the end of the twentieth century.

At the very least, the bishop’s arguments and proposals are unsettling. Some people, indeed, will be outraged. The manuscript was rejected by several publishers—too controversial, they said. The hierarchy of the United Methodist Church yanked the book from its denominational publisher, Abingdon Press, shortly before it was to be issued—too divisive, some of the bishops said. (It so happened that the Methodist General Conference was to consider the ordination of avowed, practicing homosexuals at about the time the book was to be released.) Harper & Row then picked up the book, rushing it to publication just before the Episcopal Church’s general convention.

A hot topic of discussion among Episcopalians was how the church should deal with homosexuals as members and as leaders, including whether or not practicing homosexuals should be ordained. Living in Sin? was prominently featured by one bookseller at the convention. Spong means the book to be an advocacy piece for a point of view he insists must be heard.

New Data, Not Old Nostrums

So what does he advocate? For young adults desiring sexual intimacy but who are not yet ready for marriage, he proposes a rite of “betrothal,” in which the partners would pledge fidelity to each other for a set period of time while not forming a permanent union.

He proposes the church’s blessing of same-sex unions in which the partners pledge a long-term commitment to each other.

He proposes that the church develop a rite for the blessing of divorce (all the while insisting that marriage between a man and a woman must be supported by the church in every way).

He proposes that the church bless postmarital unions in which, after the divorce or death of a previous marriage partner, a man and a woman could be sexually intimate with each other, yet not married legally for various reasons—emotional, financial, or occupational, to cite but a few.

Why should the Christian churches depart from historically held, biblically based teaching and practice in sexual ethics? Spong says that “new data are abroad in our world, demanding to be taken into account. These data, both informational and experiential, raise questions about the way sexuality has been morally and psychologically defined.” We are witnessing the results of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, with the freedoms and the dangers that lie in its wake. The church can no longer simply repeat its old nostrums, Spong suggests. People are no longer heeding the church’s teaching. Indeed, they are not even listening.

The Search For Authority

But, one might retort, it is clear from Scripture that people have not listened to God’s Word before, yet the Word has stood. Anyway, Scripture is clear about sexual ethics.

Not so, says Spong—and here lies the crux of his argument. The Bible is laced with inconsistencies, prejudice, and limited human vision, Spong says. He dismisses those who might come forward with a literal view of Scripture as fundamentalist, or ignorant. Even moderates come under attack for trying to support a human document utterly overlaid with patriarchal presuppositions.

So what of the authority of Scripture in ethical decision making? Scripture is authoritative only as the community gives it authority, Spong insists. And “if the authority is in the community, then the right to change, revise, and render inoperative various parts of the Scripture must also be vested in the community.” The authority does not lie in an author. And God certainly is not the author.

Where is the Word of God, then? It is in Christ, Spong says. “We see God and God’s Word in Jesus because God is the source of life, and Jesus revealed this God in his very aliveness.” Jesus embraced all sorts and conditions of humanity without judgment and without measure. How do we know Jesus? Not in the confines of the word written, stresses Spong, but in those moments of truth in your life and mine when we escape the narrow, rigid confines of stereotypes and barriers and come to the openness of Christ.

Spong’s ethical source, then, is in the wide brushstrokes of God’s love. He presses for an ethic of “appropriate vulnerability,” in which we are mutually open to one another to give and receive love, to show our inward nakedness and

not be ashamed. Spong says, “Nothing about the argument for vulnerability suggests that marriage is the only context in which sex is deemed appropriate. Premarital or gay and lesbian unions might well fall within the boundaries of appropriate vulnerability. At the same time, sexual activity even inside a marriage might not be ‘an appropriate expression of vulnerability.’ ”

A Deeper Seeing Of Truth

Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring, by Jill P. Baumgaertner (Shaw, 191 pp; $11.95, paper). Reviewed by Harold Fickett, a fellow of the Milton Center at Friends University, Wichita, Kansas, and author of The Holy Fool (Crossway).

Flannery O’Connor, one of the great authors of the twentieth century, is beginning to attract the kind of attention from evangelicals previously reserved for C. S. Lewis. O’Connor wrote an essay in 1955 in which she indicated the relevance of “Christian orthodoxy” to her work. She had a fully supernatural faith, and, as a Roman Catholic, embraced that central core of dogma that Lewis defined as “mere Christianity.” She is one of ours; it is time to claim her. And evidence that evangelicals are doing so comes in the new Wheaton Literary Series volume, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring, by Jill P. Baumgaertner.

A Proper Scaring is an excellent study of O’Connor’s fiction. It a serves well as a guide to an author whose “work can be extremely puzzling. Baumgaertner understands the faith and mystery at the heart of O’Connor’s fiction, and she demonstrates repeatedly the relevance of Christian orthodoxy to it.

She has a keen eye for meaningful details. And she has done her homework; she is able to marshal the best of O’Connor criticism in support of her arguments.

Puzzling pictures

Baumgaertner’s major thesis is that O’Connor’s fictions work very much like the “emblems” or pictures found in picture books of the seventeenth century, which “literalized a motto, epigram, or scriptural passage to provoke a new response to an old and often too familiar saying.” The puzzling elements in O’Connor’s work are meant to provoke a deeper appreciation, a deeper seeing, of truths to which we have become indifferent and therefore blind. When, for example, O. E. Parker in “Parker’s Back” runs a tractor into a pecan tree, shouting “God Above!” as the machine explodes and he is catapulted into the air, we are meant to see, to re-envision, that any encounter with “the burning tree,” the Cross, has an unsettling effect.

The rewards of reading O’Connor are great and many, but perhaps none is so important as her ability to teach us to see that our contemporary world testifies to the truth of the faith. Her fiction in this respect is much like a parable of Christ: It depicts world problems, so to speak, which ask us to employ our spiritual insight to discern God’s point of view. O’Connor wanted to be a “realist of distances,” meaning that she wanted to depict how first principles, which we often think of as far away, show themselves in the close-ups of daily experience. The pictures that she has left us are so full of light that they can be blinding.

Spong raises questions that are important to consider. In the wake of the sexual revolution, how are we to teach sexual ethics? No church can ignore this question, for any minister can attest to the varieties of pastoral problems that have arisen from sexual license.

The Failure Of Sexual Freedom

The veterans of the sexual revolution are today beginning to settle into marriages and establish families. They remember the promise and know the failure of sexual freedom. They look to the leadership of the church to help them make sense of their jumbled lives, to find healing and holiness.

They will not find Spong helpful. Nor will the church at large, or the secular culture with which he is so eager to make peace. Why not?

First, there is an epistemological problem. Spong seeks to ground his ethics in human experience. He rejects revelation. He wishes to form his God, not conform to God’s self-disclosure in the Word written, or even, as much as he would insist, in the person of Jesus. After all, if the Word written is riddled with gross inconsistencies, where is the truth source? The community? In one’s own fervent personal sentiment? In contemporary experience? What is so surprising in this volume is how unaware and uncritical Spong is of his own inconsistencies, his own bondage to current ideology and intellectual fashion, and how much he trusts science to yield moral guidance.

Second, Spong shows little awareness of the depth of all human sinfulness. The problem, according to Spong, is not sin, but ignorance. What is needed, then, is consciousness raising in our experience, not openness to the living God. What is needed is not repentance, but therapy.

This point of view certainly is nothing new—indeed, it has appeared from time to time in Christian theology, been found wanting, and has been discarded again and again.

Bishop Spong had a great opportunity before him to help the church think and pray (a word that appears rarely in the book) about its sexual ethics. He knows how to use the media. He wants to help the church relate to its cultured despisers. How sad that he so misused this grace-filled trust to write a volume that is so angry, polemical, destructive, and simply untrue to the Bible, church history, and the scientific community.

Bishop Spong invites sexual aberration out of the closet and into the chancel. In the end, we may well have a “relevant” church. Yet we must be mindful of Dean Inge’s insightful warning earlier in this century: “He who marries the spirit of this age will become a widow in the next.”

Paganism Today

The New Paganism, by Harold Lindsell (Harper & Row, 279 pp; $16.95, hardcover), and The Pagan Temptation, by Thomas Molnar (Eerdmans, 201 pp; $11.95, paper). Reviewed by Larry Sibley, who teaches practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Twenty years ago it was hard to find a book on the occult in a bookstore. Now whole sections at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton serve up a smorgasbord of esoteric titles—a veritable garbage heap of paganism. How could this happen in Christian America?

The answer, of course, is that America is no longer Christian—if it ever was. The argument of these two books is that the trend that culminated in the mall bookstores of the 1980s began long before the sixties, when most of us began to notice it.

Harold Lindsell’s treatment focuses largely on American culture and gives a text-bookish, sometimes simplistic, introduction to the roots of secular humanism in the old pagan myths and systems of thought and behavior. His definition of paganism is somewhat varied—sometimes meaning anything not Judeo-Christian (Far Eastern cultures, for instance), and sometimes meaning more specifically Greco-Roman polytheism and practices.

He first surveys the biblical documents to establish the doctrinal core that defines Christianity, and follows this with a review of church history up to the Reformation. Lindsell sees the Enlightenment as the turning point that leads directly to the rise of neopaganism and the eclipse of the church’s influence on Western civilization.

He then goes on to cite examples of Enlightenment thinking in the decline of the church, such as liberal theology, negative biblical criticism, evolutionism, and Marxist/liberation theology. The practice of Christians is also affected by paganism. Examples cited focus on sex, drugs, and public education—but mostly sex. Missing, unfortunately, are explorations of pagan influence on the exercise of power and the use of money.

Lindsell’s interest in The New Paganism is to equip the church for survival and even triumph in a world dominated by paganism. His final chapter outlines a strategy for evangelism and education.

There are moments when Lindsell’s documentation leaves something to be desired. However, he has provided the contemporary reader with adequate materials for understanding how we have arrived at our “post-Christian” culture, particularly the fact that the roots of the present dilemma go back before the founding of the country.

Abandoning The Supernatural

Molnar’s treatment shows more carefully drawn distinctions and additional contributing causes to the neopagan revival. The author is a philosopher and thus notices more purely philosophical influences. (Lindsell, a historian by training, sees trends more in terms of events and personalities.)

Molnar states that “pagan speculation … continued throughout the medieval period and … had in fact been incorporated into Christian thought.” He devotes a chapter of The Pagan Temptation to the revival of paganism in the late Middle Ages. Molnar demonstrates that doctrinal developments in the Roman church during this same period, which led to the corrections of the Reformation, were the results of the continuing influence of paganism. The conflict between paganism and Christianity has never let up, he says (and is therefore more complex than Lindsell’s portrayal suggests).

Molnar also digs deeper into the causes of the church’s collapse. He shows how pagan influences during the Middle Ages led Christians to abandon the supernatural and drift into rationalism: The church began to prize thinking more than belief.

But Christians, Molnar argues, must both believe and think. Without the proper balance, God no longer seems present in his world.

Once the church opted for reason without mystery, the corner had been turned. By the early fourteenth century, Christianity was in retreat, unable to survive the shock of the Avignon papacy, the conflict between the popes and Franciscan radicals, the rise of Occamistic philosophy, and secularism.

This loss of God’s presence in the consciousness of Christians opened the church and Western culture to the pagan temptation. Neopaganism offers myths and symbols of the supernatural to fill the spiritual vacuum. Though they are symbols from the supernatural enemy of God, they are potently seductive because of the deadening effect of rationalism among orthodox Christians.

The battle against paganism will not let up until Jesus comes. Even if the bookstore shelves hold more Christian titles in years to come, Satan will not go away, nor will his influences.

These two books, at different yet complementary levels, help sort out how those influences work in the thinking and events of the present age. As such, they are Christ’s tools to help preserve the church against the gates of hell.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.