(Source: slightlybotheredbrownboy
Friday, March 31, 2017
Thursday, March 30, 2017
"The Crucified Peoples of History"
"Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio EllacurĂa, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history.” The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks.Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,” an easy way to salvation that doesn’t fore us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of white supremacy."
— James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, pg xiv-xv (via lukexvx)
(via mormonmonastery)
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Jack Spong: Church Reformer
Retired Bishop John (“Jack”) Shelby Spong led a career on the front lines of the Episcopalian Church as a voice for change. As an author and church leader, he led communities to confront their racism, sexism, and homophobia despite, often, a lack of support from fellow clergy. While Bishop Spong began his career without realizing the unjust nature of some of his worldviews, he would progress to accept and affirm the identity and authority of African Americans, women, and gay and lesbian persons and to advocate for their inclusion, care, and ordination rights. Through continual education, prayer, an openness to the voices of the oppressed, the supportive and counseling relationships of selected peers, and a commitment to speaking out truth, he would help his churches and denomination move toward integrating communities in an era of segregation, ordination of women, and ordination of gay and lesbian clergy, as well as bring scholarship to laity by emphasizing adult education in his churches. By examining his life through his education; his ministries in Durham, Tarboro, Lynchburg, Richmond, and as Bishop of Newark, one can see how prayer, a commitment to prophetic honesty, deep personal relationships, and his continuing religious education sustained a ministry that brought his churches forward into more inclusive and justice-filled ways of being.
John Shelby Spong was born in 1931 in segregated North Carolina. His circles tended not to talk about race or sexuality, topics that would be at the forefront of his ministry, though he recalls being told by his father, at the age of 4, not to use respectful titles of “sir” or “ma’am” for black people and how unfair it seemed to him, even as a child.(1) When he was president of his youth group in 1949, he asked his Bishop to invite young black people to their youth convention. Spong recalls that his bishop’s refusal, which suggested that “the people are not ready for... [the mixing] of Negro boys and white girls,” “was insightful about the depth and content of racial fear in the South,” which was both racist and sexist.(2) From a young age, Spong saw the injustices within his tradition and sought to find a path toward change while remaining committed to his church. While seeking reform, Spong found in Jesus Christ “a basis for meaning, for ethics, for prayer, for worship” that he sought to convey to others.(3) He was a poor student, but he knew that such a path would require education. Despite helping to support his widowed mother and siblings as a teenager, he turned his grades around in late high school to ensure that he could attend college and make his dream of the priesthood a reality.
Jack Spong attended a religious school, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, for undergraduate work, where he majored in Philosophy and minored in Greek.(4) His education would open him to the joys of learning and the deep spiritual satisfaction of truly examining one’s beliefs and applying them to the world. During his undergrad work, he became lay leader in charge of a small church in Roxboro, North Carolina that offered him pastoral experience and taught him the importance of listening to the voices of those he served. He entered seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary promptly after graduation.
Jack Spong’s seminary education opened his eyes in new and exciting ways. Prayer was integral to his life at this time. He had always believed in the power of prayer and prayed vigorously for his father’s health during his illness. While in seminary, he created a 24-prayer circuit to pray for a professor’s wife who had cancer. After her passing, he was forced to reconsider prayer and what its purpose was-- a dilemma that he would ponder for years and eventually write his first book on.(5) His classes on theology, likewise, challenged his ideas of God. “My personal God,” he would write, “...began to shake visibly… I had begun my long theological journey into maturity.”(6) Seeing how little the knowledge provided by seminary leaked into congregational settings, he saw the priesthood’s reversion to “concepts of a manipulative, invasive, this-world-oriented deity” as an injustice to the communities they served and “vowed that [he] would be different when [he] finally became a priest.”(7) Spong increasingly came to value how academia and continual learning could influence and enlighten one’s faith. Even today, in his 80s and retired, he continues his research and writes books to share his quest with others.
During Jack Spong’s clinical work in seminary and the sessions with his supervisor, he began to realize the need for personal care and communities of trust. After his clinical work, he sought to extend the experience with his supervisor and began a covenanted group-therapy session with his supervisor and other young couples at his seminary. This journey helped him address his own needs, better understand his wife and their friends, and helped him to realize the importance of deep, personal, mentoring friendships.(8) Jack would continue to build deep, sustaining relationships with his peers, which would provide advice, counsel, and comfort in his difficult times. As a faith leader whose wife was severely ill (she had acute paranoia and later, cancer, both of which she refused treatment for) and who found himself often at odds with his institution on important issues, the support and confidence of these relationships would sustain him in some of his most challenging times.
When Jack Spong entered the priesthood, he knew that he would make adult education important to his career. “The world I lived in was not the thirteenth century, where only the clergy were educated. My world was a dynamic, intellectually exploding world… I wanted the church to speak to that world.”(9) He felt that the theologies and academic understandings that he explored in seminary were lacking in churches-- most churches continued to spout the “same old” pious theologies that disregarded seminary educations. Spong saw this as an injustice to laity, who were largely ignorant of so much knowledge regarding their tradition, and as a dimension for expansion of spirit that was not offered in churches. At his first assignment as priest at St. Joseph’s Church in Durham, North Carolina, he began offering Sunday night potlucks to discuss current issues of politics and science in relation to faith. The college town responded enthusiastically to the honest approach to religion and the willingness to dialogue. The church began to grow.(10) As Spong began to bring education, so important to his own spirituality, to others, he saw that others’ spiritualities were also heightened by the inclusion of academic and critical understandings, as well as opening up dialogue to modern science and social issues. Such forums allowed all to deepen their religious understandings and bring their faith into very real conversation with the issues that touched their lives. Bringing academia to faith allowed for the seeming dichotomy of “knowledge” and “faith” to dissolve. Educated people who had felt religion to be problematic were able to reconcile their beliefs through exploratory dialogue and the guidance of religious academia.
A few years later, Spong would be called to another small town church in Tarboro, North Carolina, where he would find himself in the middle of further racial tension in a Southern town resisting desegregation. As Jack would socialize and minister to black members of his community, folks within his home church, which was predominantly white, would struggle with his progressive attitude. “If preachers are going to touch life significantly, they must be willing to live deeply with their people.”(11) Jack would get up early to study and thus began combining his spiritual practice of study with community. He began taking his study sessions to a local coffee shop “to drink coffee with the farmers” and other laborers, many of whom were not white.(12) This would break down some divides that were present in his town and allow Jack to be present and in community with folks in a way that can’t be accomplished in a church setting. Listening to people in a variety of settings would inform and open his mind and heart to the concerns of others. “When trust developed deeply enough between [him] and the [black community],” they shared with Jack Spong and he was able to minister to them.(13) These simple acts of treating the people of color in his town with the same dignity as the white people led to many hateful and threatening phone calls, letters, and rises in KKK activity toward him and his family. While many in the Episcopal tradition still supported segregated communities, Jack Spong felt it was imperative to live and speak in ways that were radically honest. Perhaps this was due to his understanding that “life of prayer is… the responsibility to open myself in love to the transcendent in everyone I meet… It is to live with courage and honest involvement with [the] world.”(14) This time, early in his career, was a struggle. Many elements of his community, including the local press, were intent on removing Spong from their church because of his “radical” positions. Spong drew on the strength of his friends and mentors, understanding “sharing deeply” as a form of worship.(15)
When it was time for a diocesan convention, Spong attempted what he had in his youth: racial integration. He and another priest had to battle the racism of their peers, but they prevailed. “When issues are being fought over a changing world, those who risk rejection by embracing the future and moving beyond the barriers of past prejudices are never finally hurt. Those who cling to the insights of a dying world… are the ones who will ultimately lose both credibility and integrity.”(16) Spong learned the importance of speaking prophecy and calling for justice. Voices in his church in Tarboro would start to call for his resignation, but Spong continued to speak his truth. Honesty against odds would mark his career.
When Jack Spong was called to a larger church in Lynchburg, Virginia, he also brought this prophetic honesty to his spiritual education. When called to St. John’s, his adult education class would “duck no issues, compromise no truth, and avoid no frontier to which [his] thought and study led [him].”(17) He believed that churches could be intentionally deceitful in their presentation of the Bible and thus felt it important to challenge those presentations. Likewise, his understanding of prayerfulness as a way of living required him to be open and in dialogue with his world. Academia would continue to be a focal point of Jack Spong’s spirituality that he shared with others, believing that we must journey deeply into the faith to which we are loyal.(18) He believes strongly even today that critical inquiry into our religious traditions only brings us closer to the “deeper well” in which all religious journeys meet-- a level of mysticism beyond individual traditions and touching the reality of God.(19)
When Spong’s ministry moved to St. Paul’s in Richmond, Virginia, a more metropolitan area, he encountered racial tension and a class divide that he saw as unacceptable. He observed that the majority-black city had pockets of poverty and “patterns of deep racial injustice,” such as underfunded and limited access to medical care.(20) He pioneered the “Isaiah 58:12 Program” which would partner with other organizations to work on affordable housing and open a clinic so that folks in underprivileged neighborhoods would not have to go to the emergency room for care.(21) Spong understood that systematic injustice was the responsibility of all members of a community and that the lack of basic care for some members of society was a symptom of institutionalized racism-- one that had to be addressed head on, with honest speech and prayerfulness.
During his tenure in Richmond, Jack Spong began to realize more fully that women were treated unfairly in society and in the church. He allowed a woman to serve communion in his church (despite continual criticism) and supported publicly the ordination of 11 women that bishops in the church had performed despite official church positions against female ordination.(22) When Spong was nominated to serve as Bishop of Newark, he announced that he favored the ordination of women and suggested that the “church should meet the issues of our world head on and that truth was more important… than church unity” when it came to issues of justice.(23) He would write and speak on many occasions about the injustices of the church toward women as a sin and suggest that any position of the church should be available to women.(24)
Jack Spong would soon be elected as Bishop of Newark, a position of more authority that allowed him to bring his views to a larger subset of the church, as well as the ability to advocate for justice on a larger scale within the Episcopalian body. During his tenure, the Church was struggling with the humanity and authority of LGTBQ persons, as was Bishop Spong. Amid the rising tension and controversy, many priests in his diocese came out to him. He “absorbed [their challenges] like a body blow to [his] prejudices” as he faced the reality that his imaginings of what “homosexuality” meant necessarily dissolved.(25) As he was forced to deeply consider his own beliefs, he came to the conclusion that his views had been wrong; Bishop Spong made known his views and became the first bishop to ordain an openly gay and non-celibate man to the priesthood.(26) While earlier in his career he held prejudiced views, Spong would today suggest that “we can either follow Christ or maintain our prejudices. There can be no compromise.”(27) Equal rights, recognition, and welcome must be extended to all. While this issue would continue to plague his Church after his retirement, Bishop Spong continues to speak this truth in his books and lectures, believing strongly that God’s will is done in faithful and consistent truth-telling.(28)
Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong led a career as an outspoken reformer in the Episcopal Church. As a writer, speaker, teacher, preacher, and pastor, he brought his gifts to the people and asked all to honestly engage in prayer, honesty, study, and community to confront issues of injustice in church and in society. While his views have matured over time, he was and is a powerful voice for inclusion and respect of people of color, women, and gay and lesbian persons. Through continual education, prayer, an openness to the voices of the oppressed, support of deep personal relationships, and brave honesty, he moved communities toward justice. As Bishop Spong articulates, the goal of his career “has been to combine scholarship with faith, to bring honesty and the authenticity of citizenship in the modern world to the activity of worship while continuing to walk in the faith tradition established by Jesus of Nazareth whom [he calls] Lord and Christ.”(29) The history of communities he has touched and legacy he leaves behind him is testament to the importance of both deeply spiritual and critical engagement with faith.
(1)John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 16.
(2) Spong, Here I Stand, 45.
(3)John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 1
(4) Spong, Here I Stand, 48-49.
(5) Spong, Here I Stand, 67.
(6) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(7) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(8) Spong, Here I Stand, 71-73.
(9) Spong, Here I Stand, 265.
(10) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(11) Spong, Here I Stand, 89.
(12) Spong, Here I Stand, 98.
(13) Spong, Here I Stand, 104.
(14) John Shelby Spong, Honest Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 29.
(15) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 70.
(16) Spong, Here I Stand, 102.
(17) Spong, Here I Stand, 135.
(18) Spong, The Sins of Scripture, 243.
(19) Spong, Lecture, PSR, July 18, 2014
(20) Spong, Here I Stand, 184.
(21) Spong, Here I Stand, 185.
(22) Spong, Here I Stand, 234-236.
(23) Spong, Here I Stand, 254.
(24) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 5-6.
(25) Spong, Here I Stand, 281.
(26) Spong, Here I Stand, 240.
(27) John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 126.
(28) Spong, Here I Stand, 211.
(29) John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: a Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Reprint ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992), 11.
John Shelby Spong was born in 1931 in segregated North Carolina. His circles tended not to talk about race or sexuality, topics that would be at the forefront of his ministry, though he recalls being told by his father, at the age of 4, not to use respectful titles of “sir” or “ma’am” for black people and how unfair it seemed to him, even as a child.(1) When he was president of his youth group in 1949, he asked his Bishop to invite young black people to their youth convention. Spong recalls that his bishop’s refusal, which suggested that “the people are not ready for... [the mixing] of Negro boys and white girls,” “was insightful about the depth and content of racial fear in the South,” which was both racist and sexist.(2) From a young age, Spong saw the injustices within his tradition and sought to find a path toward change while remaining committed to his church. While seeking reform, Spong found in Jesus Christ “a basis for meaning, for ethics, for prayer, for worship” that he sought to convey to others.(3) He was a poor student, but he knew that such a path would require education. Despite helping to support his widowed mother and siblings as a teenager, he turned his grades around in late high school to ensure that he could attend college and make his dream of the priesthood a reality.
Jack Spong attended a religious school, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, for undergraduate work, where he majored in Philosophy and minored in Greek.(4) His education would open him to the joys of learning and the deep spiritual satisfaction of truly examining one’s beliefs and applying them to the world. During his undergrad work, he became lay leader in charge of a small church in Roxboro, North Carolina that offered him pastoral experience and taught him the importance of listening to the voices of those he served. He entered seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary promptly after graduation.
Jack Spong’s seminary education opened his eyes in new and exciting ways. Prayer was integral to his life at this time. He had always believed in the power of prayer and prayed vigorously for his father’s health during his illness. While in seminary, he created a 24-prayer circuit to pray for a professor’s wife who had cancer. After her passing, he was forced to reconsider prayer and what its purpose was-- a dilemma that he would ponder for years and eventually write his first book on.(5) His classes on theology, likewise, challenged his ideas of God. “My personal God,” he would write, “...began to shake visibly… I had begun my long theological journey into maturity.”(6) Seeing how little the knowledge provided by seminary leaked into congregational settings, he saw the priesthood’s reversion to “concepts of a manipulative, invasive, this-world-oriented deity” as an injustice to the communities they served and “vowed that [he] would be different when [he] finally became a priest.”(7) Spong increasingly came to value how academia and continual learning could influence and enlighten one’s faith. Even today, in his 80s and retired, he continues his research and writes books to share his quest with others.
During Jack Spong’s clinical work in seminary and the sessions with his supervisor, he began to realize the need for personal care and communities of trust. After his clinical work, he sought to extend the experience with his supervisor and began a covenanted group-therapy session with his supervisor and other young couples at his seminary. This journey helped him address his own needs, better understand his wife and their friends, and helped him to realize the importance of deep, personal, mentoring friendships.(8) Jack would continue to build deep, sustaining relationships with his peers, which would provide advice, counsel, and comfort in his difficult times. As a faith leader whose wife was severely ill (she had acute paranoia and later, cancer, both of which she refused treatment for) and who found himself often at odds with his institution on important issues, the support and confidence of these relationships would sustain him in some of his most challenging times.
When Jack Spong entered the priesthood, he knew that he would make adult education important to his career. “The world I lived in was not the thirteenth century, where only the clergy were educated. My world was a dynamic, intellectually exploding world… I wanted the church to speak to that world.”(9) He felt that the theologies and academic understandings that he explored in seminary were lacking in churches-- most churches continued to spout the “same old” pious theologies that disregarded seminary educations. Spong saw this as an injustice to laity, who were largely ignorant of so much knowledge regarding their tradition, and as a dimension for expansion of spirit that was not offered in churches. At his first assignment as priest at St. Joseph’s Church in Durham, North Carolina, he began offering Sunday night potlucks to discuss current issues of politics and science in relation to faith. The college town responded enthusiastically to the honest approach to religion and the willingness to dialogue. The church began to grow.(10) As Spong began to bring education, so important to his own spirituality, to others, he saw that others’ spiritualities were also heightened by the inclusion of academic and critical understandings, as well as opening up dialogue to modern science and social issues. Such forums allowed all to deepen their religious understandings and bring their faith into very real conversation with the issues that touched their lives. Bringing academia to faith allowed for the seeming dichotomy of “knowledge” and “faith” to dissolve. Educated people who had felt religion to be problematic were able to reconcile their beliefs through exploratory dialogue and the guidance of religious academia.
A few years later, Spong would be called to another small town church in Tarboro, North Carolina, where he would find himself in the middle of further racial tension in a Southern town resisting desegregation. As Jack would socialize and minister to black members of his community, folks within his home church, which was predominantly white, would struggle with his progressive attitude. “If preachers are going to touch life significantly, they must be willing to live deeply with their people.”(11) Jack would get up early to study and thus began combining his spiritual practice of study with community. He began taking his study sessions to a local coffee shop “to drink coffee with the farmers” and other laborers, many of whom were not white.(12) This would break down some divides that were present in his town and allow Jack to be present and in community with folks in a way that can’t be accomplished in a church setting. Listening to people in a variety of settings would inform and open his mind and heart to the concerns of others. “When trust developed deeply enough between [him] and the [black community],” they shared with Jack Spong and he was able to minister to them.(13) These simple acts of treating the people of color in his town with the same dignity as the white people led to many hateful and threatening phone calls, letters, and rises in KKK activity toward him and his family. While many in the Episcopal tradition still supported segregated communities, Jack Spong felt it was imperative to live and speak in ways that were radically honest. Perhaps this was due to his understanding that “life of prayer is… the responsibility to open myself in love to the transcendent in everyone I meet… It is to live with courage and honest involvement with [the] world.”(14) This time, early in his career, was a struggle. Many elements of his community, including the local press, were intent on removing Spong from their church because of his “radical” positions. Spong drew on the strength of his friends and mentors, understanding “sharing deeply” as a form of worship.(15)
When it was time for a diocesan convention, Spong attempted what he had in his youth: racial integration. He and another priest had to battle the racism of their peers, but they prevailed. “When issues are being fought over a changing world, those who risk rejection by embracing the future and moving beyond the barriers of past prejudices are never finally hurt. Those who cling to the insights of a dying world… are the ones who will ultimately lose both credibility and integrity.”(16) Spong learned the importance of speaking prophecy and calling for justice. Voices in his church in Tarboro would start to call for his resignation, but Spong continued to speak his truth. Honesty against odds would mark his career.
When Jack Spong was called to a larger church in Lynchburg, Virginia, he also brought this prophetic honesty to his spiritual education. When called to St. John’s, his adult education class would “duck no issues, compromise no truth, and avoid no frontier to which [his] thought and study led [him].”(17) He believed that churches could be intentionally deceitful in their presentation of the Bible and thus felt it important to challenge those presentations. Likewise, his understanding of prayerfulness as a way of living required him to be open and in dialogue with his world. Academia would continue to be a focal point of Jack Spong’s spirituality that he shared with others, believing that we must journey deeply into the faith to which we are loyal.(18) He believes strongly even today that critical inquiry into our religious traditions only brings us closer to the “deeper well” in which all religious journeys meet-- a level of mysticism beyond individual traditions and touching the reality of God.(19)
When Spong’s ministry moved to St. Paul’s in Richmond, Virginia, a more metropolitan area, he encountered racial tension and a class divide that he saw as unacceptable. He observed that the majority-black city had pockets of poverty and “patterns of deep racial injustice,” such as underfunded and limited access to medical care.(20) He pioneered the “Isaiah 58:12 Program” which would partner with other organizations to work on affordable housing and open a clinic so that folks in underprivileged neighborhoods would not have to go to the emergency room for care.(21) Spong understood that systematic injustice was the responsibility of all members of a community and that the lack of basic care for some members of society was a symptom of institutionalized racism-- one that had to be addressed head on, with honest speech and prayerfulness.
During his tenure in Richmond, Jack Spong began to realize more fully that women were treated unfairly in society and in the church. He allowed a woman to serve communion in his church (despite continual criticism) and supported publicly the ordination of 11 women that bishops in the church had performed despite official church positions against female ordination.(22) When Spong was nominated to serve as Bishop of Newark, he announced that he favored the ordination of women and suggested that the “church should meet the issues of our world head on and that truth was more important… than church unity” when it came to issues of justice.(23) He would write and speak on many occasions about the injustices of the church toward women as a sin and suggest that any position of the church should be available to women.(24)
Jack Spong would soon be elected as Bishop of Newark, a position of more authority that allowed him to bring his views to a larger subset of the church, as well as the ability to advocate for justice on a larger scale within the Episcopalian body. During his tenure, the Church was struggling with the humanity and authority of LGTBQ persons, as was Bishop Spong. Amid the rising tension and controversy, many priests in his diocese came out to him. He “absorbed [their challenges] like a body blow to [his] prejudices” as he faced the reality that his imaginings of what “homosexuality” meant necessarily dissolved.(25) As he was forced to deeply consider his own beliefs, he came to the conclusion that his views had been wrong; Bishop Spong made known his views and became the first bishop to ordain an openly gay and non-celibate man to the priesthood.(26) While earlier in his career he held prejudiced views, Spong would today suggest that “we can either follow Christ or maintain our prejudices. There can be no compromise.”(27) Equal rights, recognition, and welcome must be extended to all. While this issue would continue to plague his Church after his retirement, Bishop Spong continues to speak this truth in his books and lectures, believing strongly that God’s will is done in faithful and consistent truth-telling.(28)
Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong led a career as an outspoken reformer in the Episcopal Church. As a writer, speaker, teacher, preacher, and pastor, he brought his gifts to the people and asked all to honestly engage in prayer, honesty, study, and community to confront issues of injustice in church and in society. While his views have matured over time, he was and is a powerful voice for inclusion and respect of people of color, women, and gay and lesbian persons. Through continual education, prayer, an openness to the voices of the oppressed, support of deep personal relationships, and brave honesty, he moved communities toward justice. As Bishop Spong articulates, the goal of his career “has been to combine scholarship with faith, to bring honesty and the authenticity of citizenship in the modern world to the activity of worship while continuing to walk in the faith tradition established by Jesus of Nazareth whom [he calls] Lord and Christ.”(29) The history of communities he has touched and legacy he leaves behind him is testament to the importance of both deeply spiritual and critical engagement with faith.
(1)John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 16.
(2) Spong, Here I Stand, 45.
(3)John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002), 1
(4) Spong, Here I Stand, 48-49.
(5) Spong, Here I Stand, 67.
(6) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(7) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(8) Spong, Here I Stand, 71-73.
(9) Spong, Here I Stand, 265.
(10) Spong, Here I Stand, 68.
(11) Spong, Here I Stand, 89.
(12) Spong, Here I Stand, 98.
(13) Spong, Here I Stand, 104.
(14) John Shelby Spong, Honest Prayer (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 29.
(15) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 70.
(16) Spong, Here I Stand, 102.
(17) Spong, Here I Stand, 135.
(18) Spong, The Sins of Scripture, 243.
(19) Spong, Lecture, PSR, July 18, 2014
(20) Spong, Here I Stand, 184.
(21) Spong, Here I Stand, 185.
(22) Spong, Here I Stand, 234-236.
(23) Spong, Here I Stand, 254.
(24) Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, 5-6.
(25) Spong, Here I Stand, 281.
(26) Spong, Here I Stand, 240.
(27) John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 126.
(28) Spong, Here I Stand, 211.
(29) John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: a Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Reprint ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992), 11.
Works Consulted
- Spong, John Shelby. A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002.
- Spong, John Shelby. Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001.
- Spong, John Shelby. Honest Prayer. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
- Spong, John Shelby. Jesus for the Non-Religious. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008.
- Spong, John Shelby. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: a Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture. Reprint ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992.
- Spong, John Shelby. The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. Reprint ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014.
Friday, March 24, 2017
Solution or Problem?
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Sermon for Family Worship
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
That Bible Thing
“This reveals something I wish every Christian knew, and I say this as a deeply committed Christian myself: sometimes the Bible is wrong. It not only tells us about the wisdom and insights and experiences of our spiritual ancestors, but also contains their limited vision, their acceptance of things like slavery and the subordination of women. That’s not uniform, of course. There are also texts that proclaim the equality of men and women and forbid a Christian from having a Christian slave and so forth, but it’s all there, including mistaken notions about how the second coming will be soon.
We would escape a whole bunch of problems if only we all knew that and weren’t alarmed by it. The whole Genesis versus evolution controversy. For me, it’s not that the first chapters of Genesis are wrong, but they’re not meant to be taken literally. So, also the issue of whether women are supposed to be subordinate to men. That issue disappears if people are willing to say, “sometimes the Bible is wrong.”
So also with the texts that are quoted in opposition to same-sex behavior. Those passages, and there aren’t many, tell us what some of our spiritual ancestors thought and clearly they were wrong about that. So many conflicts in the church could be either resolved or handled in a very different way if only we didn’t have this uncritical reverence for the Bible.”
"
—
Marcus Borg (via affcath)
(Source: religiondispatches.org, via 2ndhalfoflife)
I am of the view that anything we love is something we should be critical of when that criticism is necessary. We discipline our children because we love them and we want them to be good people. We speak out against our government because we love our country and want it to be a good country. We speak out against the injustice in the Bible because we love our faith and want it to be a healthy, loving religion for everyone.
I am of the view that anything we love is something we should be critical of when that criticism is necessary. We discipline our children because we love them and we want them to be good people. We speak out against our government because we love our country and want it to be a good country. We speak out against the injustice in the Bible because we love our faith and want it to be a healthy, loving religion for everyone.
I sometimes feel like there is this dichotomy of fundamentalists and liberals. It goes both ways and I acknowledge myself trying to distance myself from the hurtful things that religious conservatives do, but I see the same thing happening on the other side. Progressives aren’t “real” Christians, we are DISREGARDING and CHERRY PICKING and justifying our sinfulness via Biblical criticism… even though I think that Biblical literalists are doing exactly the same thing.
So here’s today’s reminder that biblical literalism is a modern development, that I love the Bible and my faith just as much as my brothers and sisters who are part of the “religious right” and that I think I am doing it right just as much as they do.
I am critical of the Bible not because I want to justify my own worldviews but because I have a deep desire to get close to the real meanings and truths present within it and those truths are often times obscured by literalist interpretations and by human biases inserted into the text by its authors and translators.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Buy Less Stuff
Srsly. @Regrann from @stylewiseblog - It’s hard to change your spending habits and your lifestyle to reflect your ethics.
And it’s challenging to stop consuming at a breakneck pace when that’s what you’re used to. But too often we take it for granted that the best way to live more sustainably is to slow our consumption. It’s not enough to have a wardrobe made of ethical pieces if it means you’re still buying and disposing and repeating the cycle and again and again to keep up with trends or personal whims. Being an ethical blogger and adhering to an ethical lifestyle isn’t glamorous. Sometimes it’s absolutely devoid of mass appeal. But it’s worth it in the end.
Don’t get discouraged when you see others filling their carts with spring clothing. Instead, allow yourself to think about the ways you’re being transformed and transforming the world by slowing down. Stop and smell the roses. đŸŒ·đŸŒ¹
Ethical Consumerism
@Regrann from @zady - Read more about supply chain transparency in The New Standard. zady.com/thenewstandard #thenewstandard #Regrann
Saturday, March 18, 2017
True Cost
@Regrann from @truecostmovie - Here’s to a future full of greater opportunity for every woman everywhere #internationalwomenday ( video repost from our friends @ecoage ) #Regrann
Reposting this essential reminder about #expectation from the awesome @jasonwrobel along with his original post for no other reason than that I doubt it could be said much better than this!!! “ See, the thing is, when you fight against reality… reality always wins. It’s undefeated. Your incessant expectations and constant demands that life ought to be a particular way cause you immense amounts of suffering. Life owes you nothing and expectations are illusions. Staying present and responding (not reacting) to what is… are powerful practices to keep you connected and clear in the moment. ” #princeea #lifehacks #respondingnotreacting #beinthemoment #embracethenow
——
Stop comparing your life to everyone around you– your friend with the nice car or your other friend with the nice house. Start comparing your life to Jesus and MLK. Or someone equally cool who understood that the path to Kingdom is through justice, not accumulating crap that only benefits you and your hubby or dog or whatever.
Can we start living in a world based in love and community already? This capitalism stuff sucks.
Friday, March 17, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Now
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it."
—
From the Talmud
Pirkei Avos (Ethics/Chapters of the Fathers) 2:16
(via arubasmusings)
(via mormonmonastery)
Friday, March 10, 2017
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Augustine and Original Sin
Exerpts from an essay:
The origins of humanity, according to Augustine, begin with Adam and Eve. He argues that Adam and Eve are the first parents of humanity and first sinners, and are thus the reason that humans die. Furthermore, he believes that the mortality of all human bodies was a “just punishment” for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.(8) The modern, scientifically-minded person sees how this is at odds with the Theory of Evolution. Since we now know that humanity is descended from apes, a suggestion that there was a “first couple” created from dust seems archaic and ignorant of what we now know to be true. Augustine’s conclusion that humans die because of Adam and Eve is as at odds with science as it is with our individual identities. Additionally, while Augustine sees mortality as a just punishment, I do not believe a just God would not punish an entire species for the disobedience of an individual. “Original sin” hinges on these archaic understandings of human origins.
…it is important to understand how Augustine sees the human species and its nature. He explains that children are “identical” to their parents in nature, since parents make their children (as opposed to the first humans, who were made from dust).(9) Because Adam and Eve sinned, it is now human nature to sin. Augustine believes God wanted all humanity to be derived from one couple so that the nature of humanity would be unified and peaceful (arguing that “blood kinship” would lead humans to live harmoniously).(10) … Augustine’s understanding of human nature as prone to sin by virtue of the actions of Adam and Eve is at odds with our understandings of science (Adam and Eve were not progenitors of our species).
While Augustine understands humanity to be prone to sin, he suggests that “…by the law comes the knowledge of sin; by faith comes the obtaining of grace against sin…and grace heals the will whereby righteousness may freely be loved.”(11) Again, Augustine focuses sin (and our tendency toward it) as tied to God. Our only escape from sinfulness is through relationship to the divine. This is an individualistic sense of humanity in which one’s prime focus is on oneself and one’s relationship to God…
In contrast to Augustine’s concept of sin as descended from Adam and Eve, Keller would suggest that while we are “not to blame for the sins that precede [us] Academically, … [we are] responsible to recognize the collective structures of injustice, to recycle [our] legacy for the better, to resist what wastes life and to take part in what saves.”(12) For Keller, sin is about responsibility to the world. We are not sinful because of our ancestors, but we have responsibility for the ripple effects of all sin.
… In contrast to Augustine’s idea of the necessity for God’s grace in resisting sin, Keller suggests that God brings forth love in people in a way that is not resistant, but unfolds in concert with the continuously creating creation.(15) … Augustine’s conception of sin as inherent to our species does not allow the the kind of positive orientation toward justice we find in Keller’s understanding of humanity as a species unfolding in love and relatedness to all creation, in concert with God.
In conclusion, it is time for religious understandings of sin and human nature to take into account information from the sciences. The views put forth by Augustine early in church history are no longer adequate for modern minds and are too individualistic for a world facing Climate Change, limited resources, and systematic injustice. To conceptualize human nature through the story of Adam and Eve (as presented by Augustine) is problematic in the eyes of modern science. Catherine Keller offers an alternative understanding of humans and our relationship to sin that focuses less on the individual. She does this by emphasizing the interconnectedness of creation. To sin, for Keller, is to act against creation. This understanding leads to an emphasis on justice that can have practical application in our world. To see ourselves in relationship and to consider how our actions positively affect other beings can help us to imagine a world where we are more considerate to all.
- Augustine in Hodgson, King, p. 150
- Hodgson/King, p. 176
- Augustin in Hodgson/King, p. 177
- Augustine in Hodgson/King, p. 151
- Keller, p. 80
- Keller, p. 97.
- Keller, p. 80.
- Augustine in Hodgson/King, p. 150
- Augustine in Hodgson/King, p. 147-148
- Augustine in Hodgson/King, p. 150
- Augustine in Hodgson/King, p. 179-180
- Keller, p. 82
- Keller, p. 93.
- Keller, p. 100.
- Keller, p. 100.
Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008.
King, Robert H., and Peter C. Hodgson, eds. Readings in Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985.
Monday, March 6, 2017
Wealth and Action in Church
I come from a “nice church.” There are many very wealthy people in our congregation. Our church has been where it stands for 150 years and it now rests on the border of downtown, some wealthy neighborhoods, and a neighborhood that is now home to many lower-income folks. My church is struggling with how to engage this dichotomy with a “Local Outreach Task Force.” This is a difficult task. We don’t want to be the nice church situated in a bomb zone, but we also don’t want to be “those white people” who try to go in and “fix” things in a way that is condescending or oppressive. We are trying to find ways to build relationships that are open and reciprocal. It is difficult. I think part of what is keeping us on that journey is that our church sees prophetic preaching quite often. I think it keeps us from lapsing back into whatever comfortable patterns it’s easy for middle class and upper middle class folks to fall into. If prophetic preaching is ill-received in one’s context, I guess I would ask, “why?” It’s fair to point out that if a congregation leaves because you push too hard or fires you and hires a preacher that will give them what they want, we’re probably not being effective. While I also don’t think there’s something inherently “wrong” with being middle class or belonging to a middle class church, I think there is a danger in too much comfort (perhaps that comfortable oppression). There is a line somewhere; we need to challenge our communities to be more, but we can’t alienate them or present our challenges in ways that seem to beat them into the ground for not being good enough.
For our church to “only” address the issues of our own involvement in oppressive structures might lead to a congregation that considers “justice” to be “charity” or buying more “green” products and voting for immigration reform and thinking that’s an acceptable response to the call of God. I feel like addressing our own involvement in oppressive systems necessitates working with folks from all walks of life and getting involved in what it means to be marginalized in ways that we might not personally be marginalized. I don’t think that means treating places of marginalization like museums or “crashing” internal community groups, but I think to operate in isolation is problematic. I never wish to get up in front of a marginalized group that I am not a part of and “preach” to them about how to make things better, but in a church like mine, it might need to be a privileged person like myself who brings light to those issues of marginalization. I should talk about it in my church. I think, however, that leads a void where an “action plan” should be. I could get up and point out to my congregation how we contribute to economic injustices by virtue of our middle class, consumer lifestyle, but then what? I don’t want our response to simply be a voting position or which brand of fabric softener to buy.
I think there can be common ground and that it’s important to act in concert with folks who come from different contexts. I never want that interaction to be one of dominance/subordinance or oppressor/oppressed; maybe it is my position of privilege that allows me to think that I can have an interaction that isn’t that. I don’t want to be part of a church that raises money for new stained glass while there are homeless people sleeping on our front steps. It’s important for people of privilege to hear and speak to prophetic issues– but certainly not over the voices of the marginalized.
I don’t know that I’m getting anywhere with this subject. I’m sorry if I just typed in circles; this is very lengthy. It’s good to be thinking and challenged.
Sunday, March 5, 2017
Ideas for Church
*Create adult educational programming that can be advertised to the general public (posters, newspaper ads). "Class on Spiritual Disciplines" or “ABC: Abraham Buddha Christ: Exploring World Faith Traditions” or “Interfaith Yoga” or “Documentary Discussion Series on Blah.” Maybe folks who attend will not only be engaged and find meaning, but might come to see what church CAN be.
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