Deep Roots of Religious Orthodoxy

Religions seldom change, or change much, due to the conscious efforts of the human mortals. The reason for this immutability is that a concept of Divinity is built into the structure of almost every religion (a religion that does not have Divinity in it is not a religion) and Divinity is unchangeable by definition. Yet religions do change with the passage of time; such changes may not be substantial still they are significant enough to undermine the religious foundation even ever so slightly.

As an example, the Bible considered Earth as an immobile center of the universe before Copernicus. Copernicus’s cosmology moved the Earth from the center of the universe (there is no center of the universe) and made it an ordinary planet orbiting around the Sun which originally was believed to be orbiting the Earth. Galileo was compelled by the Roman Catholic Church to recant from his Copernican position regarding the status of the Earth but in 1991 after more than three hundred years of muzzling Galileo, the Roman Catholic Church renounced its wrong position formally to accept Galileo’s cosmic visualization as correct. How the Pope reconciled this fact with the biblical understanding is somewhat of a mystery. Bible at more than one place stated implicitly or explicitly that the Sun moved around Earth. This language still exists in the Bible which is believed to be the eternal ‘word of God’ by the Christian orthodoxy. There are some other instances of similar discrepancy in the Bible. Similar instances do exist in the Holy Quran also although the Muslim scholars do not dare to discuss them in the open for fear of the blasphemy stigmatization.

Such changes as take place in the religions occur due to social and scientific developments with the passage of time. The Church resisted the change in its geocentric belief due to Galileo’s efforts but the Christian religion accepted Galileo’s view nonetheless and the Pope formalized its recognition after more than three hundred years of poignant silence. This change in the outlook did not alter the biblical text, which remains as it was before Galileo and Copernicus.

There are numerous skeptical philosophers and scientists in the West who have questioned the foundations of the Bible and lost faith in it. More importantly, there are several people of the clergy who have underscored the need for reinterpreting the outdated Scriptures in order to make them more amenable and harmonious with the modern times. One of such prominent scholars is Bishop (retired) John Shelby Spong. I shall discuss herein the deep roots of orthodox belief in religion quoting examples of Christianity derived from Spong’s writings.

Reinterpretation doesn’t change the literal words of the Scriptures; reinterpretation is provided in the books of commentaries (Tafsirs, for instance, of the Holy Quran). The commentaries can change in time and made commensurate with the temporal needs. This is a difficult and challenging task but worth undertaking.

Another motivation for the reinterpretation is that the Scriptural language is ancient and archaic. The modern Arabic, for instance, is much different from the Arabic language used in the Quran. A given word in the Quran may have a different meaning these days than what it had fourteen years ago. The situation is more complex in the case of Bible, which has passed translation from Hebrew to Greek to Roman and to English. Some essence gets lost in translating from one language into another through a concatenation of other intermediate languages.

The greatest motivation for reinterpreting the Scriptures is due to the great developments that have taken place in the modern times. The laws and codes that had been written in the past for simple life in the desert of Arabia, for example, need to be suitably adjusted for use in different climes and times. The literal meaning needs to be modified retaining the spirit of the injunction. Even God wouldn’t like that the same old laws be used for the greatly different living conditions of the modern times.

The orthodox believers however generally resist any reinterpretation of the Scriptures; for them, the literal comprehension however discordant with the modern life is sufficient and meaningful in some strange way. Their perpetual slogan is “go back to the fundamentals”, which means literal interpretation of the scriptures.

Bishop Spong and the Inconsistencies of the Bible

John Shelby Spong retired in 2000 from his office of the Bishop of the Diocese of Newark. He has very good academic, literary, and professional credentials. He earned his first degree (A.B.) in philosophy with Minor in Zoology. In honor of his impressive scholarship, he was awarded the degree of the Doctor of Divinity by St. Paul’s College in 1976, and Virginia Theological Seminar in 1977. He was also honored with Doctor of Humane Letters by Muhlenberg College in 1998. In due time, he acquired a rationalistic attitude and examined the scripture rather critically to understand if it could be meaningfully used in the modern times.

He came to rather severely skeptical conclusions regarding the originality and the traditional orthodox comprehension of the Bible. According to him (1), “…everything written in the Bible is first of all not eternal, and, second, not necessarily true.” In his book “Living in Sin” (2), he asserted, “In the Bible there are conflicting accounts of creation, conflicting versions of the Ten Commandments, conflicting understanding of who Jesus is and was, ….
Despite the fact that these conflicts and alternatives are present in Scripture, there are still some who insist that the Bible is inerrant and that its text can be quoted to define and support a wide variety of moral activities.” In view of these observations, he (3) declared, “The Bible becomes not a literal road map to reality, but a historical narrative of the journey our religious forbears made in the eternal human quest to understand life, the world, themselves,” and God.”

In his book “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism” (4), he wrote, “..there are concepts in the Bible that are repugnant to the modern consciousness. There is a vicious tribal code of ethics that prohibits internally behavior that is actually encouraged in dealing with outsiders. Moses was a murderer, but this was not a character flaw because his victim was an Egyptian. (Exod. 2:11 ff)…Captive peoples, if spared from death, were reduced to slavery. Captive women were used for sexual sport by their Hebrew conquerors.” In his book “A New Christianity for a New World”, he (5) wrote, “This God is described in our scriptures as hammering the Egyptians with plague after plague, for example, one of which involved the murder of the firstborn male of every Egyptian household in a divine campaign to free the chosen people from slavery (Exod. 7-10). Then this God opened the Red Sea to allow the Hebrews to escape their life of bondage and closed the Red Sea just in time to drown the pursuing army of the Egyptians (Exod. 14). Is that the handiwork of a moral deity?” He continued, “The theistic God of scripture is also said to have stopped the sun in the sky (as if the sun actually rotated around the earth) to enable Joshua to have sufficient daylight to slaughter the Amorites in a battle (Josh. 10). Is that a justifiable cause for divine action?”

In view of the obvious incredibility of these stories, Spong who has a modern and rationalistic outlook finds it impossible to believe in them. The traditional orthodoxy however still believes in such stories in spite of the fact that they point to the irrational partiality of God and contradict the modern discoveries of astronomy and cosmology. A God who is defined by such theism, Spong calls a theistic God.

Death of Theistic God

When people say today, for example, that the “age of miracles is over” what they mean is not that miracles no longer occur, but that they never did – the age when we perceived events as miraculous is gone. (John Shelby Spong)

Spong (5) defines a theistic God as “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will.” He is the God of rewards and retribution. He will resurrect all the dead bodies on the Day of Judgment to determine who should be rewarded with entry to the paradise, an abode of eternal bliss, for his (her) good actions, and who should be condemned eternally to burn in the hell for ill-deeds. Such a theistic God is dying, Spong proclaims, if not already dead.

What I intend to do here is to provide Bishop Spong’s rationale for updating the intent and meaning of the Bible for the modern man. Similar need exists in the Muslim world also, where the situation is much more complex. Many orthodox Muslims believe that the door of ijtehad (reinterpretation) is shut after Imam al-Ghazali, Hujjat-el-Islam, the Revivalist of the first millennium. Many others believe that Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, Mujaddad Aleph Thani (Revivalist of the second millennium) was the last Mujtahed. Yet many others recognize the need for reinterpretation but they prescribe such impossibly narrow qualifications for such a mujtahed that it is nearly impossible to find such a living person.

Be that as it may, I will try to demonstrate here using generous quotations from Spong, how archaic and anachronistic have the Scriptures become in their literal comprehension. He wrote (6), “The God of theism is so visibly dying that only by playing a game of denial and illusion – a game that many play – can we continue to maintain that this God is still real. That is the nature of the religious dilemma of our generation.”

In case any body misunderstood Spong’s proclamation, he wrote (7), “God, understood theistically, is thus quite clearly a human construct. Please let that fact register. The theistic definition of God is a human creation. Thus theism is not the same as God. Neither is it any more eternal than any other human definition.”

In spite of such vitriolic criticism of the traditional Christianity and theism, Spong is a self-proclaimed believer. He opened his first chapter “A Place to Begin” in “A New Christianity for a New World” with, “I am a Christian. For forty-five years I have served the Christian church as a deacon, priest, and bishop. I continue to serve that church today in a wide variety of ways in my official retirement. I believe that God is real and that I live deeply and significantly as one related to that divine reality.” He further elaborated, “I have tried for a lifetime to live faithfully, if not comfortably, within the confining boundaries of this institution called the church. That church has conferred on me gifts of honor, position, leadership, and influence. I have loved my life as one of the church’s ordained servants. I have never wished the church harm. But I no longer believe that this institution – or the Christian faith as this church has traditionally proclaimed it – can continue to live without dramatic change in our post-theistic world. Somewhere along the way we Christians appear to have lost ability to initiate effective self-reformation. We have warned others against idolatry but have not listened to our own warning. We have acted time after time as if the God we have experienced could be or has been captured in and bound by the words of our scriptures, our creeds, and our doctrines. Through out Christian history we have acted as if God had to be protected and defended by those in possession of the infinite truth of the divine being. We have presumed that the doorway to God is in our hands. Proclaiming that God can be approached only through our symbols, we have excluded those human beings who do not use our words or refuse to bow before our altars erected by the community of ‘the saved’.”

Bishop Spong’s self-scrutiny of his faith is a good omen for reformation in the religious institutions, in general. If his example is followed by the scholars and ulema of other religions, there is hope that religion can still survive as a spiritual institution. The religious orthodoxy will then cease to exist and be replaced by religious modernity. This is probably the only way in which religion can become less oppressive and gain a spell of meaningful existence.

Other spades that Spong has stoked in the religious fires are numerous such as the issue of equality of genders, the homosexuality which he considers as a biological condition (left handedness, for example) and not a human choice and preference, negation of Christ’s resurrection and ascension to heaven, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, and original sin, among many others, and cannot be adequately discussed in such a short paper. The intent of this paper is to open up meaningful discussion on the viability of the traditional orthodoxy.

Conclusion

The religious orthodox views are ubiquitous; they exist in more or less every religion. Their incompatibility with the evolving scientific world-view is becoming increasingly transparent. Even the entrenched orthodox religionists have relinquished their belief that the Earth is stationary; many others have also abandoned their belief that the Earth was created six thousand years ago.

The creationists are fighting a losing battle against the biological evolutionists. The traditional theistic world-view is outdated and doomed; people will have to let it go in due time; not in the distant future but in a matter of few decades.

At the same time, spirituality is almost a human instinct. Science cannot be a substitute for religion because religion satisfies the spiritual needs of the humankind. Majority of the people will always believe in one form or the other of religion. To wit: John Shelby Spong and his undying faith in Christianity in spite of his very dim view of the traditional Christianity.

References

1.John Shelby Spong, “Living in Sin,” HaroperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, p. 136.
2.Ibid., pp. 111-112.
3.John Shelby Spong, “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism,” HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, p. 33.
4.Ibid. pp. 16-17.
5.John Shelby Spong, “A New Christianity for a New World,” HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, p. 9.
6.Ibid., p. 23.
7.Ibid., p. 45.