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Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture

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It is interesting that many Churches place much emphasis on the strict and literal interpretation of the Bible. Isaac Asimov pointed out that the whole reason Jesus clashed with the Jewish authorities was because while they placed strict emphasis on keeping with the strict letter of the law, Jesus' mentality was that it was alright to deviate from the written law if it meant doing a greater good. EXAMPLE: In the Gospel According to John, a woman is going to be stoned for adultery. "Levitivus" 20:10 and "Deuteronomy" 22:22 clearly state death as the punishment for adultery. And Jesus of course told them anyone who was without sin could begin the execution: "...He that is without sin amongst you, let him first cast a stone at her" (John 8:7). (None of them could.) Paul even warns us about taking the Bible too literally in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians: "...the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2nd Corinthians 3:6). While Bishop Spong explains that the differences between the 4 Gospels often frustrate people, he explains that it shouldn't. The reason is that the 4 Gospels were written for different audiences. Mark basically wrote his Gospel based on the teachings of Peter. Matthew wrote his Gospel in a way that compared Jesus to Moses. He was writing for the Jewish populations, and he wanted to emphasize that Christianity was the fulfillment of Judaism. Matthew also liked to dramatize things. Luke wrote in a memorable and beautiful way. His goal was to make peace with the Jews who became followers of Christ and the Gentiles who became followers of Christ. John's Gospel is on the hostile side. This is because at the time John wrote, many of the followers of Christ were being expelled from the Jewish places of worship. And John wrote in a hostile manner to show the early Christians that God would not be angry at them for leaving their former places of worship. All in all, this is a great book that belongs in the library of any Christian.

- My purpose in this volume is first to resuce the Bible from the exclusive hands of those who demand that it be literal truth and second to open that sacred story to levels of insight and beauty that, in my experience, literalism has never produced.

- I honor fundamentalism's demand that the Bible be taken seriously.

- To traffic in guilt as the church has done, to take the beauty and life-giving quality of sexual love and distort it with layer after layer of sexual guilt is simply no longer defensible, if it ever was.

- When the love of God is contained inside human barriers, it dies. It ceases to be the demanding, searing, opening love of God. It has become instead the perfume of human respectability, sprinkled on the cesspools of human negativity.

- Religion almost inevitably tries to take our anxiety away from us by claiming that which religion can never deliver - absolute certainty.

These are just a few of the many passages I highlighted when reading this volume. A book that I"m sure to read again and again for a different point of view, one that talks about the Bible not as a devinely inspired, unchanging thing, but as a tome that was written by men of their time trying to convey the deep meaning of the life altering experiences they encountered. A must read for it's measured, thoughtful, direct and stance.

Since reading this book two weeks agao I've been wondering why I hold certain beliefs, pondering new meanings and finding new insights. In short Spong has done something no other Priest or theologian has done for me in a LONG time - he's got me thinking about the Bible and my relation to it on a daily basis.

This book should be required reading for all seekers of God, particularly those who identify themselves as Christians. I have known for a long time that it was not possible for the Bible to be the "inerrant" work of God. (Anyone who still thinks the Bible is inerrant should be forced to READ every word of it so they know what they are believing.) The Bible when read at face value condones incest (Lot and his daughters) slavery, the denigration of women and a host of other ills our world does not need. RE: Inerrancy--When in history have we ever seen humans interpreting God's word without any mistakes or projecting their own biases? Never--human beings are flawed -- as it was in the beginning, it is now at the dawn of the 21st century. I am very grateful to men like Spong and Bruce Bauer for helping me reclaim the truths I know are in the Bible without the trappings of 1st century ignorance that has long been proved inadequate. The result in my faith is not the collapse of all I used to believe (as the fundamentalists would have us think) but for me, a renewed excitement and celebration of my faith. When I can understand that Paul's views of homosexuality and male supremacy are based on his culture, I am free to release the anger I have felt at him for years for surpressing women and rejoice in his life changing experience with the Living Christ that I can share. The black and white thinking I was taught in the church "Jesus was the son of God, a liar or a maniac" is exactly the kind of craziness that is driving folks from seeking God in our world, and it breaks my heart. I used to be ashamed to call myself a Christian; thanks to the works of Spong and others, I am now reclaiming that word as meaning "a follower of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth" and I wear it with pride. OUR GOD IS SO MUCH BIGGER THAN WE EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE! If that's not worth a Hallelujah I don't know what is.

This is a good book, and should be read by an awful lot of people who are interested in Christianity. First, I must disagree with the reviewer immediately below mine who states that there are not fundamentalists who hold the 'straw man' beliefs to which Spong assigns them. There are.

Having been brought up in a culture in which these 'fundamentalist' views were precariously close, or in, the Christian mainstream, it's only been through encountering writers like Spong that I have found 'faith' again. He is preaching two different messages: to people still in the flock, he states that it is necessary to THINK and BELIEVE and not that these are exclusive; to others who have left the fold, he tries to make the faith acceptable. And now on to my comments about the book....

I think this is a good and interesting book though no where near as thought-provoking as 'Why Christianity Must Change....' or 'Liberating the Gospels'. Some of his points about Paul-- i.e. that he was a closeted homosexual are a bit played out and striken with an uncharacteristic meanness. I also get annoyed by his liking to mention Einstein and subatomic physics-- its safe to say that the cosmology of the world has changed without bringing in specifics... As a whole, though, the book is interesting for those really fluent in Christian scholarship to those in want of something to think about or even an introduction to the Bible.

I'm pretty sure this review is going to get lots of negative votes, but I recommend this book sincerely and wholeheartedly.

Yes, this book has changed my life forever! I used to be a fundamentalist Christian, trying to find "security" in my extreme belief and point of view of my religion. I used to believe that the Bible is the Whole Truth and the perfect word of God. Now my eyes are open and I can see how dangerous, destructive and narrow-minded it was.
Look at the problems in the world nowadays, terrorism, hatred to certain groups of the community and wars... Mostly caused by the bigots, fundamentalists (in any religions) who think that they are the best and other people who are not the same like them are the enemy of God and should be destroyed or converted into their own religion.
If we look into the history, Christianity itself from the beginning has transformed from "being persecuted" into "the persecutor", witch-hunting in the past and now the same thing happens only in a different formats.
Why do we have to be hypocrites? For example, look at so many so called "Christian Artists" who did "sin", got divorced and so forth and still they are "forgiven" and "accepted" by the congregation as long as they say "God forgave my sin"? How ridiculous is that? It's so easy to legitimize everything by saying "God this.." and "God that.."? While the God that you are talking about is "silent"?
Bishop Spong wants to share his point of view of the real essence in Christianity that has been lost and we supposed to have in this age now. We should have been more developed in our way of thinking, more advanced, not going back to the dark old way of thinking in the "stone age". Thank you Bishop Spong for this masterpiece! People will always remember this for many many years to come. I totally support you and people like you out there who are willing to do something for humanity.
One last word, who are the people who threatened Bishop Spong with death sentence for revealing this "extereme point of view of Christianity - as they thought so"? They are the so called "Christian Devotees" and "The Guardian of The Truth of God". If God could speak out, he will never legitimize anyone to kill anyone else by any excuse. Looks like they are defending their "insecurity" should the truth comes out.

For many years I struggled to understand the Bible and the fundamental, rigid, exclusive Christian doctrine I was raised to believe. Bishop Spong gives all doubters permission to ask questions, to seek answers, to accept other forms of religion, and to remain a believer. One cannot be a student of science,language,culture, philosophy and religion without questioning whether or not the Bible is the inerrant word of God. I have come to believe the Bible is the living word of God because of the truths it contains that are as relevant today as they were in Old Testament times. Are all of the events related within it real; are all the stories absolute truth? I don't think so, but Bishop Spong provided me with a way to accept the lessons the Bible teaches without having to reject my mind's inability to accept every word as being the inerrant word of God, and every event as an historical fact.

Spong's arguments make sense, his belief that fundamentalism has led to the decline in Christianity in recent years is well-founded, and his interpretations are interesting. However, by vehemently attacking the fundamentalists themselves, and his tedious psychoanalyzing of the fundamentalist mind, will certainly turn off the very people he should be targeting. Spong seems to preaching to the converted, presenting brilliant ideas and the latest in historical Christianity at a pace so rapid, he's unable to provide the actual evidence. As with his brief section on the scientifically inaccuracies of the Bible, the truth of his argument is there, but he goes by it so fast only the converted and sympathetic will listen.
But, otherwise, Spong has written a pretty good introduction to his modernized Christianity, with a focus on the eternal truths of the Bible rather than the literalized dogma. The chapters on Paul are perhaps the most interesting, touching on the most important distinguishing feature of Christianity--forgiveness. At times the Bishop's writing seems forced and blocky, but there are passages where he really does convey the power of his faith, based on the ethical truths found in the symbolism of the Bible. If only Spong could show this level of emotion throughout his book.
Overall, a fine piece of post-modern Christian literature. While Spong is unlikely to become a C. S. Lewish except among liberal Christians, or even win many converts from the fundamentalist camp, he has collected in his own words what many people are thinking these days. Hopefully, an organized form of these beliefs may eventually come into being.

My father was a very devout Anglo Catholic. One day he bought this book for me. In my opinion, this book belongs in the library of ANY Roman Catholic or Anglo Catholic. Many people become frustrated that the Gospels vary in facts. Bishop Spong helps to solve this quite vividly. (Even a real obtuse person could finally understand why the Gospels are so different.) Mark basically wrote the facts without any other intentions. Matthew wrote in a way that compared Christ to Moses. (This way the Jews who became followers of Christ would be able to see Christianity as the fulfillment of Judaism.) Luke used beautiful images and language. (His goal was to make peace between the Jews who became followers of Christ and the Gentiles who became followers of Christ.) John wrote in a hostile tone. (He did not want the new followers of Christ to worry when they were being expelled from the Jewish places of worship.) Bishop Spong did the church a wonderful service when he wrote this book!

In a clear writing style, Spong exposes the fundamentalist, mindlessly literal movement in Christianity as simply foolish, and returns our attention to the message of the Word of God rather than the words themselves. Reading this book has been insightful, and made me proud to be a Christian. No doubt that folks who like to pretend that the Bible is perfectly correct in every phase, often those same folks who have justified slavery, segregation, the inferiority of women, and many our society's ills using the words of the Bible, will find Spong's ideas threatening. For me, it deeped my understanding of God and faith.

I grew up in an environment of mystical, orthodox christianity that is not amenable to change, but in the latter clause of that sentence of experience, all of christianity - indeed, religions in general - are not amenable to change. The intransigence of christian denominations, in particular, makes many of them dinosaurs in the realm of human thought; and they must change to survive. The Catholic Church, the Episcopalian Church, and many other denominations seem to be making some headway, as this book, written by a bishop, attests. At its purest form, to be a christian is to be a follower of Jesus, and this often means that the person presuming to be a christian must struggle with what he or she understands Jesus to be. But sometimes the reality is not what we undersand it to be or what we would prefer it to be; and it can often be at odds with what others might believe Jesus to be. There is no direct record by Jesus recording his experiences or travails in this or any other world. In the end, we choose what to believe, and our beliefs are less about God or Jesus and more about what we find comfortable. Bishop Spong gently disrupts that comfort somewhat, and while this book does not result in an extensive rethinking of the meaning of Scripture, as the subtitle suggests, it provides a little food for thought. There are some who will automatically reject what is in this book because they are fundamentalists, but my somewhat limited experience with fundamentalists indicates that those of that belief system are among the most immune to reasoned discussion of the faith. It is also my experience that the belief in Jesus and God among fundamentalists is not predicated so much in an ability to intellectually support or defend fundamentalism or the "truth" of fundamentalism, but because it is what is firmly believed, and to critically think about the belief is not something that is considered proper. Fundamentalists do not want to hear what challenges their faith, only what affirms it. That is a shame, because the real value of a strong faith is not its intransigence, but its ability to deal with the challenges of a changing world. Bishop Spong's book is a gentle example of such a challenge and it deserves a good review. Religious beliefs must adapt with the times or become irrelevant; and sometimes deeply held views must be evaluated and reevaluated. As my father has often said to me, "there's a reason no one believes Apollo controls the movements of the sun, any more." If we do not wish to see christianity become as irrelevant as the belief in Apollo, we would do well to consider the words of authors such as Bishop Spong.