sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

So, about a third of the way into Spong's Sins of Scripture, i am starting to have... i don't know if misgivings is exactly the right word. I don't have disagreements with him and i can't really fault what he has to say. I'm just not sure how relevant his message is.

Spong's heart and mind are in the right place. He has a zeal for honestly and forthrightly addressing the misdeeds of Christianity in the past and present, and demonstrating that they are the result of error. He has a particular talent for illuminating new ways to see familiar passages of scripture, as well as calling our attention to lesser known gems.

But i wonder how relevant this kind of theology is. He sees the Bible with a sense of wonder, even while criticizing the fundamentalists for worshipping it. His hope is that people who have come to doubt or hate it will come to think of it as a misunderstood treasure from a previous age, and not a horrible instrument of evil.

It is hard, having stepped back from my own fascination with that style of theology, to think of it as something that will save the world. Doesn't any scripture-centered approach carry within it the seeds of fundamentalism? Not everyone possesses the skill to read texts in a nuanced way; and so long as there are power imbalances in human society, authoritarian structures will always tend to favor literalistic text-centered theology. Also, haven't we had enough of looking in books for answers to flesh-and-blood questions?

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With something as old as scripture, it is moreso the reader, and not the author(s), who holds the ethical key to meaning.

I disagree. The people who originally wrote the various parts of the bible did so to fill certain needs, and i think that is where ethics demands the focus should remain. We, 2-3000 years removed from scripture's authorship, may get things from scripture that were never intended, and it's okay to acknowledge that -- as long as we treat our reading of scripture as such. To do otherwise is to give scripture a kind of "time-transcendent" status, which i think is very dangerous: it is barely a step removed from saying, "God knew we would face modern issues and sought to give us guidance on them, even though the people who wrote scripture could not possibly have conceived of them."

From your description, it doesn't appear to me that scripture, qua objectively existent text, is the center to Spong's approach.

I've read three or four of his books now, and virtually everything he writes focuses on the bible. He wants us to learn how to read it in a way that is more respectful of the culture that produced it and put in the context of a text written before 2000 years of scientific and cultural advance. But he still wants us to draw inspiration from it. He wants to quote from it and show us the wisdom in those quotes.

I can understand his fascination; we are all taught to see the bible as something great and wonderful. And i have no small amount of fascination myself with early Christian literature, though my fascination has mostly focused on the Gnostic works.

My fear is that maybe even a liberal hermeneutic is not enough to keep us from sliding into literalism and dogmatism. I fear that even a liberal approach to scripture may teach us to seek to view the world through the prism of scripture. I think this is ultimately a problem.

There's a brilliant passage in the first chapter of this book where he writes about how bibles are printed with two columns on each page, like a dictionary or encyclopedia, so that we will be encouraged to think of it as a reference book. And i thought, "Aha! he gets it!" But even while he dedicates time to debunking fundamentalism he is also defending scripture as something inspirational and holy.

"There's a brilliant passage in the first chapter of this book where he writes about how bibles are printed with two columns on each page, like a dictionary or encyclopedia, so that we will be encouraged to think of it as a reference book. And i thought, "Aha! he gets it!" But even while he dedicates time to debunking fundamentalism he is also defending scripture as something inspirational and holy."

Wow, I never thought of that! but it's true.
You just reminded me of some small part of the (very basd) dream I had last night, which was ocnfusing and random so it doesn't even relate well as a story, but there was something about burning a bible in there.