Spong - Biblical literalism : a gentile heresy : a journey into a new Christianity through the doorway of Matthews gospel

FOR

Christine,

My Wife,

Whose love

Expands my life endlessly

and almost miraculously;

AND FOR

Our Five Children,

Ellen

Katharine

Jaquelin

Brian

Rachel

AND

IN MEMORIAM

John Elbridge Hines (19101997)

John Arthur Thomas Robinson (19191983)

Michael Douglas Goulder (19272010)

My Three Greatest and Most Appreciated Mentors

Contents

I DID NOT THINK I WOULD EVER WRITE another book. The time, the study, the sheer discipline and the rigor of writing just did not seem to fit into my life at this stage. When this book comes out in 2016, I will be eighty-five years old. Did I still have either the desire or the will to complete such an arduous task? Does the Christian world want or need another Spong book? After all, my autobiography came out in the year 2000 under the title Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality. Normally, one is supposed to die in the last chapter of ones autobiography or, at the very least, to move along with sufficient haste that an editors note must be added to the text explaining that the author had passed from the stage of history in that critical interval between the time the book was completed and the time it was published. Somehow, I failed to cooperate with that tradition!

Indeed I went on to experience the years of my retirement as the most creative and growing years of my life. Among other things, I was named the William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard University. While delivering these lectures at Harvard (published under the title A New Christianity for a New World), I also taught two classes at the Harvard Divinity School, where I had the pleasure of meeting the most engaging theological students I have ever encountered. I formed stimulating friendships with a number of the theological faculty, including Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin. I also got to know and to interact with members of the university faculty and with those at the Kennedy School of Government, where the former senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, was teaching.

Following that, I taught for a semester at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and formed a lasting friendship with Professor Lawrence Meredith and his wife, Pat. Larry had earlier headed up the department of religion at this university. I also served on the faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and the Pacific School of Religion, also in Berkeley, on seven different occasions as part of their summer school. These experiences gave me new insights into West Coast Christianity and introduced me to some rather remarkable and very diverse students and faculty. Over a period of two years I taught three different courses in the Theological School of Drew University, a Methodist institution possessing the most international student body that I have ever engaged. In that capacity I was privileged to get to know three different and very gifted deans. The first was Maxine Beach, one of the earliest women clergy to head a denominational seminary; the second was Jeffrey Kuan, an Old Testament Scholar from Malaysia and the first Asian to head a Methodist seminary in America; the third was a young Hispanic scholar named Javier Viera, whose vision for contemporary theological education is exciting and demanding. The Theological School at Drew University became a major asset to my life. Not only did it regularly affirm my gifts, but it also made available to me its magnificent theological library. The dean of the libraries at Drew was Dr. Andrew Scrimgeour, who time after time aided my research and, in the process, became a close personal friend.

Perhaps the highest honor of my life also came during those retirement years, when my portrait was commissioned to be painted by Morehouse College in Atlanta, to hang in its Hall of Honor at the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel, among those who had contributed deeply to the Civil Rights struggle in the United States during the years of the twentieth century. The dean of the chapel, Dr. Lawrence Carter, said in the unveiling ceremony: You have done for gay and lesbian people what Martin Luther King Jr. did for people of color. I hang today just beneath Justice Thurgood Marshall.

During the years of my retirement I also wrote and HarperCollins published five new books, each of which expanded my life and my intellectual scope enormously. I lectured extensively on these books all over the world, including appearances at some five hundred universities, colleges and theological seminaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Thailand.

When my books began to be translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Arabic and the languages of Scandinavia, my work and ideas reached an expanded world audience. I was able to develop European lecture tours and to have articles published in prominent journals in Latin America.

In my retirement I have also developed a career as a weekly columnist on the Internet, working ultimately for a company that my wife Christine and I earlier helped to found entitled Progressive Christianity Inc. I have now written that column for sixteen years, and through its question-and-answer feature, I have been able to develop a dialogue with people around the world.

One other great privilege of my retirement years was that I was made a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, that remarkable biblical and early Christianity think tank founded by Dr. Robert Funk, a brilliant scholar, who once served as the executive secretary of the Society of Biblical Literature. In this seminar some 250 scripture scholars, of all religious traditions, meet regularly to explore contemporary biblical issues and to do so in a very public way. It was the intention of the Jesus Seminar not to allow its findings to remain hidden inside the ivy-covered walls of academia, but through the use of public media to reach the working clergy and, perhaps more importantly, the thinking laypeople who occupy the pews of our churches on Sunday mornings.

Above all I continued in retirement my lifelong habit of serious study in the early-morning hours of each day. My appetite for exploring the Bible outside the boxes of traditional religion was whetted anew by the five years from 20062010, a period that I devoted to the study of the Fourth Gospel, which resulted in the publication of a book entitled The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. It was, I thought, the most creative piece of writing in my career. The responses I received from audiences around the nation convinced me that a case can be made for the continued power of the Bible among educated people, if biblical scholars are courageous enough to break out of the straitjackets of their threadbare and time-warped approaches to traditional religion.

In 2014, at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, more than ten thousand people attended my five days of lectures on Johns Gospel, and about twenty-five percent of that audience was Jewish! When this book on the Fourth Gospel was complete, I felt, once again, that my writing career was over. Just to continue the habit of a lifetime, however, I began to engage the gospel of Matthew, reading continuously and exclusively on this subject for more than four years. This study was so enriching and so eye-popping that it led eventually to the publication of this present volume. I have now begun a time of intense study of the gospel of Luke, but I am doing it for the joy of the study alone. I do not believe that I have sufficient longevity left in what William Shakespeare called this mortal coil to produce yet another book at age ninety! No one other than my mother would probably want to read it anyway! So this book on Matthew will (probably) be my final book.