Bishop Spong’s “The Time Has Come” Manifesto and New Conversation Spaces

Eleanor Roosevelt with U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, 1949

In another, wiser version of my life, I would be a more careful collector of those stray tidbits of illuminating discourse we all run across in unexpected places on a daily basis, make a mental note to file away, and then lose sight of.  A case in point:

Research projects sometimes have me scanning back issues of my state’s daily newspapers in periods of crucial social transition like the 1950s and 1960s.  As I do that, looking for the single piece of information I need, I inevitably find myself lured into reading the letters column to see what people were thinking and saying during decades when I was too young to pay attention to public discourse about political and cultural events unfolding around me.  I wish I had had the foresight to clip these letters as I’ve read them over the years, because of their power to illuminate contemporary debates about the bible and its cultural uses.

Invariably, I’m fascinated—and often repulsed—by what I find when I read them.  In my area during the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn’t at all uncommon for fellow citizens to write the local paper and declare confidently that 1) the bible clearly demonstrates that God made some people white and others black, with the intent of keeping the two races separate; 2) the bible shows plainly that God made the black race to serve the white race; and 3) anyone who doubts these “facts” questions God and is probably an immoral socialist.

Oh, and of course, those writing these letters (white folks, it goes without saying, white Christian folks) declare with equal confidence that they love their black brothers and sisters and mean them no harm.  But when the bible says something, what can one do except stand where the Word tells you to stand?  The whole world turns upside down when we let folks question the divine Word of God.

Turn the clock back and dip into letters written during the first decades of the 20^th century, as women began entering the workforce and claiming the right to vote, and you’ll find—I know; I read them frequently, when I scan old newspapers—people declaring with equal certainty that 1) God made men and women different and complementary for reason; 2) specifically, God made men strong and women weak; 3) the bible clearly demonstrates that female subordination to males is God’s plan for the created world; and 4) allowing women to do “men’s” work and to vote overturns God’s divine order and subverts the plain meaning of the bible.

Not much seems to have changed in the new century, has it?  Nowadays, though there may still be considerable pockets of American culture that cling to these totally untenable understandings of God and the bible when it comes to matters of race and gender, hardly anyone would dare to voice such declarations in public any longer.* Though many people may whisper their untenable and prejudice-laden readings of the bible vis-à-vis race or gender in private, even within the confines of their church, they seldom dare to bring these readings to the light of public discourse, where they know that light will illuminate an unsavory darkness at the heart of their use of the bible to keep others in subordination to themselves.

But when it comes to gay and lesbian people, many folks still feel perfectly at ease making confident public declarations about God, the bible, and homosexuality that are rapidly being proven as untenable as the preceding equally confident declarations about God, the bible, and race or gender have been proven to be.  We live at a turning point in history at which both careful biblical (and theological) analysis and cultural developments have revealed that the use of the scriptures to bash gay folks is as malevolent as the use of the bible to bash people of color and women was in the past.

Clearly not all of us have caught up to that recognition yet.  Some of us are intent on resisting the turning point as long and as bitterly as possible—just as many of my fellow citizens were committed to resisting the culture’s turning point regarding segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, and about women’s rights at the start of the 20^th century.

And so for those of us who discern that a crucial turning point has taken place in our culture in recent years re: God, the bible, and queer folks, what’s to be done, when a segment of the culture is intent on clinging to a homophobic reading of scripture that is simply no longer tenable in light of sound biblical scholarship and the new light that a growing progressive cultural consensus casts on the scriptures?  What’s to be done when that segment of culture wants to thwart productive conversations that will move us beyond the dead stasis of fruitless debate about issues now settled?

Southern Slavery and the Bible, One of Many Works Using Scripture to Defend Slavery

As I think about this challenge in the new year, and with the opening of a new discourse space at Open Tabernacle designed for productive conversations about theological and cultural issues that take for granted the turning point I’ve just sketched, I’ve been revisiting Bishop John Shelby Spong’s “The Time Has Come” Manifesto of 15 October 2009.  Over at my Bilgrimage blog, I blogged about Bishop Spong’s manifesto on 22 October.

Since I made a statement about “The Time Has Come” in the blog posting to which I just linked, I won’t belabor what I have already said about the Spong manifesto.  I encourage interested readers to link to the manifesto itself and read it carefully, and if you want my take on it, please check out what I say about it on Bilgrimage.

Here, I’d like to make note of the pertinence of Bishop Spong’s manifesto for those of us who have been longing for new discourse spaces within our various religious (or political, or both) traditions, which permit us to move beyond the dead stasis created by fruitless arguments re: biblical and theological interpretations of homosexuality that have been proven wrong.  It seems to me that the Spong manifesto is addressing that longing, and clearing a path for any of us who want to build such conversation spaces.

Bishop Spong begins his manifesto with a flat declaration—a flat avowal that he will simply no longer engage the stop-the-train arguments of those who want to resist a cultural turning point that has now moved us to a new level of understanding of gay people, gay lives, and the relationship of those lives to scripture and tradition:

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone.  I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right‐wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy.

What justification does Bishop Spong provide for this position?  I hear two primary justifications for the opening declaration as I read the manifesto.  In the first place, it is time to move on:

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won.  There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us.

And, in the second place, it’s time to move on because a new consciousness has arisen:

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer: a key underlying argument in Bishop Spong’s manifesto is that our culture has moved on in the past as a new consciousness arose about other issues re: which many Christians believed the bible was clear.  None of us can imagine, Bishop Spong proposes, continuing to carry on debates with those who think we should treat epilepsy by casting out demons, or that bleeding a patient with an infection is a feasible way of treating the infection.

Nor do the vast majority of us any longer imagine—we have moved on; a new consciousness has produced a new cultural consensus that reveals our previous reading of scripture about these matters as wrong—that we should revive the enervating cultural debates and misguided exegesis of the past that supported racism, sexism, and anti-semitism in many Christian cultures:

I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.” The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves.

We do not seek to revive those debates and the aberrant exegesis and theology that gave rise to them because they are:

1. Enervating
2. Enmeshed with political movements and commitments that have proven toxic for our culture and, for believers, antithetical to the gospel.

I lived through the turning point at which the formative culture of my childhood decided (when judicial and legislative decisions reflecting a new consciousness forced change) that it was time to move on, re: the use of the bible to support racism and subordination of people of color to white people.  And here’s what I remember about that cultural turning point: it would not have taken place if a number of people, a critical mass, determined to move the conversation in a new direction had not simply said, Enough.  It’s time to stop the enervating debate.  It’s over.  It’s no longer doing anyone a bit of good.

Continued debate about what the bible says re: gay people and gay lives is enervating because it ties up energy needed to build a better world.  The enervating debate about what the bible says re: gay people and gay lives ties up energy keeping productive change at bay in many areas.  It ties up energy as it tries to solve and re-solve a theological and cultural problem that has already been solved.  It ties up valuable energy that needs to be used to build a better world for everyone, straight and gay and alike.

A fundamental theological presupposition of many religious traditions is that the divine Spirit moves constantly through the world and through historical and cultural events to effect change—change for the better.  The theological framework within which Christians (who inherit this from Judaism) talk about this movement of the Spirit and its relationship to historical and social developments is called the reign of God.

The Christian understanding of the reign of God is centered on the affirmation that the Spirit is at work constantly, throughout history and in all cultures, to call the world to a vision of a more humane and inclusive society towards which we keep trying to move (and which we keep failing to realize) as we listen collectively for the voice of the Spirit at our point in history.  We waste the energy with which the Spirit keenly wants to imbue us—energy for necessary social change—when we continue to fight enervating battles about social issues after the emergence of a new consciousness has shown us the path along which a more humane society lies, as we deliberate about those social issues.

Unfortunately, there are groups within both faith communities and the culture at large who actively promote precisely the kind of enervation I’m describing here, as a new consciousness about an issue arises, and, on its basis, a new cultural consensus.  This is the point I want to get at when I say that I hear Bishop Spong telling us it is time to move on both because the conversation about homosexuality in which we have been involved is enervating, and because resistance to the new cultural consensus is enmeshed with toxic political movements and commitments that are antithetical to the gospel.

Many of those who promote continued enervating fights about homosexuality in our culture today are doing so not so much because homosexuality is their key issue, as because this issue remains instrumentally useful to political groups seeking to halt (and destroy) social changes designed to create a more just and humane social order in general.  In all areas—economic as well as social.  To the extent that we permit those promoting the enervating, going-nowhere discussion of homosexuality and the bible to continue occupying our attention and tying up our energy, to that extent, we also permit those promoting this behavior to thwart social and political changes necessary to build a more humane world.

To move our world closer to the vision of the reign of God . . . .

And for that, in my humble opinion, we very much need new conversation spaces like The Open Tabernacle, in which believers (and people of good will without any faith commitment) can gather to talk respectfully, perhaps raucously, even cantankerously, but always with the vision of that more humane society pulling us forward as we discuss the significant tasks ahead of us in the human community.  The tasks ahead of us as we work to build that more humane society . . . .

*I do suspect that it remains more culturally acceptable in some quarters to voice open “biblically based” support for misogyny than for racism.