Resurrection: A Reality or a Pious Dream, Part IX Luke: Physical, Non-Physical or Both?

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 25 June 2015 1 Comments
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Question

I find a lot of difficulties in understanding the Bible. Abraham was, as you know, a Babylonian from Ur, what we would call a town, and was devolved by the Elohim Jehovah God to a tribal leader or a herder. Now, as you probably also know, this Elohim Jehovah God favored shepherds as we saw in the favoritism of Abel over Cain. Tribes could become racist and exclude all or, as we saw in the "Promised Land," where genocide was used to eliminate all but the “chosen people.” So the Elohim Jehovah God had a racist policy, which still exists today in the Apartheid policies of the Israeli Government.

Jesus on the other hand influenced Paul and others to adopt a non-racist policy and lived in Galilee where Jews and others who were racially "impure" lived.

The First World War was an example of different countries worshiping Jehovah and demanding them to kill their enemies. Woodrow Wilson used racist policies with his League of Nations to bring about the conflict. The Jehovah-inspired United Nations continues today.

This Jehovah, with his necessarily egoistic methods, demanded the worship of one God (as if there could be one God, there is one tree, one grain of sand, one human, one star?) and the necessity for racism - the Christ arrived - has passed.

Answer

Dear Vince,

You make so many false assumptions in your letter that I hardly know where to begin. Let me simply affirm the fact first that tribalism is by its very nature exclusive. You call that “racist,” but tribal exclusion had very little to do with race per se. The Jews, Arabs and Semites of the Middle East are racially deeply related - even kin. The Bible suggests that Abraham had two sons, Ishmael, the father of the Arab people, and Isaac, the father of the Hebrew people. It also suggests that the Moabites and the Ammonites are descendants of Abraham’s nephew Lot and that the Edomites are descended from Isaac’s son, Esau, and were therefore, the descendants of Abraham’s grandson.

The story of Adam and Eve was not written until the 10th century BCE. If Abraham lived at all, and there is considerable doubt about that, he would have lived around 1800-1850 BCE, but the earliest thing we have about him in writing came about 950 BCE or some 45 generations later. The ideas of God were evolving throughout the biblical story. In the book of Samuel, the prophet instructs King Saul in the name of God to go to war and to commit genocide against the Amalekites. That is a long cry from Jesus’ injunction to “love your enemies.”

One cannot treat the Bible in any of its parts as if it is literal history or that God can be defined by the actions attributed to God in the Bible.

Racism is a survival technique. So is tribalism, anti-women thinking and homophobia. Human beings, like all living things, plants and animals, are survival-oriented creatures. That is our biology. Over the centuries, we have reacted with hostility to all human differences in order to maximize our chances of survival. That is not the result of one religion or another, it is the result of a religion feeding and justifying our drive to survive.

Finally, the word Jehovah, which you use in your letter so frequently, is a word that entered the vocabulary of the Christian world only with the publication of the King James Bible in 1611. The Jews would never have used or recognized that word. It is a combination of the consonants of the word YHWH (the unpronounceable name of God) with the vowels of the word “adonai’, which meant “the Lord.” God is given a number of names in the Bible: YHWH or Yahweh, Elohim, El and El Shaddai, but never is God called Jehovah, except in bad English translations.

Racism is bad. You have that clear, but you need to look at the Bible in a non-literal way to be able to talk about it properly.

John Shelby Spong

 

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