Article for BiblicalBulletin

Robert C. Newman

Rescuingthe Bible from Bishop Spong

In recent years,it seems, there has been a change in strategy by those who reject the Bible asa message from God. For most ofthe century, attacks on Scripture in the US were confined to atheist publisherslike Prometheus Press, or to scholarly religious books, and neither of theseusually reached the general public. True, the leaders of mainline denominations typically held similarviews, but they tended to lay low for fear of arousing the ire of theirconservative parishioners, who might just leave the denomination and taketheir money with them. Or worse,they might wake up and take the denomination back, as has now happened in theSouthern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. So theological liberals had beencontent to keep a low profile, depending on the growing secularization ofsociety and introductory religion courses in their colleges to bring moreand more people around to their way of thinking.

But nomore. Whether it has been theincreasing radicalism in parts of society, or the growing effectiveness ofconservative responses, the lay-low strategy has been abandoned and the culturewars are heating up. One exampleof this is the much-hyped Jesus Seminar, which seeks to share the "assuredresults of religious scholarship" with the average Joe and Mary.

Another is John Shelby Spong, EpiscopalBishop of Newark, NJ and one of the most outspoken and liberal clergy inAmerica today. In 1991 he wrote Rescuingthe Bible from Fundamentalism,which sold enough copies to go into paperback the following year, and now hasreached its 17^th printing. Spongis concerned that the only lay people who take the Bible seriously are thefundamentalists C with whom he lumps evangelicals andanyone else who believes in the inerrancy of Scripture.  Spong wants to convince his readersthat the Bible is filled with errors, but that behind and beneath its text is apowerful message and experience which modern people need and will accept if itcan be freed from the shackles of an ancient worldview.

In fourteenbrief and readable chapters, Spong raises most of the objections to acceptingthe Bible as literally true that I have seen. He even has a number of new ones that most scholars would beembarrassed to suggest, e.g., he rebukes TV meteorologists for speaking of thesun rising when we now know that it=s really the earth that rotates, and heclaims the Bible teaches that stars are peepholes to heaven through which Godwatches us! He gives deft sketchesof the content of many of the biblical books, sharing some genuine insightswith his readers while ridiculing miracles, Satan, hell and creation Cthe worldview of the Bible. At thesame time, he claims a love for the Bible and a desire that others could sharewith him in liberating experiences of love, life and being, which hefeels are precluded by a literal reading of Scripture.

If we asBible-believing Christians are to be effective in reaching out to anincreasingly diverse and secular society, we need to know what the attacksagainst the Bible look like, and Spong is as good as any for stating suchobjections quickly and pungently. Not only do atheists and theological liberals use these arguments,but so do Muslims and new agers, all to turn people away from Christianityand to win them over to their own religion.

Like many of ourstudents here at Biblical, most Christians raised in an evangelical orfundamental environment have been very much sheltered from this material, andas a result do not take it seriously. I, too, was raised in a Christian home and attended a (not veryconservative) Southern Baptist Church growing up, but I did not really run intoattacks on the Bible until I took the required courses in religion at DukeUniversity in the early '60s. Providentially, the Lord provided the works of C.S. Lewis to help me inthat time, and later Herman Eckelmann at Cornell, and then Allan MacRae. As a result, instead of coming toreject the Bible, I now appreciate its truth and power more than ever.

But of course,we need to know more than just the objections to the Bible and biblicalChristianity. We need to knowhow to answer them. Such materialcan seem very academic unless we have been in the trenches ourselves, and if welay low in our Christian ghettos we can probably avoid facing it. But God has not called us to hide incaves and fortresses while the enemy takes over the land; he wants us to joinin raising up a banner against them. What we need to do is to genuinely reach out to our secular neighbors,and then try to help them by answering objections they may have to the Bibleand Christianity.

Allan MacRae wasa big help to me when I came to seminary. His lectures responding to the claims that the first five books of theBible don't really go back to Moses (or God) have now been published in a veryreadable form and are available at Biblical (JEDP: Lectures on the HigherCriticism of the Pentateuch). Hugh Ross has written some excellent books that show how modernscientific discoveries point to the infinite, eternal, personal God of theBible as the creator of the universe (see his website at www.reasons.org ). Craig Blomberg has written an excellent work TheHistorical Reliability of the Gospels(InterVarsity, 1987), which shows that they look very good indeed unless onehas already assumed that miracles cannot occur. In addition, a fair amount of material responding to attackson the Bible has been produced by our group IBRI, the InterdisciplinaryBiblical Research Institute. Itcan be downloaded free from the IBRI website www.ibri.org.

Theologicalliberalism is not only a threat; it is a tragedy. How many young people have gone off to college only to havetheir faith shaken or destroyed by teachers who had passed through a similarexperience years before? It evensounds like this happened to John Spong. Indeed, the foundations of Western society have been eaten away; weaccepted the hasty assumption of scientism that miracles could not occur, andthus concluded that the narratives of the Bible could not be reliable. The result has been a moral meltdownand a loss of vision. If deathends it all, what is left but to eat, drink, and try to be merry?

Spong tries tosave something by extracting the ideas of love, life and being from theirbiblical matrix. But how does heknow that this is the real message beneath and behind the Scriptures if theBible is filled with error? Isn'the just engaged in wishful thinking? If we do not have the light of Scripture, then indeed we walk indarkness.

I praise Godthat he has given us excellent evidence that the Bible is not the guesses of ancientmen. Indeed, it is the oneextraterrestrial message that can save us, if we will interpret itcarefully and act upon what it says.