The last couple of weeks have been difficult, and I have not been very present on Daily Kos even though I've written a few diaries. The partner of a dear friend of mine suffered a stroke two Sundays ago, and he has been in the hospital since then in a coma. The doctors have now told my friend that his partner is brain dead. So, please forgive me tonight if I am not as responsive as I normally would be.
I've spoken and written about various biblical scholars and Christian leaders in the past. However, I don't think that I've mentioned the Episcopal Church's retired Bishop John Shelby Spong prior to now - mainly because I didn't know too much about him. He recently did an interview on one of the popular shows there in Australia and discussed LGBT issues, marriage equality, women's issues within the Church, the (so-called) Apostle Paul, and various other issues. I was extremely impressed. Follow me below the fold for more information and for the interview.
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Bishop Spong has written a number of books. Unfortuantely, I have only read one of them - Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. As many of you know from some of my diaries, it's a topic that I'm extremely interested in. And, I also wanted to read what he had to say about (Apostle) Paul. The book has a couple of chapters in it about Paul, and the first one is simply titled "The Man From Tarsus."
On page 117, Bishop Spong speaks of his suggestion that Paul might have been gay:
Paul felt tremendous guilt and shame, which produced in him self-loathing. The presence of homosexuality would have produced this response among Jewish people in that period of history. Nothing else, in my opinion, could account for Paul's self-judging rhetoric, his negative feeling toward his own body, and his sense of being controlled by something he had no power to change. The war that went on between what he desired with his mind and what he desired with his body, his drivenness to a legalistic religion of control, his fear when that system was threatened, his attitude toward women, his refusal to seek marriage as an outlet for his passion - nothing else accounts for this data as well as the possibility that Paul was a gay male.
The only part I might disagree with Bishop Spong about in that paragraph is the comment about Paul's attitude toward women. That would not necessarily point to him being gay; it was a societal view back then. Most (if not all) men (and, probably many women as well) shared Paul's misogyny.
In the video below, one of the interesting comments that he makes is that he believes that Paul would be very surprised to learn that some of his letters were considered by some as the "Words of the Lord." He says, "those aren't the words of the Lord. They are the words of Paul."
From The Vue Post:
Charlie Pickering interviewed Bishop John Spong on his show The Weekly last Wednesday night.
Bishop Spong is a retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Spong was ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 1955, at the age of twenty-four. From 1979 to 2000 he was the Bishop of Newark. He is a liberal Christian theologian, religious commentator and author. Throughout his career he called for a fundamental rethink of Christian belief away from biblical literalism, theism and traditional doctrines.
Bishop Spong’s views often evoke either enthusiastic support or indignant condemnation from differing segments of Christian churches, and Roman Catholics have been particularly critical of him. And he of them …
Many Christians call him a ‘heretic’ over his denial of the virgin birth, the resurrection, and other ‘sacred’ tenets of Christianity. Others have been known to refer to him as the ‘Anglican nightmare‘ and a ‘rogue priest’. He wears these terms of derision with pride.
The above article goes on to state that the publication has an overwhelming athiest vibe, but that they did not find Bishop Spong's views threatening at all (to "secular values").
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