Why is the Bible sacred?
Question & Answer
Q: By Tom
One of the reasons I wanted to reread his book was to see if I could get a different viewpoint on being a Christian within the “church.” I am still flummoxed as to why Bishop Spong is a Christian. He appears to be more of a humanist (non-capitalized).
Why is the Bible sacred? It’s like a compendium of authors writing over a thousand years. And, yes, they all seem to be writing about a supernatural entity. But that’s because the only early writers tended to be either state actors or religious leaders.
The other reason I read the book was that I started out as a Billy Graham=born-again Presbyterian, moved into atheism, then pantheism, and recently back as an atheist. I am still searching. No one has the answers. If someone could assist me in explaining rationally what makes Bishop Spong a Christian, I would be very grateful.
A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper
Dear Tom,
I understand your confusion around Bishop Spong’s claim to be a Christian and hope that I can help you lay the quandary aside.
You see, I am a Christian, too. But I’m also an atheist. And I have been an atheist for most of my life, though I didn’t claim the term until several years ago. Few, these days, would be comfortable hearing me identify as a Christian, and I don’t do it publicly very often. They believe there needs to be a defining line: you’re this or you’re that; you cannot be both.
But Jack and I refuse that line. I grew up in the church, too, though my belief system developed far more loosely than either yours or Jack’s. My Christian upbringing was decidedly in the camp yours would have dismissed or maligned as unChristian or heretical. My Sunday School curriculum taught me that God was love and Jesus was this cool guy who taught us that we needed to love one another. As a teenager, I delighted in the psychedelic “Live Love” stickers and adorned my school binders with them. When I entered theological college as an adult, I was relieved when my studies provided the foundations over which my beliefs had already been floating: the Bible was a collection of stories which, as you’ve noted in your question, were written by many different people over millennia; God was a concept we needed to wrestle with as we formulated our own truths; and Jesus was a man who lived a long time ago and taught us some challenging and interesting things, but wasn’t perfect. None of us are.
The stories of Christianity, indeed the stories of all religions, are woven and wrapped around human truths; it isn’t the other way ‘round, as many religions continue to proclaim. Awe and wonder, conviction and repentance, gratitude and appreciation, sorrow, lament, and need: all these are human truths and human realities. Over the course of our history, in every corner of the world, we’ve sought solace and encouragement, meaning and destiny. We’ve done it through the tools our religions have handed us, simply because they were there for that use.
Jack and I know those tools inside and out; Jack much more intimately and comprehensively than I. We see the world through the templates of Christianity. We engage with it through the roots of our faith. While my congregation no longer celebrates Palm Sunday or Easter, we live the Biblical story that was woven of the truths and metaphors that reside at the heart of human existence: the dreams we have and the elation we know when we achieve them; the desolation of rejection and betrayal when they crash against the violence of reality; and the gift that it is, for each one of us, when we pick up the thread of someone else’s broken dream – an end to violence against women; the forgiveness of crippling national debt; the fight for the future of our planet – and carry it forward. These are basic themes of the human journey; Christianity got them right when they wove the story of persecution, passion, death, and resurrection. The stories bring us back to face and accept those truths in our own lives.
Jack’s world is informed, as is mine, by those stories. For decades now, he has looked beneath them and worked to untangle the threads that have held them together. And at the end of his work, he has, every time, grasped the one thread that was worthy of you and me and humanity and lifted it up, offering it to us to hold and use as we will. He calls himself a Christian because he lives his life through the stories to which his life was and remains bound. I am so grateful for his efforts there and for the gift and permission he has given to me to do so as well.
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.