Charting a New Reformation, Part XII – The Third Thesis: Original Sin “Pre-Darwinian Mythology – Post-Darwinian Nonsense” (continued)

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 10 March 2016 6 Comments
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Question

I am French and Catholic. I agree with most all that you think, but and I do not speak good English. I have taught classics and am a Ph.D. in religious history, religious antiquity religious anthropology. I send you a text maybe you could understand it or know somebody who can help you. There is an error in the translation from Greek to Latin (and so in all the languages after) of an important verse about marriage and divorce in Matthew 5:32. Big consequences (indissolubility of marriage and so on). Even if I know myself that I can know what I do, it is important for other people to have an image less deformed of Jesus: there are many different levels and ways. I would like to meet you if you go in France, maybe with a group?

Thank you for your comments. Sorry for my bad English. I teach classics and I can read English. Tell me if you read French if I have to answer from you!

Answer

Dear Agathe,

Thank you for your letter that I have printed as it was received. Your English is better than my French, so I appreciate it. I was in France for four days last June. Two of my books have now been translated into French and are available at bookstores from a publisher named Editions Karthala. They are Born of a Woman and Why Christianity Must Change or Die? We expect to be back in Paris this October by which time two others of my books, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, will have made their entrances into the French publishing world. At that time I will be preaching and lecturing in the American Cathedral in Paris. I would love to meet you and others in your group. If you would contact Jeanne Raymond, who is my agent and contact (at Karthala@orange.fr (22-24 Boulevard Arago, 75013 Paris). She can apprise you of the exact times and places.

The verse you ask about is in the Sermon on the Mount. It makes adultery the sole justification for divorce; that is a Matthaen adaptation. The point in this text is the permanence of the marriage vows. They were meant to be incapable of being dissolved. In that society, however, a woman could not divorce her husband, only the husband could divorce the wife. Equality between the sexes was not yet an idea that had been born. Making it more difficult for the man to divorce his wife was the agenda. If Matthew had his way a man could only divorce his wife if she were guilty of adultery, and anyone who would marry a divorced and adulterous woman (for there should be no other kind) was participating in her ongoing adultery.

The sacredness of the marriage vows was and is an important asset in the stability of the whole society, but there are reasons today for allowing divorce that does not impugn the integrity of the divorcing partner. Should a woman be forced to live with an abusive husband? If the relationship has placed both partners into depression, should the relationship be forced to be continued? If a man in a mid-life crisis leaves his wife for a younger woman, is the abandoned wife doomed to live a single, loveless future? Life is so much more complicated than the laws of the past seemed to understand.

I am a remarried widower. My first wife died of cancer in 1988 and I married my second wife Christine in 1990. She was a single, divorced woman, who separated from her husband in 1982 and received a “No Fault” divorce in 1986. She and her first husband remain good friends to this day and they share the love and responsibilities of their two children, now grown up. I support, as an ideal, faithful monogamy and life enduring marriages. I think we do take our partners for better or worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death us do part. When the ideal, however, proves not to be possible, the wholeness of one’s life in my mind takes priority over the rules of one’s religious tradition. That makes me a “liberal” I suppose. I think it makes me realistic about the complexities of modern life. I adore my wife. We have now been married for over 26 years. If we use biblical standards that one knows the goodness of the tree by the goodness of the fruit it produces, then I bear witness to the fact that my life is made whole in this marriage. I am expanded, I am a more loving, more patient, more caring and more giving person today than I have ever been before. I, therefore, do not hesitate to define my marriage as “of God” and I live in gratitude for the gifts my wife gives to me. I hope that I have helped to create in her the same responses.
The ultimate law of life is love. How love is worked out in the particular circumstances of life is not by keeping the rules, but by becoming more whole. It is a lot harder to do than people think, but the results are more blessed than rigid rule-following could ever produce.

I hope we meet someday.
John Shelby Spong

 

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