Is Homosexuality Compatible with Christianity? (White vs Spong)

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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This, of course, is the seventh debate that we've actually done in this area and in Seattle last year.

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It's a pleasure to have you here this year. Let me explain to you what our objective is and has been for the last few years.

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Our objective is to have theological, scholarly debate, and that between the two best participants or representatives from opposing or polemic sides.

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We hope that while we engage in this, though, that, of course, everything will be done from that manner.

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With that, we understand that there are a number of people here that are both from a Reformed Christian perspective as well as a

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Progressive Christian perspective. All at the same time, we still ask that you behave as Christians during this debate.

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You have come in and you have paid to hear both Dr. White debate and Dr. Spong or Bishop Spong to debate, and I would hope you would allow them to do the debating tonight.

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With that being said, it is my pleasure to thank you, to welcome you here tonight, and to enjoy the next three hours with you.

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Let me introduce, first of all, our participants. On my left and your right,

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I have the Director of Alpha Omega Ministries. It's a Christian apologetics ministry based in Phoenix, Arizona, professor, having taught

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Greek, systematic theology, various topics in the field of apologetics. He is the author and he has authored and contributed to more than 20 books, including the

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King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, The God Who Justifies, and The Same -Sex

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Controversy. Would you please welcome with me Dr. James White. On my right and your left,

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I have the retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. As the author of 14 books, he is the most published member of the

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House of Bishops of the Episcopalian Church of the United States. His bestsellers include Rescuing the

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Bible from Fundamentalism, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest release,

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The Sins of Scripture. Would you please welcome with me Bishop John Shelby Spong. I would also like to take the time to state my thanks.

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As many of you know, there was supposed to be a debate a couple weeks ago. Both Bishop Spong and his lovely wife,

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Christine, have been more than enjoyable and friendly and Christian in their attitude to work with in order to arrange this debate.

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So I do thank them for doing that and being so easy to work with. Wouldn't it be great if all

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Christians could act and behave that way? Well, let's talk about the format of this evening's debate.

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First of all, tonight we will have 25 -minute opening statements from either side.

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We will then take a very brief break, okay? Then we will come back.

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We will have 20 -minute rebuttals to either sides. Another quick five -minute break.

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Then we will have a series, and I'm going to make this 15 -minute affirmative cross -examination, negative cross -examination, going back and forth.

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There's four of those. Okay, so that's a total of one hour, okay? And then at the end, we will have 15 -minute closing statements.

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Now at that time, folks, we will open it up for some audience questions. Let me explain to you about how this will work for audience questions.

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First of all, when you do ask a question, please ask your question directly to the person that you need to ask the question to.

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Just don't make it a roundabout question. So if it is for Dr. White, please state that it is for him.

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If it's for Bishop Spong, please state it as that being the case. If you would like to ask a question for Bishop Spong, there is a large flower right over here on the floor, and I'd like you to stand right in the middle of the diamond and make a line back if you have a question for Bishop Spong.

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If you have a question for Dr. White, on this side over here and trailing back, and I will be in the middle and call each of you this way.

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Now once again, you are to ask a question. Please do not engage in debate.

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These gentlemen are here to debate. Your objective is just to ask the question and want or expect them to answer it for you.

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But after you ask that first question, please go back to your seat and allow them to answer the question. Also, please no long rhetorical questions.

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Keep it brief, if possible, under 30 seconds. If you're going on too long or if you want to tell us about your life story,

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I will cut you off, just to let you know that. I may also state that there will be a special blessing by both of the men up here at the forefront of the stage.

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If anyone would like to get me some Starbucks coffee by the end of the night. And so with that, folks, if we could just observe a moment of silence.

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Amen. And thank you. Well, let me first introduce tonight, and the subject and the thesis of tonight's debate is, is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical

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Christianity? And representing the affirmative side, Bishop John Shelby Spahn.

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Thank you very much, and thank you for being here. I know that I'm delighted to be here, and I'd like to say that I appreciate very much the amazing hospitality that the

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Sovereign Cruises Group has supplied. I'm also delighted they want to debate this issue, because by and large in Christian circles, this issue is either shouted about or ignored.

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It's never just debated. I'm also pleased to share the stage this evening with Dr.

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White. I'd like to begin by finding out something about my audience. How many of you are from Florida?

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Raise your hands. How many of you are not from Florida? 30, 60, so maybe 30, 70,

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I guess, got to add up to be 100. And how many of you came here tonight because you were sure that you would agree with everything

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I said? Raise your hands. And how many of you are here tonight because you're sure you would disagree with almost everything

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I said? Raise your hands. I always wanted to know how Daniel felt before he went into the lion's den.

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My hope tonight is a very simple one, and I believe Dr. White shares that hope, namely that only the truth will be spoken and only the truth will be served.

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I want to begin with an autobiographical word. I was raised in a

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Bible -quoting, fundamentalist, evangelical, Episcopal church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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My mother died a fundamentalist. I was taught to honor and respect the sacred scriptures from the earliest moment of my existence.

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I still do. I was also taught to read those scriptures, to read them regularly.

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Carefully and fervently. I suspect I've been through the entire

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Bible word for word at least 25 times. And even more,

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I was taught to interact with those scriptures so that they might inform my life with its expanding knowledge and engage my world as it constantly changed.

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And that's really not easy. Many believers are told that they should not view the

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Bible critically or with scholarly insight. There was actually a time before the

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Protestant Reformation when people were not even allowed to read the Bible for themselves.

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Indeed, there was a time when it was a crime to translate the Bible into a language that people could actually understand.

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In the 15th century, an Englishman named William Tyndall was burned at the stake for translating the

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Bible into English. The fascinating fact of history is that about 80 % of William Tyndall's translation was incorporated into the version of the

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Bible that you and I know as the King James Version. But if you read, study, and know the

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Bible, and also live in a changing world, the way you read and understand the

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Bible will also change. Let me illustrate that. In my evangelical church in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the

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Bible was regularly quoted to justify that prejudice. My church also taught me that women were inferior to men, that that was

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God's design, and the Bible was regularly quoted to justify it.

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My church taught me that it was okay to look down on and even to hate other religious traditions.

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Since in North Carolina we didn't know a great deal about the religions of the world, we'd never met a

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Buddhist or a Hindu, we mostly spent our energy hating Jews. We called them

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Christ killers. They were rather conveniently present. I can remember that most of my prejudice against Jews was taught to me in Sunday school, not always overtly, but covertly.

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For example, I never met a good Jew in my Sunday school material. Every time the phrase, the

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Jews, was used, it was a pejorative, hostile phrase. The people who bore

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Jewish names were Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and Judas Iscariot, and no good words were ever said about them.

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Whenever I saw pictures of these Pharisees or Judas Iscariot, they were always portrayed as dark and sultry, ominous figures.

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The fascinating thing is that in my Sunday school no one ever told me that Jesus was a

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Jew. And when I looked at pictures of Jesus, he didn't look like a Jew to me.

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I thought he was a Swede. He was blonde and blue -eyed and fair -skinned. And it's interesting that even our prejudice covered the image we had of this

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Jesus figure so that we could not see him as he really was in history.

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And strangely enough, my church did not teach me much about homosexuality. Indeed, it didn't teach me anything about it.

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I cannot even recall hearing the word homosexual mentioned until I was 18 years old.

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We just didn't have homosexuals in the South. Or at least we didn't allow them to be visible.

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And when I did learn that there was such a thing as homosexuality, I, without any criticism, accepted my church's definition and my culture's definition.

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And that was twofold. If you were a sort of liberal, kind -spirited person, you thought of homosexuality as a sickness, something which one could not really help.

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So they should be cured if possible, and if it were not possible, they should be pitied.

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It was at least kind. But if you were a conservative or a more hard -line person, homosexuality was regarded as an expression of moral depravity.

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We even called it a lifestyle deliberately chosen by evil or morally depraved people.

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And conversion was the prescription for this diagnosis. And if conversion did not work, then attempts at repression, even persecution, were justified.

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Sometimes persecution reached the point of murder, as Matthew Shepard from Wyoming can attest.

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And, of course, the Bible was quoted to justify this prejudice. The texts are all far too familiar to me today.

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The Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis, the two texts in the Book of Leviticus, Romans 1, and some other scattered verses in the

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Pauline and Pseudo -Pauline corpus, and finally a couple of weird references, one in Jude and one in 2

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Peter. It makes nine in all. As I grew and as my knowledge demanded that I engage these prejudices, that were so deeply planted in my heart by my church, undergirded by my

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Bible, that I had to challenge the way the

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Bible was read in order to rid myself of these debilitating prejudices.

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Not only how the Bible was read, but how the Bible was interpreted. Sometimes I even had to challenge the accuracy of the

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Bible itself. Let me take you through that, if I can, for just a moment.

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In my church in North Carolina, there is a sense in which my life was a struggle to rid itself of these debilitating negativities.

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Prejudice hurts your victim. Prejudice also hurts the prejudiced one because it diminishes your humanity.

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No human being can ever treat another human being as less than fully human without diminishing their own humanity.

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It was my black friends and the civil rights movement that enabled me to challenge my racism.

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And I am pleased about two things. At one point in my life in Tarboro, North Carolina, I had the distinct honor of being named public enemy number one by the

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Ku Klux Klan. I'd like it on my tombstone. The other thing that pleases me so much today is that in my church, the

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Episcopal Church in North Carolina, we have only one bishop today, elected by our people, and that bishop happens to be an

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African American. It was my four daughters that forced me to deal with my sexism.

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Daughters will do that to you. I remember telling one of the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church that the only way the

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Roman Catholic Church will ever address the problem it has with women is for its priests to have daughters.

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The cardinal told me that it would be a long time or a cold day, you know where, before that might happen.

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But daughters have a way of calling you to look at humanity quite differently, and they challenged my sexism.

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My four daughters are today a managing director of a company called Invesco, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of an

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Orlando bank named SunTrust. My second daughter is a lawyer who teaches in the law school at the

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University of Richmond. My third daughter has a Ph .D. in physics from Stanford University and is in the high -tech industry.

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My fourth daughter is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. She's a helicopter pilot, and she has completed three tours of duty in the

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Iraq war. Now, folks, you don't raise daughters like this and quote the Bible where Paul says,

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I forbid a woman to have authority over a man and expect to get away with it. Today I am pleased that 40 percent of my church's clergy are female, and I am particularly pleased that my church just this past summer elected a woman bishop to be the head of the

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Episcopal Church in the United States of America. My prejudices against other religions died when

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I had the privilege of doing dialogues, first with a rabbi in Richmond, then with a

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Buddhist monk in China, and then with three Hindu scholars in Katiem in India, and also when

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I invited a leading Islamic scholar in 1991 to lead my clergy conference so that he could teach our clergy about Islam, something they knew almost nothing about.

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Out of each of these other faith traditions,

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I found my own deeply Christian faith strengthened enormously, expanded.

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I even found that Judaism, my study of Judaism, changed the way that I study and understand the

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Bible, for it is a deeply, deeply Jewish book. Now, my prejudice against homosexuality was challenged first by meeting whole, loving people who were gay or lesbian who didn't fit my stereotype.

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They weren't mentally sick. They weren't morally depraved. And it was the relationship that I had with them that finally forced me to challenge my deeply held homophobia.

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And when I finally made sure that that's something I needed to do, I contacted some doctors in the

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Cornell School of Medicine in New York City, and I worked with them for about six months, reading every report that they had for me to read and talking with them constantly.

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And it was in that process that I became convinced that homosexuality is not a choice, it is not evil,

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I don't even think it is unnatural, since it certainly is present in the world of nature.

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I think of homosexuality as only one more minority in the vast spectrum of our human experience, but so are redheaded people, so are freckle -faced people, so indeed are obese people.

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They're only a minority, and that each of those minorities at some point begins to be made to feel different.

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I learned at Cornell that the overwhelming number of scientists and doctors are now convinced that people do not choose their sexual orientation, they only awaken to it.

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And that was certainly true of me. I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up one day when

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I was 12 or 13, and suddenly girls did not seem obnoxious to me any longer.

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And so I began to do weird things like take baths more frequently, dress better, comb my hair, even use deodorant.

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I'd never done that before I was 12 or 13. I wanted to do anything to make girls feel more comfortable around me.

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I didn't make a decision, and I don't believe that there's any gay lad who ever woke up one day and sat on the side of his bed and said, oh,

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I'll decide to be gay. I really like to be disowned by my family and beat up by my friends, condemned by my church and run out of town, fired from my job, and all the other things we've done to gay and lesbian people.

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You don't choose your sexual orientation. You awaken to it. So it's in the same category with gender, with being left -handed or right -handed.

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I also learned that homosexuals can, in the minds of these doctors and scientists, neither be created by any external event nor can they be cured by religious hysteria.

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And that only suggests that most of us don't know what we're dealing with.

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When people act as if they can cure homosexual people, they're either badly misinformed, in my opinion, or they are seeking to practice medicine without a license, for which they ought to be charged with criminal behavior.

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Another thing I learned is the percentage of homosexual people tends to be the same in every part of the human population, at every place, at every time, in every culture, among all people.

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It can neither be created by having the culture accept it, nor can it be diminished by having the culture oppress it.

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It might appear so, because in an accepting culture, they will come out of the closet.

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In a repressive culture, they will stay deeply, deeply hidden. I also learned, and these

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Cornell doctors were actually doing experiments with white mice to demonstrate it, that homosexuality is a fact in the world of mammals, in the world of nature, where no one seems to think they have the ability to choose.

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I rejoice that when I retired as Bishop of Newark in the year 2000, that I had 35 open, out -of -the -closet gay and lesbian clergy serving congregations in New Jersey.

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Thirty -one of them lived openly with their partners. I never had a complaint about the sexual behavior of any of my gay or lesbian clergy.

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I cannot say that about my heterosexual clergy. I also am pleased that three years after my retirement, my church elected, confirmed, and ordained an openly homosexual man, living in a partnered relationship of at least 14 years' duration when he was elected

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Bishop, to be the Bishop of New Hampshire. To me, that was one more sign that we had moved past another barrier.

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I also had to accept the fact that the Bible is no more competent to make judgments about homosexuality than it was when it declared that menstruation in women was something that demanded rejection.

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It made them unclean. That epileptic people were really demon -possessed.

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That deaf -mutes were those who had had their tongues tied by the devil. Those were attitudes in a world that we know better about today, but they are deeply part of the

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Bible's understanding. What the Bible does teach me, however, and by this

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I have to live, and that is that all people are holy, that all people are made in God's image.

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Whether they are like me or not is relatively unimportant. That all people are loved, that to me is the essence of the

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Christ story. That's what Jesus means. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you are loved by this gracious, loving

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Savior. And the Bible teaches me that all people are called to be not what

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I want them to be or my society asks them to be, but all that they most deeply are, in the full integrity of their own very specific humanity.

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What it means to me to live in the life of the Spirit is that you have the courage to become all that God intended you to be.

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And so the battle about homosexuality in the life of the church is, for me, finally a battle between the love of God and human prejudice, nothing other.

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And I have no doubt as to which of those will win in the long run. Thank you very much.

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Dr. White now has 25 minutes for his opening statements. Well, thank you very much for being here this evening.

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It is an honor to get to address you on a very important subject, a subject that causes us this evening to look at the most basic levels of what we believe about what is right and what is wrong and how we can know what is right and what is wrong.

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The thesis statement this evening asks us, is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical

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Christianity? That, of course, asks us to answer the question, what is biblical Christianity?

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Words have meanings. Christianity has the right over its history to self -definition.

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There are certain fundamental aspects concerning the Christian faith that simply cannot be sacrificed, they cannot be compromised, and it still be the

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Christian faith. If I were to dress as an Islamic imam and I were to say

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I am progressive Islam and yet deny that there is only one true God, Allah, deny that Muhammad was his prophet, and deny that Quran is the word of God, I could not honestly expect any

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Muslim to accept my profession to be a Muslim. There are certain definitional aspects of what it means to be a

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Muslim involved in that type of terminology and language. In the same way, Christianity has certain basic fundamentals that define what

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Christianity is and set it apart from any other religious faith. Without the ability to make that kind of definition, then we all just have one religious faith that really doesn't have any way of communicating anything special about itself.

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So for Christianity, we begin with the fact that Christianity is monotheistic. There is only one true

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God, but the confession of Christians has always been that God is personal.

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God is a person. He is the creator of all things. And because He is personal and the creator of all things,

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He is capable of communicating with His creation. We believe that God is triune,

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And as a result of this, when we talk about man, we can say that man is

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His creature created in the image of God. There is something about man that corresponds to God in His ability to worship

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God and, in fact, to communicate with God. Man's ability to be communicative between ourselves, between ourselves and God, is reflective of the imago dei, that is, the image of God itself.

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Now, God, as the creator, has a purpose in creating. All of creation, the

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Scriptures tell us, exists to glorify Him. Christianity, then, is theocentric.

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It is centered upon God and His purposes. It is not anthropocentric and centered upon the creature man.

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Man is very important, of course. Man is the one being redeemed through the Savior, Jesus Christ.

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But the world misses the whole point of Scripture when it focuses solely upon man as the central element rather than upon God Himself.

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The Scriptures tell us that God has revealed Himself in creation. He has written

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His law upon the hearts of men and women so that their conscience is not merely some cultural construct but is a part of God's own witness to Himself, is a part of that image that He has indelibly stamped upon us.

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The more we learn of science, as long as we do not suppress the knowledge of God, reveals evermore the glory of God.

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In college, I was department fellow, anatomy and physiology. In my senior year, my emphasis was a study of genetics.

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And I was just amazed at the beauty, for example, of the DNA molecule, the transcriptional complex, mRNA and tRNA, and the ribosomal complex that is involved in reading and transcribing this tremendously complex mechanism that simply defies the idea that this simply came about by some random chance, some developments from some primordial soup.

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But God has not created us to be communicative with each other while remaining silent

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Himself. Christians have always believed in God's Word, in God's revelation, and scripturated in the

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Scriptures themselves. His ultimate revelation, of course, is the Incarnation, where the eternal second person of the

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Trinity, the divine Son, entered into His own creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

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As radical as that claim is, there is no Christianity without a claim that God has entered into His own creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

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Now, there is no question in my mind, and I don't think there can be any question in this debate, really, that every writer of the

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Gospels was united in recording for us Jesus' high view of Scripture itself.

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If believing the Bible is God's Word is wrong, then there is no question of this.

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Jesus believed it, and if we follow Him, we will believe it as well. While the

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Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were written over long periods of time in different languages and different contexts, surely no one will argue that a

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God with such power as to create this glorious creation cannot do, as Peter said, referring to Scripture as, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. This is the universal testimony of the writers of Scripture and of Christians down through the centuries.

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The idea that God revealed Himself in Scripture is not new, and it is simply definitional of the

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Christian faith. So the question tonight is fairly easily answered. There is no question to any unbiased reader of the

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Scriptures who does not come to the text with a presupposition of rejecting their consistency, rejecting their author, and rejecting their authority of what they teach regarding the proper expression of God -given sexual desire.

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But before I look at the negative text, let me start with something positive. In Matthew chapter 19 we read,

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Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

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And he answered and said, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

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And said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

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So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

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They said to him, Why then did Moses give to her a certificate of divorce and send her away? He said to them, Because of the hardness of heart

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Moses permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it has not been this way.

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Now please note that according to the Lord Jesus, the male and female roles are creational.

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They are purposeful on God's part. They are not simply random results of an evolutionary process.

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Notice as well, the family unit from which the man comes and the woman comes is a mother and a father.

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You have the God -ordained union of male and female becoming one flesh.

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There is a mutuality. There is a reciprocity that exists between the male and the female that does not exist between a male and a male and a female and a female.

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A male and a male and a female and a female is a mirror image, not a mutuality.

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That union then is impossible between male and male and female and female.

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Those together are never one flesh, but always two. Likewise, the

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Apostle Paul exalted marriage by likening it to the love Christ has for his church.

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The bridegroom for the bride and commanded men in a radical way in the culture in which he was in, commanded men to love their wives and give their lives for them when writing to the church at Ephesus.

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From the beginning, God protected marriage in his law. The departures even seen in men like David and Solomon were a step down from God's ideal revealed in his law as Jesus himself explained.

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And so often the discussion of this particular subject focuses only upon a few passages, such as some of those that Bishop Spong mentioned, but in reality there is a tremendous positive body of teaching in the

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Scriptures regarding the nature of marriage that cannot be applied to any other kind of sexual relationship.

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And so it is not just a couple of texts. It is the united testimony of the entirety of the written word of God.

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Now, in the Old Testament, Leviticus chapters 18, 19, and 20 presents what's called the holiness code, wherein both ceremonial and moral laws are given to God's people to protect them from the practices of the inhabitants of the land into which

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God was bringing them. This is the same section, by the way, from which Jesus quotes, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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And it likewise contains the prohibition of such evils as bestiality, incest, and rape.

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The fact that it contains abiding moral law is unquestionable.

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And clearly the Lord Jesus, inciting from this text repeatedly in light of his own teaching that not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law until all things are fulfilled, believed its moral imperatives had remained intact until his day and would remain normative for anyone who would seriously consider being his disciple.

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In this context, we read these words, Leviticus 18, 22, you shall not lie with a male as one lies the female.

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It is an abomination. Now, I want to give you just a section of the Greek translation of that.

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Why? The Greek septuagint was the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures used in the

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New Testament. And in that text, in Leviticus 18, 22, we have kaimeta arsenos ukoimetheisai koitain gounikos.

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Now, hear those two terms, arsenos, male, and koitain, bed, to lie with.

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Keep that in mind. Just remember those as we look at Leviticus 20, verse 13. If there is a male who lies the male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act.

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They shall surely be put to death. Their blood gildedness is upon them. Once again, note the

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Greek translation, meta arsenos koitain. Arsenos koitain.

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Keep those in mind because there is a reason for that. You see, the

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New Testament, in two places, uses a term that is really quite easily understood if one realizes that the one using the term, in this case, the

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Apostle Paul, taught the Gentile Christians using the Greek Septuagint translation of the

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Hebrew Scriptures. They couldn't read Hebrew, and so when he's writing to the Ephesians or the Corinthians or whatever, they're going to be reading

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Greek, and so he's going to use the Greek Septuagint. He even quotes in the Greek Septuagint where it differs from the

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Hebrew at times. And in 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11, we read these words.

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Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived.

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Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

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Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. Now, in that list, you have effeminate and homosexuals.

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In Greek, oota malakoi, oota arsenikkoitai. Now, that term arsenikkoitai, in the plural there, arsenikkoites in the singular, is the term that entire chapters of books have been dedicated to, all to try to promote the idea that we don't know what it means.

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John Boswell wrote a huge work on the subject of homosexuality. Everybody else just basically quotes him these days and puts their own spin on things.

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And amazingly enough, in scholarly works, wherein every other situation, you would automatically go back to the

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Greek Septuagint to look at the background of Paul's writings and look at what the sources are, especially since this is a term that is not used before Paul.

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In this one instance, all of a sudden, their scholarship falters, and they don't bother to look at the fact that there in Leviticus 20, you have arsenos, you have koitain, and here

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Paul has put them together in one word meaning homosexual, men who lie with men.

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No end of effort has been made to try to obscure the meanings of these words. But it is here where honest, non -political scholarship is seen in distinction from dishonest, politically motivated scholarship.

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The two terms effeminate and homosexual refer to the active and passive partners in homosexual sex.

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Arsenokoitai comes from Paul's teaching from the Septuagint in Leviticus 18, especially

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Leviticus 20, verse 13, and he says, Such were, were, past tense, some of you.

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Now this is consistent with Paul's argument in opening the book of Romans where we read these words,

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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

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Please note, they have the truth, but they are suppressing it. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them.

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For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse, without an apologetic from the original tongue.

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For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible

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God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four -footed animals and crawling creatures.

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Therefore, God gave them over in the lust of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

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For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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Amen. Now let me stop right there. We have a coherent argument. We have an argument that says that God has revealed himself in creation, internally and externally, and that men, when they sin against his revelation, do so willfully, without an excuse and without an apologetic.

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They are suppressing, katakanton, holding down the truth of God that is within them.

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And as a result, there is a twistedness that enters into the creation. They exchange the truth of God for a lie.

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They exchange what should be a gift and an honorable possession for a lie. There is a twistedness in the creation.

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The argument is very clear. You may agree or disagree with it, but there is no reason to avoid what the elements of the argument are.

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Up to this point, it's very clear. But he continues. Verse 26.

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For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

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In the same way also, the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

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And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice.

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They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful.

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And note the last verse. And although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things...

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What are such things? Everything that came before. Everything that came before. And although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

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Now, clearly, to isolate the condemnation of both male and female homosexuality contained in this section and dismiss it as the rantings of a repressed homosexual is to completely and totally miss the entirety of the point of the passage.

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Suppression of truth brings a twisting of the creator -creation distinction. Homosexuality is a judgment wherein

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God gives over those who have already shown a rejection of his right to define their behavior and existence to the expression of their rebellion.

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That is clearly Paul's teaching. And may I note something to you? This is the beginning of what we might call the bad news.

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When Paul writes to the church at Rome, he presents to us the entirety of his gospel.

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And he starts with two -and -a -half chapters of bad news before he ever gets to the good news.

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And when we skip the bad news, the good news becomes an empty cure because we don't understand why it is that God has to go to such lengths to make people right with him.

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Romans chapter 2, more bad news. Romans chapter 3 through verse 19. And only then, only after he's established the need of man for redemption and salvation and forgiveness of sin, for all of those sins, including gossips, people who are dishonest, disobedient to parents.

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What a laughable thing in our society today. Everybody's disobedient to their parents, right? Isn't that the case?

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No, it's not a laughable thing. Not in God's sight, especially when those parents represent

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God's authority within one's life. It's not a laughable thing. No matter what, our society decays the point of calling it.

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That bad news must be understood. And God's wrath against that bad news must be understood before what he has done in Jesus Christ can be understood from the

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Christian scriptures. But there's also other good news. I had to pass over it fairly quickly, but I would like to emphasize what was said by the

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Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. Remember, he went through a list, and he said, do not be deceived.

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That means there is a danger that people could be deceived. They could actually be taught that you can be right with God, but have no concern about how he's revealed his law as to how you are to live.

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You could be deceived into thinking that all you have to do is tip your hat toward God, and he's just going to accept anyone, which, of course, would mean that the cross and the entirety of the incarnation, in fact, the entire message of the

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Bible, would have no meaning whatsoever. And he said, don't be deceived.

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These individuals will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. Is that because God's a big, mean ogre?

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No. It's because God is doing something in this world. According to Titus chapter 2, God is redeeming a peculiar people in Christ Jesus.

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He is redeeming them from their sins, and they are zealous for good deeds. He's making a people who, like the

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Lord Jesus, honor his law and honor his truth. God is doing something.

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He changes people's hearts. He takes out a heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh.

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Why would he have to do that if there truly isn't any depravity within man? And so he tells the

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Corinthians, don't be deceived. If you continue in these lifestyles, and there is a number of things listed there, not just homosexuality, but it is there.

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There's no question of that. There's all sorts of other areas there mentioned. If you continue in these things, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.

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But then what does he say to them? Verse 13 of chapter 6. Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. Such were some of you.

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Every single one of those sins mentioned by the apostle Paul, every single one of them, was represented within the congregation, the church at Corinth.

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But those who heard the gospel message turned from those things and turned to Christ.

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They did not remain in those things and demand that Christ adopt their attitude.

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They did not say, I refuse to accept God's standard, but I want

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God's blessing. No, they did not do that. In repentance, they turned from their old ways and they were washed, they were sanctified, they were justified in the name of the

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Lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of our God. The reason that we need to have this discussion this evening, the reason we need to have this debate this evening, is because there is a movement in our land that tells us that people have the right to redefine

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Christianity. People have the right to say, I will not accept the universal judgment of all of Scripture and of the history of the church in regards to what is and what is not an abomination before God and I will remain in this behavior and I will demand to have the rights of a

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Christian. That would be like having a movement for covetous

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Christians. I'm a covetous Christian, I was just made this way. I just love everything that everybody else has and if I don't have it,

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I want it and that's just the way God made me and you just need to accept me the way I am. Or fornicating

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Christians, adulterous Christians, hateful Christians, whatever it might be.

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I refuse to accept what the word of God says defining what is holiness and what is not.

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We need to understand something. If we accept this kind of perspective, we are saying that Jesus Christ died for nothing.

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If there is no sin, if there is no penalty for sin, if there is no redemption, if there is no substitutionary atonement, then

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Christ died needlessly. There is a beautiful call of grace.

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The gospel of grace is to be preached to every man and every woman no matter what their experience.

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But grace is for those who are repentant. Grace is for those who agree with God.

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Grace is for those who are willing to allow God to be God and me to be his creature under his authority.

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For the one who is repentant, grace is all -sufficient and beautiful.

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And every believer who sits in this place this evening can testify to God's amazing grace and how it has changed our lives.

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Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. White. We will now take a quick three -minute break.

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You have three minutes. Okay, we are going to be starting with Bishop Spong for his 20 -minute rebuttal period.

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Thank you very much. I'm really not interested in rebutting. I don't believe rebutting another person's opinion makes a lot of sense.

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My understanding is that all of us are creatures of our time, of our upbringing, of our inherited values.

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We move out of our inherited values and out of our time only when we can no longer interpret life adequately within that frame of reference.

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And most people's opinions are part of their security system. So when you challenge an opinion, you challenge the very being of that person's life.

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However, I do need to take note of a comment made by Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York before he died.

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Everyone, he said, is welcome to their own opinions. No one, however, is welcome to their own facts.

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Now, when facts are in dispute, there is a way to determine what is true and what is not.

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And that is to submit those facts to a body of experts and to have them go into them.

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That's the way it is in every academic subject. Challenge, debate, go into the facts, and finally determine what the facts are.

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This means that you have to submit your ideas to reputable authorities in the subject.

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In a public dialogue, that's almost impossible to do. And so discussion sometimes turn into shouting matches.

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And various authorities are cited to uphold one or another opinion. And in that process,

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I do not believe any minds are enlightened or any hearts are warmed.

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An audience does not know how to evaluate the quoted authorities. They do not even know how to evaluate the credentials of the authorities that are quoted.

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I'd like to tell you that doctoral degrees are a dime a dozen. I have six of them. I don't know that I earned any of them.

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It just is not a criteria for being a master in the subject. There are people who are quite authoritative with learned degrees who still support the

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Flat Earth Theory. There are people who still think that the battle over evolution has not been fought and won.

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It's over. So let me just file by title the places where my perception of the facts will differ from Dr.

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White's perception of the facts. I venerate the Bible.

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I study it every day of my life, but I do not understand the Bible as somehow the inerrant revelation of God.

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Perhaps I know too much about the Bible for that. The Bible was quoted in 1215 to defend the divine right of kings and to oppose the

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Magna Carta. The Bible lost. The Bible was quoted in the 17th century to condemn

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Galileo and to prove that the earth was the center of a three -tiered universe. The Bible lost.

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The Bible was quoted to justify slavery, and when slavery died, to justify segregation and apartheid.

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And the Bible lost. The Bible was quoted to justify the second -class citizenship of women.

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We didn't allow women to vote in this country until 1920. We didn't allow women to serve in the cabinet of the president of the

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United States until 1932. No woman served on the Supreme Court until Ronald Reagan appointed someone during his term of office.

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No woman has yet been elected president or vice president of the United States, though they have run for both offices.

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So to treat the Bible as if it is a book that can govern behavior for all time is to treat the

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Bible in an improper way. And there are parts of the Bible that are gory. I don't believe in genocide.

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I don't think you believe in genocide. But the prophet Samuel says to King Saul, in the name of God, you are to go out and kill every man, woman, child, suckling, ox, and ass among the

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Amalekites. Is that not what genocide is? I'm not drawn to the picture of a

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God who is so angry with the world that he drowns everybody in the great flood. If I were an

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Egyptian, I would not be drawn to the God who puts plague after plague after plague upon the

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Egyptians, even drowning them in the Red Sea and being portrayed as rejoicing on the other side.

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Surely the Egyptians are also the children of God. So there's a very big difference in the way we read the

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Scriptures. I would also disagree with the opinion of Dr.

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White that Christianity is set in some sort of firm way. The doctrine of the Trinity is a 4th century doctrine.

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I don't think Paul understood anything about that. The Christian faith is an evolving faith, not because God is evolving, but because our understanding of God is evolving.

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The Bible, I know, was written over a period of about 1 ,000 years. The earliest part of the

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Old Testament is dated around 1 ,000 B .C. The latest part of the

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New Testament is dated around 135 A .D. That's 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 years ago.

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Now, those authors were relating oral tradition that had gone on for much longer.

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Most scholars today think that Abraham lived about 1850 before the Common Era, but the stories about Abraham were not written until the 10th century before the

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Common Era. So everything we know about Abraham filtered through word -of -mouth oral transmission for 900 years.

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You suppose it was not changed? You suppose it didn't reflect different attitudes, prejudices, lacks of understanding?

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Moses lived around 1250 before the Common Era. It was about 300 years later that the books that we call the

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Books of Moses were actually written. And even when you come to our Lord, most scholars would agree that he came to the end of his earthly life around 30 of this

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Common Era, but the Gospels about him were written between 70 and 100 of this

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Common Era, 40 to 70 years later, written in a language that Jesus didn't speak.

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We don't have any of the original copies, and remember they were all hand -copied until you get about the 4th century.

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We have some fragments that are earlier than that, but no full books. So every book of the

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Bible was hand -copied any number of times. You suppose the scribes always got it right?

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I don't know. But even the translations differ very, very widely.

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Even the heart of the Christian story, which I deeply affirm, that somehow, in some way, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we confronted the presence of the

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Holy God. That's the heart of the Christian faith. But if you go back and look at the Bible, the

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Gospels, the Pauline Corpus, you'll discover that the way they explained how that Holy God got into Jesus differs in a wide variety of ways.

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What we call the Christian creeds weren't written until the 4th century. Most people didn't know that until they read the Da Vinci Code.

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They learned a lot of things in the Da Vinci Code, half of them wrong. But they learned them anyway. Perhaps the most important thing that I think we need to look at is that our understanding of the origins of human life is dramatically different today from the view of the biblical myth.

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The biblical story says that God created human life perfect in God's image.

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And then human life corrupted the perfection of God's world by disobedience. And we broke the wonder and beauty of God's creation.

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We were destined to live in Eden. But because of our sinfulness, we now have to live east of Eden, yearning always to get back, but unable to get back because, that myth says, an angel with a sword guards the door.

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You cannot go home. And so we've explained human evil by the fall.

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And we've said that human life is so desperately lost, wretched, abominable, without redeeming grace, that only

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God could finally rescue us. And we tell the story of Jesus in terms of God's rescue operation.

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But what do you do with that when you live on the other side of Charles Darwin? And Charles Darwin says, there never was a time we were created perfect.

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And you can hardly fall into sin if you don't start out perfect. But what we have been doing is evolving into higher and higher consciousness.

01:00:01

Does that mean there's no sin? Of course not. Human beings are capable of the grossest sins. But is the sin because there's something corrupt about our nature?

01:00:11

Or is the sin because we are evolving creatures dedicated to our own survival and therefore radically self -centered?

01:00:18

And so we're always trying to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. And is the cure for that to be rescued?

01:00:27

Or is the cure for that to be loved into the power of being so deeply and fully human that you can give your life away in love for another person?

01:00:39

Is Jesus the rescuer of the fallen? Or is Jesus the call of God and the empowerment of God to love us into being all that God meant for us to be?

01:00:52

I submit that those are very different ways to look at the Christ story. And I'm quite happy to have those ways compete with one another.

01:01:01

And finally, I would say that if authentic Christianity demands believing that the

01:01:08

Bible is somehow inerrant or infallible, then the great mass of the

01:01:15

Christians of the world aren't there anymore. It's not true of the great Roman Catholic scholars like Raymond Brown who taught for years at the

01:01:24

Union Theological Seminary or Edward Skillebex or Carl Jung. And it's certainly not true of Protestant scholarship.

01:01:33

I've studied at Cambridge. I've studied at Oxford. I've studied at Edinburgh. I've taught at Harvard. I've studied and lectured at Union.

01:01:41

And that point of view is not even on the table in those places. Now, those people could all be wrong.

01:01:48

But is it likely that the world of Christian scholarship has been static and that we can still use this

01:01:55

Bible that I treasure but has been used in very destructive ways throughout the centuries?

01:02:03

To me, there's a deeper way to read the Bible, and that's to see Jesus as always an expression of the love of God and always on the side of the marginalized, the weak, the inept, the rejected.

01:02:17

I see him as loving the Gentiles who were rejected by the Jews. I see him as reaching out to the

01:02:23

Samaritans. I see him as allowing the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual discharge that the world called unclean.

01:02:30

I see him standing between the woman taken in the act of adultery and her accusers. I see him embracing the rotting flesh of the leper.

01:02:40

The Jesus I know is always on the side of the weak and the marginalized and the victim. And somehow there's so much of religion that is always still, even after the great redemptive act of God in Christ, always still seeking to build ourselves up.

01:02:58

And we do it by having a victim. Sometimes our victim is a person of color. Sometimes our victim is a person of another religious tradition.

01:03:07

Sometimes our victim is a woman. Sometimes our victim is a gay or lesbian person whose only sin, in my opinion, is that they were born with a sexual orientation different from the majority.

01:03:23

Thank you. Thank you, Bishop Spong. Dr. White now has 20 minutes for his rebuttal statements.

01:03:38

Thank you very much. This evening we have a clash of worldviews. We have very different understandings of what's called epistemology, how we know what we know or whether we can know anything at all.

01:03:53

I think this was just illustrated in what was said concerning the Bible. We had a number of instances where the

01:04:01

Bible was quoted in defense of X, Y, or Z, the rights of kings or whatever, and we were told the

01:04:07

Bible lost. Well, I don't think that the Bible has anything to do with the people who quote it.

01:04:14

I do not understand how it is that misusing a written source is the same as demonstrating that that written source is in error or that written source is unclear or that written source somehow lacks authority.

01:04:27

I have Bishop Spong's books here on my desk. If I were to quote them out of context, if I were to quote them out of their historical context, if I were to quote them in such a way that did not represent his original meaning, would that have anything whatsoever to do with Bishop Spong's thesis?

01:04:42

Would it have anything to do with the correctness or incorrectness of his writings? Well, of course not.

01:04:48

So why is it that we say, well, the Bible was quoted to support this or the Bible has been quoted to support this kind of outrageous behavior?

01:04:56

How does that have anything to do with whether the Bible is in fact the Word of God and whether it is in fact inspired and inerrant, as Jesus clearly believed that it was?

01:05:05

What does that have to do with any of that? Misciting an authoritative source does not have any reflection logically or rationally upon that source itself.

01:05:15

Now, I don't think that this evening is just a matter of opinions. I believe that God has spoken. He has spoken with clarity, and therefore, even in matters of religion, you can actually know right and wrong.

01:05:27

I reject the idea that we are stuck in a subjective morass where everything is just simply a matter of your opinion versus my opinion.

01:05:35

We live in a society today where when it comes to scientific things, we can say with certainty that such and such has been decided.

01:05:43

For example, we were just told that even if you've read all the intelligent design literature, even if you've read all the genetic literature about the absolute impossibility of life developing from non -life, that that's no longer on the table.

01:05:55

That issue has already been settled. It certainly hasn't been settled for me, and it probably hasn't been settled for a number of you as well.

01:06:01

But we're told that in that area, we can have absolute certainty. But when it comes to one area, and that is religion, every opinion is equal to every other opinion.

01:06:12

And that assumes one thing. God has remained silent. And there is no

01:06:18

Christian that I can think of for the first at least 1 ,800 years, and we can go back before that to the

01:06:24

Jews before them, who actually believed God had ever been silent. God has revealed his truth, and therefore we can know what is right and what is wrong in these particular areas.

01:06:36

Now, just a few things in the brief amount of time that we have together. Bishop Spong said that in his upbringing, we called

01:06:45

Jews Christ -killers. I also was raised in a very fundamentalist, conservative background myself.

01:06:51

I never heard anyone called a Christ -killer. I was never taught to hate Jews. My first best friend, the first person

01:06:58

I can remember, at the age of about three and a half, who was my best friend, was named

01:07:04

Kevin. And Kevin's dad was the biggest, blackest man I have ever seen in my life.

01:07:10

If he closed his eyes and didn't grin, you wouldn't see him at midnight. He was as black as pitch, and he was a policeman, too.

01:07:16

So he scared me to death. He had a gun, and he was about 6 '5", and massive. And his mom was albino.

01:07:24

And that made Kevin somewhere in between. And from that point on, I couldn't be a racist.

01:07:29

I couldn't understand how anybody could be, because my first best friend, Kevin, wasn't the same color as me, and so who cares?

01:07:36

So I wasn't raised in this context of where, allegedly, the Bible is used to abuse people in this way and that way.

01:07:44

And when I hear it being said, well, the Bible was quoted to suppress women, you know, sometimes when the

01:07:49

Bible recognizes there's a difference between men and women, people think that that's somehow suppressing them. There's a difference between men and women.

01:07:55

Okay? And I am very, very glad, for example, there's a difference between me and my lovely wife. My lovely wife is lovely.

01:08:01

I am not. Okay? My lovely wife loves shoes.

01:08:07

If we both had the same number of shoes, we would have no place to live in our house. I am glad there's a difference.

01:08:14

And my lovely wife would not be up here debating tonight. She leaves that to me. Differences and recognizing those

01:08:20

God -given differences is not the same as suppression. There is no basis in God's Scripture for any kind of hatred based upon these things.

01:08:32

Bishop Spong spoke of a deeply held homophobia. I don't know what that is. I think that is one of the worst terms that has ever been defined and used as a bludgeon in this debate.

01:08:42

If you believe that God has spoken with clarity in Scripture and you believe that with a clear conscience and you believe that out of conviction and you really do believe that homosexuality reduces

01:08:53

Christian life, that it reduces human life, not just Christian life, human life, what does that make you?

01:09:00

Homophobic? That's an unfair word that simply should be dismissed from the vocabulary.

01:09:07

If a person comes to these conclusions from honest examination of the facts, don't call them homophobic.

01:09:13

That's not fair, and I don't know where that deeply held homophobia came from, and I'm sorry that that was a part of something in the

01:09:18

South. I was raised in Minneapolis, for crying out loud where it's nice and cold, but I didn't experience that in any way, shape, or form.

01:09:27

We were told that homosexuality can never be cured by religious hysteria, but what was

01:09:35

Paul referring to in 1 Corinthians 6? He says, such were some of you. Paul is referring to the fact that there were some people who had been homosexuals in the church at Corinth, and they were no longer.

01:09:46

What had changed? If this was a God -ordained activity, what had changed?

01:09:54

I would submit to you that we're told, right there in verse 11, they were washed, they were regenerated, the heart of stone had been taken out, a heart of flesh had been given, and healing had taken place.

01:10:06

Now, we were also told, well, you know, the Bible is no more competent to judge homosexuality than all these other things, but the list that was given to us really wasn't a list of moral activities.

01:10:19

For example, we had epilepsy and deaf -mutes that were listed. There is a category error there.

01:10:25

There's no clear parallel between, even if you rejected the idea that a demonic force could make someone a deaf -mute,

01:10:32

I'm not, we haven't been given any evidence that a demonic force could do that, and certainly we're not assuming, are we, that because a demonic force could create a deaf -mute, that every deaf -mute is because of demonism, are we?

01:10:45

I mean, we need to think logically and clearly here, or we may end up rejecting a divine revelation on the basis of our own ignorance of what it's actually saying, and our prejudice is being read into the text itself.

01:10:55

We were told that all people are holy. Well, all people are the creation of God. All people, indeed, are created by God, but that does not mean all people are holy, in point of fact, because the fallen

01:11:05

Adam, we are told, that all people are unholy and need to be born into the family of God.

01:11:11

They are not a natural part of the family of God until they have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

01:11:16

Now, you can reject that. You can say there's no personal God that's ever said that. You can reject the Word of God however you want, but we need to at least accept that that, in fact, is what the

01:11:26

Scriptures teach, and they do so consistently, not merely inconsistently. We were told that the debate is really between the love of God versus human prejudice.

01:11:35

I reject those categories. I do not believe that that is the case at all. In fact, I would submit to you that if what the

01:11:41

Scriptures say are true, then the only way to show the love of God is to speak

01:11:47

His truth. If you do not speak His truth, you are not showing love for anyone but yourself because you're afraid to speak the truth.

01:11:56

You want to be so accepted by others that you are willing, in fact, to dishonor

01:12:02

God by changing His truth. This isn't a matter of the love of God versus human prejudice. I am not prejudiced against homosexuals any more than I'm prejudiced against covetous people.

01:12:13

My Scriptures tell me, and they do so consistently, and when I look at the world and I examine it scientifically, and I examine the scientists, and I see that my goodness, scientists have prejudices and biases too.

01:12:27

Isn't that amazing? Look at Richard Dawkins today. Richard Dawkins, a great geneticist. We can both look at the exact same genetic information and come to completely different conclusions.

01:12:37

That man hates religion. He thinks religion is the source of every evil under the sun. He's not unprejudiced, and yet the world would say, well,

01:12:47

Richard Dawkins, there is a great evolutionary scientist. And yet when a non - religious person says, well, let's talk about where life came from and the

01:12:56

DNA molecule, you're obviously biased because of religion. You know what? Non -religion is just as much of a bias as religion can be in these areas.

01:13:05

We're told we're all creatures of our time. Yes, we're all impacted by our time. No one denies that, but it does not follow that God cannot give a revelation that speaks across all generations and all languages and all cultures.

01:13:19

You see, if we will allow for the Word of God to be consistent with itself, if we will engage in proper exegesis, if we will examine the original context, we'll examine the original languages, then we will reduce the danger of our inserting our biases and prejudices as if they are in fact

01:13:35

God speaking. That's why we have to handle the Word of God with accuracy. Certainly it is true that we can let our traditions override, our prejudices and our biases override, but the fact that you can abuse the scriptures is not an argument against the clarity and inspiration of those scriptures.

01:13:54

We are told that when facts are at dispute, what you do is you subject them to the experts. God's truth has never been a matter of majority opinion.

01:14:03

When you subject truth to the experts, and the experts have a reason for saying X, Y, or Z, doesn't history tell us that the truth is going to be abused?

01:14:12

Very often the truth is in the minority, not in the majority. And when it comes to the issue of what the scriptures teach, so far to be honest with you,

01:14:20

I've not heard any rebuttal of the fact that that is what Leviticus says, and I've read

01:14:26

Bishop Spong's books, he recognizes that is what Leviticus says, and Leviticus is wrong. And that is what

01:14:32

Romans 1 says, but Paul was a repressed gay man, and so he should reject what he had to say.

01:14:38

Well, I think we need in this debate to show respect for the truth and not worry about my feelings, his feelings, let's put the truth out there, and let's let you, the audience, you here are the only judge panel, you'll notice there's no panel of judges here.

01:14:54

You're the only ones who are listening to what we're saying, and it is up to you to decide the facts of this particular issue.

01:15:01

Now, we had a number of things that were just stated. For example, Bishop Spong said that he is not drawn to such a

01:15:07

God who, for example, would commit genocide. The flood story, the Amalekites.

01:15:13

Well, you know what? A lot of people are not drawn to the picture of a God who punishes sin.

01:15:20

There's no question about that. Many people reject the idea that God would ever punish sin.

01:15:28

But let's be very clear about one thing. You cannot read the Bible and not come to the conclusion that from Genesis to Revelation, God is just and holy.

01:15:39

And what makes the story of Christ so tremendously amazing is the backdrop of the reality of God's wrath, knowing that that wrath is mine and deserved, and yet, knowing that,

01:15:55

He has shown me mercy, knowing what I deserve. Knowing in my heart what

01:16:02

I deserve because I have trampled underfoot His law, and I've done so knowingly.

01:16:07

My conscience has testified to me. I knew lying was wrong. I knew sexual sin was wrong.

01:16:14

I knew hatred was wrong. I knew mistreating another person who's created the image of God was wrong, but I did it anyway.

01:16:20

High -handed sins, and yet God shows mercy to me?

01:16:26

We all are in need of that mercy. I am drawn to that God only because God has changed my heart.

01:16:36

We're told the Egyptians must not like the Exodus story. The only problem is there were some

01:16:41

Egyptians that went with the Israelites and they experienced redemption. You see, the issue was whose God are you going to be worshiping?

01:16:48

Idolatry is a serious thing with God. It's not just simply a matter of doing the proper worship things. Idolatry is whether the teacup made by God is going to reject the made -by sticker on His bottom and say,

01:17:01

I'm not going to do that. I'm not made by anyone, or I was made by someone else. It's rebellion. It's rebellion against our

01:17:08

Creator. That's what idolatry is, and God takes it very seriously. Some of you know,

01:17:14

I'm not sure if we have any here, but yes, I see it over there. I wrote a book called The Forgotten Trinity, and the entire book is on how if you believe all of Scripture and only

01:17:24

Scripture, you're forced to be a biblical Trinitarian. It's not just a fourth -century doctrine. In fact, if you want to go to Ignatius, who writes in the very first generation after the

01:17:33

Apostles, we can discuss the fact that he affirms all of those basic things, too. It wasn't just something that developed at that period of time.

01:17:41

They say Christianity is a developing religion. Well, developing in what way? Developing ever greater understandings of the rich treasure of Revelation that's been given to us?

01:17:53

Sure. But developing the sense of once being a monotheistic religion where God is personal and reveals himself to becoming an impersonal

01:18:01

God where the Trinity is now, life is good, life is loved, be all you can be?

01:18:07

That's not development. That's mutation. And that's not coming from the same foundation of what real development would be.

01:18:17

We need to be very clear about our language when we use this kind of statement. We were asked, you've got to realize, there was this time of oral tradition before the first writing of the

01:18:27

Old Testament documents. Do you suppose that it could have been changed? Well, I ask you, do you suppose that God's big enough that when

01:18:34

Paul says all scripture is theanoustos, it is God -breathed, that it's the actual scriptures that are written that are

01:18:40

God -breathed, you think God's big enough to use his own creation which he himself made to give us the

01:18:47

Word of God as a guidance for his people if that's his entire purpose in this creation? Only if we approach this from a naturalistic, materialistic perspective do we come to those conclusions that, well, maybe it might have been changed.

01:18:59

We were told the Gospels were written 7 -100 A .D. 70 -100 A .D. I'm sorry, that doesn't fit with the fact that the

01:19:06

Temple is clearly still standing in the Gospels. You have to assume, again, a naturalistic materialistic worldview to look at that.

01:19:14

There's a book called Rediscovering Jesus. I'm not sure if we have any on any of the tables around here, but excellent discussion of these particular things.

01:19:21

There is no reason to put them that late. We're told we have no originals. That's quite true. And that the 4th century is the earliest.

01:19:27

That is not true. While we have fragments before that, we also have, for example, the

01:19:32

Bodmer Papyri, P46, P66, P75 that are as early as the 3rd century, and they are of complete books.

01:19:39

Textual critical study is one of my favorite areas of scholarly pursuit. And then we said, well, there's textual variance.

01:19:47

Are we to believe the scribes always got it right? Well, there's also a book over there called The King James Only Controversy.

01:19:53

It discusses the whole area of how we can know, in light of the richness of the manuscript tradition that has been provided to us, that God has preserved

01:20:02

His Word, and there is no other work of antiquity that even comes close to the New Testament in the amount of information that is provided to us, and the confidence that we can have in the text provided to us in our modern translations today.

01:20:17

Truly, we come down to whether God has spoken, and if you do not believe in a personal

01:20:23

God, and during the cross -examination I'm going to read to Bishop Spong and ask him, do you believe in a personal

01:20:29

God? Because you've said in your writings, I believe in a non -theistic God, a non -personal God. The theistic

01:20:35

God of Christian ethics is dead. If you do not believe that God speaks and has spoken, then there's no way that you can affirm anything about biblical

01:20:43

Christianity because there can't be such a thing as biblical Christianity. If you don't believe that God has spoken, then you cannot believe that there is any type of objective morality to which you can refer.

01:20:54

You can have your opinions, somebody else can have their opinions, but there can be no objective morality whatsoever.

01:21:01

That is a dark chasm to make a leap into. We've seen what has happened in the past when cultures have dropped into that abyss.

01:21:10

We are told that man was not created perfect. We're evolving creatures and that we are advancing in our enlightenment.

01:21:23

When I look at the world around me, that's not what I see. I don't see that.

01:21:30

I see man willing to abandon all sorts of clear revelation from God.

01:21:37

When I look at the scientific evidence, I see a very strong political movement that controls certain things, that says, we won't even discuss that type of thing, we won't even have debates about that type of thing.

01:21:49

We are viewing a fundamentally different way of looking at man.

01:21:56

Either man is the creation of God, and therefore God has the right to define human behavior, or man is simply a highly evolved mammal and therefore there is no standard of human behavior.

01:22:11

The only standard of human behavior that can be created there becomes maybe a majority rule. There would be many atheistic philosophers, naturalistic, materialistic philosophers who would say that homosexuality is wrong because from the naturalistic, atheistic worldview, the best thing you can do for you is get as many of your genes in the next generation as possible.

01:22:31

That's how you spread your genotype. So homosexuality would be a bad thing from their perspective.

01:22:37

Why isn't that wrong? Once you have no clear word from God, it's all a matter of subjective opinion at that point.

01:22:47

Well, I feel this, I feel that. Is that what God has left us to?

01:22:52

Can we even talk about God in that context? That's the question we have to ask ourselves this evening. Thank you very much.

01:23:01

Thank you, Dr. White. Well, our next series will be starting with Bishop Spong will be asking

01:23:10

Dr. White 15 minutes of questions. It is within that time that Dr.

01:23:17

White will need to answer. Thank you. 15 minutes of questions is a lot of time.

01:23:23

I must say that was the longest 20 -minute rebuttal I've ever listened to. About 40 minutes, wasn't it?

01:23:30

And I felt you were only just getting warmed up at that moment. One of the things that language is a great big barrier.

01:23:43

And you constantly juxtapose some things, like he doesn't believe in a personal

01:23:49

God, or at least that's the implication. That's absolutely wrong. There's an enormous difference between what

01:23:55

I call a non -theistic understanding of God and not believing in a personal God. You seem to have confused those two things.

01:24:05

I guess what I really would like to ask you to try to clarify for me is how do you know who

01:24:12

God is? I know what I believe my experience of God is, and it's intentionally personal.

01:24:21

But I don't believe that that leads me to a place where I can say who God is. I don't believe that an insect could ever describe what it means to be a bird.

01:24:32

I don't believe a horse could ever describe what it means to be a human being. And I think it's almost idolatrous when human beings act as if they can describe who

01:24:42

God is. I think you can only describe what your experience of God is, and then you have to be humble enough to admit that you might even be delusional.

01:24:52

For example, on the Trinity, I have no trouble pronouncing myself a

01:24:59

Trinitarian. I absolutely believe that I experience God as wholly other, depth within, and incarnate in the life of this world, and most particularly incarnate in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and that's what the

01:25:13

Trinity means to me. But while I can call myself with great ease a Trinitarian, I don't think that I can then say, therefore,

01:25:21

God is a Trinity. That is, God has now been defined in the categories of my experience. God might have sixteen sides, and I've only experienced three of them.

01:25:30

So I find that God language gets very, very destructive. So I guess I'd like to start first by asking you, how do you know who

01:25:38

God is that you can dismiss anybody that sort of uses different words as no longer believing in the same

01:25:44

God that you believe in? Well, there were a number of statements made there far beyond a single question.

01:25:50

First of all, how do I know who God is? I believe that God has spoken with clarity because it is

01:25:56

His purpose to reveal Himself to His people. The whole purpose of God is that we grow in the grace and knowledge of the

01:26:02

Lord Jesus Christ, and if that is in fact His purpose, then it would follow that He has provided a revelation that is clear enough to accomplish the purpose that He has established for us.

01:26:12

And so, if God has spoken, then we can know only as much as He has revealed.

01:26:18

I do not claim to know more than what God has revealed of Himself, but I believe that His revelation is sufficient for me to be able to say

01:26:26

God has revealed Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He has not revealed Himself as Shivna or Vishnu or any of these other gods because the scriptures specifically state that the gods of the peoples are idols.

01:26:39

And contrast the true God, that is the whole message of the prophets, is that the true God can be identified by certain things.

01:26:45

If His revelation isn't clear enough to know those things, there is no way to make heads or tails out of what the prophets were talking about.

01:26:52

And I want to be very accurate, Bishop Spong. You began by basically saying that I've misrepresented you.

01:26:58

I was referring to Christianity Must Change or Die pages 166 through 167.

01:27:07

You said you didn't bring your books. Spong. It's the Bible and me. With text. But if you want to check the validity of what

01:27:14

I'm about to quote, what I understand you saying is if we can grasp these possibilities or at least be willing to explore these tiny cracks leading to a different way of thinking about God, and if the holy

01:27:24

God can be understood not as a person but as the depth and ground of life itself, then the ethical task of the church becomes quite different.

01:27:34

And you also said the theistic God whose will constituted the ethics of the past is dead.

01:27:40

So my search for the basis of ethics to guide me beyond the exile drives me back to the same area where a non -theistic

01:27:47

God was found and where Christ was redefined. And so I was using your own language there.

01:27:53

Well, let me suggest you're using it improperly. It's one thing to say God is not a person and another to say

01:28:00

God is not personal. A person is a human category.

01:28:06

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes said that if horses had gods they would look like horses. So all human beings' gods inevitably look like human beings and so we define them after the analogy of human life.

01:28:17

All I'm trying to say is that's our experience of God. That is not what God is. And for us to claim that we can announce the nature of God is to be idolatrous.

01:28:28

You began your statement by saying His when you refer to God.

01:28:33

Now I don't want to argue the language barrier but inevitably we have defined God as male over our history.

01:28:41

And I think that's a very inadequate assumption about God. I don't think God is male or female.

01:28:46

I think God is beyond the categories of human sexuality. So that, you know, even that language becomes the language of a kind of religious imperialism that says

01:28:58

I understand God and anybody that doesn't understand God the way I understand God is wrong.

01:29:04

I do not spit upon the gods of other people. I want to walk hand in hand with Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists.

01:29:11

Not that I could become a Buddhist or a Hindu or any of those things. That would not even be within the scope of my possibility.

01:29:18

But I would say that God is working in those systems, calling those people into a new humanity the same way

01:29:25

I think God is calling me and someday I would hope that we might arrive at the place where you and I having plumbed the depths of our own

01:29:33

Christian tradition would sit down and meet with Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists who had plumbed the depths of their tradition and each of us would say to the other, this is the gift that I have to bring you that I have received through my

01:29:47

Christian faith and I want to share it with you. Is that a question? Well, it's almost as long as your rebuttal.

01:29:57

Yeah, you know the idea that I can stand in judgment. I stand firmly within my faith tradition.

01:30:03

I do not stand in judgment on anybody else's faith tradition and so I find that difficult and I wonder where it comes to you that you have the ability to judge others that disagree with your point of view as somehow incompetent or inadequate.

01:30:18

Well, once again, if God has spoken and he has given us a revelation, that revelation tells us that this

01:30:23

God exists and that God does not. Your own religious tradition, the 39 articles of the Anglican Church, do judge other perspectives.

01:30:31

I don't know if you believe those articles or not. Thank God we got rid of those a long time ago. And so I don't know what you mean by your religious tradition if you reject what was only a few hundred years ago and I'm standing in a tradition that goes back to Moses.

01:30:43

And that tradition says that God has revealed himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not as Baal and not as Ashtoreth and I really wonder if in the days of Joshua or in the days of Samuel if you would have likewise said to them, you can't judge the

01:30:59

Baals, you can't judge the Ashtoreth. That is clearly the tradition the

01:31:04

Judeo - the Judeo -Christian tradition has said God has revealed himself in a definitive fashion that allows us to know who he is and allows us to know how we would live our lives if we were to be pleasing to him.

01:31:19

I don't know what tradition you're referring to within Christianity that would say otherwise.

01:31:24

Well let me suggest that there's an enormous difference between a

01:31:30

God who will send plague after plague after plague upon the Egyptians and you may say that God is punishing sin but that assumes that all the

01:31:37

Egyptians were sinners. And that God would condemn to death the firstborn in every

01:31:43

Egyptian household on the night of the Passover which assumes that the firstborn must have been particularly sinful.

01:31:49

That you can assume those things and then you follow this God who stops the sun in the sky so that Joshua can kill more of the

01:31:57

Amorites and then orders the death of the Amalekites and how do you square that with the

01:32:02

Jesus who said you've got to love your enemies and you've got to bless those who persecute you? Can I answer that? Sure.

01:32:07

Okay. I appreciate the opportunity of answering that. I put those two together by allowing all of scripture to speak and the same

01:32:14

Jesus who said to love your enemies also spoke more about hell and God's wrath and punishment of coming upon sinners than he did about heaven and he affirmed his belief repeatedly in the law and the prophets and said that anyone who taught otherwise would be leased in the kingdom of heaven.

01:32:32

And so what I understand is what you said, you said unless you assume that all Egyptians are sinners.

01:32:37

Yes, sir. I believe as the Apostle Paul taught that we all fell in Adam and that as such we are as David said born in sin and under the condemnation and wrath of God and therefore every day that he gives to any individual without his wrath breaking forth upon them is an act of mercy and grace, common grace extended to them and that he uses that to call his people unto himself.

01:32:59

And so I believe that I have a very consistent understanding of the prophets and apostles at that point and I do believe that the

01:33:07

Amalekites were engaged in gross idolatry and sexual sin and if God had destroyed them with an earthquake not many people would be arguing about that but since he used

01:33:17

Israel as his instrumentality somehow that means that he's a terrible, horrible nasty

01:33:22

God. I don't agree with that partial reading of the text.

01:33:28

Let me press that then. A hurricane struck the city of New Orleans with enormous wrath, devastation and a lot of pain and a lot of death to a lot of people.

01:33:41

A tsunami struck the Indian Ocean, perhaps 350 ,000 people killed.

01:33:48

Did God direct that? Could our prayers have stopped that hurricane?

01:33:53

Could our prayers have stopped that tsunami? What kind of God is it that you would attribute the power to do these things and also have to accept the judgment that God must have wanted all those people to die because they were evil?

01:34:07

I'm perfectly aware that everybody's evil but the Jews didn't seem to incur the wrath of God in the same way the

01:34:13

Egyptians did. And I think the God is the God of the Egyptians. Yeah, I think actually the people of Israel did.

01:34:19

If you read Isaiah chapter 10, they did bring the wrath of God and the God who controls hurricanes and tsunamis is the

01:34:25

God described in Scripture who is said to accomplish his will and his purpose in the heavens and upon earth.

01:34:31

The one who rules over the winds and the waves and the one who brings his wrath to bear and he uses that to awaken people to their sin and to their rebellion and he did so throughout the history of Israel.

01:34:43

He did so in the plagues upon Egypt and we have a fundamental disagreement on the basis of the

01:34:49

Scriptures. But is it not the case that the very Scriptures that we're talking about, for example in the

01:34:54

Exodus, make reference to the idolatry of the Egyptians? Yeah, but I'm almost, that's almost at the place where we're two ships passing in the night.

01:35:06

You are suggesting that a book written between two and three thousand years ago contains all the truth that we need.

01:35:15

I don't know where that comes from. I didn't say that. I've never said that. If I'm wrong,

01:35:20

I apologize but my sense is that you're assuming there's no truth outside that book. No, no sir.

01:35:25

I would never ever even suggest such a thing. The DNA molecule was not revealed in the text of Scripture. You all stand corrected. Let me go to another thing.

01:35:31

You said that if we don't have all these rules we're loosed into some sort of morass of relativity.

01:35:39

Is that fair? Yes sir. If God has not spoken then we cannot have certainty on what his will is for our lives in any aspect of our lives.

01:35:48

Yes sir. Well, you know, for years we seem to think that women were of such insignificance that a man could have as many of them as he could afford and that's deep in the

01:35:57

Biblical story. The idea of God seeing man and woman together as a unit reflecting

01:36:03

God isn't Biblical in a lot of places. That just, you know,

01:36:08

I think you need to see the story in a lot. I happen to be deeply committed to monogamous and faithful relationships.

01:36:16

I think there's a higher humanity revealed when a man and a woman or an, I would also argue that two partners of the same sex could commit themselves so totally to one another that they would live into the full humanity of the other and expand the full humanity of the other and that that's what that's what we are called to do and to be and my standard for judgment and it is a quite objective standard is that any act that diminishes the humanity of another child of God is wrong and any act that enhances the life of another child of God is right and that's a fairly objective standard.

01:36:52

Well, if that was a question then my response would be once again only

01:36:57

God can define what enhancing life is. John chapter 10, Jesus said

01:37:02

I am come they might have life, they might have it more abundantly and that's within the context in John chapter 10 of his bringing people into a relationship with him inclusive of obedience to his word and that word includes

01:37:15

God's revelation about how we are to behave with one another. You had just said that you see in scripture this idea of monogamy and that there are places where that was violated.

01:37:26

Yes, and look what happened. Look what happened to David because of his multiple wives. Look at what happened to about Absalom and Solomon.

01:37:33

The fact of the matter is Jesus himself interpreted the Genesis account for us in the text that I read from my presentation and he did say male and female.

01:37:41

He did not say male and male and female and female. He specifically excluded that. He said male and female together become one flesh and that in point of fact was his interpretation of Genesis and the earliest accounts of Genesis so we'd have to believe that Jesus Christ was either ignorant of just how these texts should no longer be believed 2 ,000 years later.

01:38:04

Bishop Spong, I just believe that 2 ,000 years isn't a long time for God. It's not and if we know what we know about our evolutionary history, this world has been here between 4 .6

01:38:14

and 4 .7 billion years. Human like creatures if not fully human have been here for about 2 million years and yet we're suggesting that a book that human beings wrote between 2 and 3 ,000 years ago contains the ultimate and only saving truth of God.

01:38:34

I think God is bigger than that book. I think God is bigger than any religion. I don't think God's a Christian. I don't think

01:38:40

God's a Jew. I don't think God's a Muslim but I think Christianity is a pathway through which I am privileged to walk into the mystery and wonder of God and I think

01:38:49

I meet God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and I don't know how to say it any differently than that and I'm happy just to state the fact that you and I will we start with different premises, we wind up with different conclusions.

01:39:01

I would never suggest that that places you outside the Christian faith and I would also claim that my disagreement with you does not place me outside the

01:39:11

Christian faith and I would call for a little less judgment. Okay.

01:39:16

Dr. White it's your 15 minute question period. I would ask from henceforth if we could during each gentleman's time that you do ask questions of the other person and try not to make statements during that time.

01:39:30

I'll be glad to give Dr. White as much time as he wants to make whatever statement he wants. My concern is not that we win or lose.

01:39:37

My concern is that we understand each other and seek the truth. So I defer to anything you want to do.

01:39:42

Need to have a little bit of format though. Okay. Great. Bishop Spong you specifically

01:39:49

I read to you the theistic God whose will constitute the ethics of the past is dead and you spoke of a non -theistic

01:39:56

God. Could you define briefly for us what a since the word theistic means God, what a non -God

01:40:03

God is? Is He personal in the sense that He can speak? Well I wouldn't ever say

01:40:09

He to refer to God in the first place and I would say I'd have to put that into my tense.

01:40:16

I experience God as personal. The highest thing that I think I can achieve is full personhood and so I can't imagine that God does not participate in that but for me therefore to say

01:40:28

God is like me and is a person I think is a step beyond which I cannot take. The theologian who most shaped my early life was

01:40:37

Paul Tillich. He was a German Lutheran reformed theologian that the Nazis executed in 19, no that's

01:40:45

Bonhoeffer. He died in 1963. He escaped the Nazis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not. But Paul Tillich was looking for a way to stop having people think about God as the man upstairs who you can pray to like writing a letter to Santa Claus and that he will do what you want him to do if you're a good boy or a good girl.

01:41:05

He considered that a very juvenile, a very childlike understanding of God that sort of pales before the mystery and wonder of God and so Tillich tried to find language that was big enough to capture his

01:41:18

God experience but didn't lend itself to this sort of personalistic idolatry and so he coined a phrase he borrowed it from a philosopher named

01:41:26

Plutinus and began to refer to God as the ground of being. I that's not enough for me because I don't know how to translate that so when

01:41:37

I begin to think about God and I'm only thinking about my experience of God I can say

01:41:43

I experience God as a source of life calling me to live and the more deeply

01:41:48

I live the more I believe I make God visible. I experience God as love calling me to love and the more deeply

01:41:54

I love across every barrier and boundary the more I believe I make God visible and I experience

01:42:00

God as the ground of being calling me to be all that I can be in the infinite variety of our humanity and the more deeply and fully

01:42:07

I can be myself I make God visible and my charge as a follower of this

01:42:13

Jesus is to do everything I can to build a world where everybody in that world can live to the height of their ability, love to the maximum of their capacity and be whatever it is

01:42:23

God created them to be in the variety of our humanity. Bishop Spong, is it fair to say that this non -theistic

01:42:30

God, can it reveal propositional truth to mankind?

01:42:37

I would only worry about your word propositional truth because I don't think any propositional truth has got to be received by a person who is bound in time and space and immediately when you use language, if I use language in the 21st century it's bound by my understanding of the shape of the world in the 21st century and I don't believe that's eternal

01:42:57

I don't want to identify God with that eternity. I accept Albert Einstein's understanding that we live in a world of relativity and I don't object to that because I live in time and space,

01:43:08

I am a time bound and time warped creature so was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

01:43:14

They believed that the world was a three tiered universe much of the bible didn't make sense if you don't think the world is a three tiered universe but we stopped believing in that in the 14th 15th, 16th centuries, 17th centuries under the work of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo.

01:43:28

We understand how big space is. The story of Jesus ascension makes no sense literally in a space age if Jesus ascended into heaven the way people interpret that you know rising up off the earth to go to heaven, well he didn't get to heaven he got into orbit and if he didn't, if he escaped orbit he sank into the infinity of space.

01:43:48

We don't live in a three tiered universe. You can't build a tower of Babel from the earth to be so tall you can get to heaven.

01:43:54

So every propositional statements always are bound by your time, your space your level of knowledge and the world in which you experience life but I think

01:44:04

God reveals God's truth but not in propositional form. And you are the decider of what that truth is because it's a personal revelation?

01:44:13

No one of the things that I think is terribly important is that there be a community of believers that walks together and that you're always challenging one another so that no individual can be just sort of a law unto himself or herself.

01:44:25

Well then what was going on when the community of believers was unanimous for over a millennium that your position you're holding tonight was wrong were they right then?

01:44:32

Well but see that community was also holding that slavery was legitimate, the second class status of women was legitimate and epilepsy was caused by demon possession.

01:44:40

I think that we've grown in a lot of understandings and I think to limit God to the mentality of the biblical period of history is to limit

01:44:49

God to the place where God becomes increasingly unbelievable to a great number of people that live in the 21st century.

01:44:54

But Bishop Spong you just said that it's not an individual thing that the community and yet what that would mean is that truth has never been known until the 21st century.

01:45:03

No, I don't mean that at all. I mean truth is always unfolding. I think we know truth but we don't know ultimate truth and truth is something into which we journey.

01:45:13

It's not something we ever possess and my experience particularly with religious people is that when they think they possess the truth that's when they begin to persecute anybody that disagrees with them and I think that's where we get in trouble.

01:45:25

Bishop Spong can you name any biblical author who held your view of God? Oh many. You believe the biblical authors held a non -personal

01:45:33

I'd start with Paul Tillich. I said biblical author sir. Oh biblical author. Oh no I don't think they probably did but that's because they were creatures of their time in space.

01:45:41

They believed that God literally lived above the sky so that God could hang out a star in the sky when

01:45:47

Jesus was born and God could put a star on a roller that could go through the sky, the heaven so slowly that wise men could keep up with it.

01:45:54

I don't know any star like that that lives in my world. You see we don't even recognize that the light we see from a star was emitted millions of years ago.

01:46:02

You know the idea that you can hang a star up there to announce the birth of Jesus, that's you know if you know anything about the

01:46:08

Hebrew tradition you'll know that in the folklore of the Jewish people a star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Abraham and a star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Isaac and a star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Moses and that that was one of the ways the

01:46:21

Jews talked about welcoming into the life of the world a figure that changes the way they understand

01:46:27

God. Bishop Spong, can you name anyone who identified themselves as a Christian the first 1800 years of Christian history who held to a view of a non -theistic

01:46:37

God? I would say that the way most people have thought of God has been after the analogy of themselves and that's what

01:46:47

I mean by theistic. That is you see of God, you think of God, we think of God, most of us throughout history have thought of God as someone who is very much like us except not bounded.

01:47:00

Every word that we human beings use for God is a human word magnified. I am finite,

01:47:06

God is infinite. I am mortal, God is immortal. I am limited in knowledge, God is omniscient.

01:47:11

They're all analogies after human life. That's the only language we've got to speak. That's not what concerns me.

01:47:17

What concerns me is when we take our human expanded knowledge and act as if we have captured the truth of God.

01:47:25

All we have done is try to make sense out of our transcendent God experience. I believe

01:47:30

God is very real and I believe I confront God in the depth of my personhood and so I don't have any trouble seeing

01:47:37

God manifest God's self to me personally but I don't take the next step and say therefore

01:47:44

God is what I have created God to be because I think God is infinitely more than I can ever imagine

01:47:50

God to be. Bishop Spong, if one believed in propositional divine revelation theoretically, would it be possible for a personal

01:47:58

God who created all things to reveal his will as to man's proper behavior in human language?

01:48:04

Would such be theoretically beyond the capacity of a creator God? Are you saying in essence with what you've been saying so far that that's beyond God's capacity to give us that kind of divine revelation?

01:48:15

I don't ever say what's beyond God's capacity nor do I tell God what is in God's capacity.

01:48:20

I think that's the distinction. I think God is infinitely more than you and I will ever know. The fact that the

01:48:26

Christian church is not a very unified institution indicates that human beings have been debating these realities for a long, long time.

01:48:34

I think it's time we stopped excommunicating one another because we don't agree and say the perceptions of God among human beings vary widely and we're all faithful in our journey.

01:48:45

Deep down, I would actually define myself more as a mystic today than anything else.

01:48:51

Bishop Spong, would you agree that if someone uses your writings to express hatred toward Christians, that you are not responsible for the misuse of your own published statements?

01:49:02

That's an interesting way to phrase it. I'm not aware that people do that, but if you are aware of that,

01:49:08

I would be very sorry that my writings are used. I have a very deep appreciation for what it means to be human.

01:49:16

I have a very deep sense that most of our humanity is twisted and warped. I don't think it's twisted and warped because we have fallen into something called original sin.

01:49:26

I think it's twisted and warped because we have emerged out of an evolutionary soup and we have made our own survival our highest value.

01:49:35

I think that's where the problems of this world come from. We surround ourselves with tribal identity, which justifies the fact that we can hate other people's tribes.

01:49:46

We're all in America today aware of how many American soldiers have given their lives in the

01:49:52

Iraqi war because we keep account of that. We're not aware of how many Iraqis have died.

01:49:59

That's a vague – the President suggests it might be 40 ,000 on one occasion. It's a vague concept because basically we don't value

01:50:07

Iraqis, but I think they too are created in God's image, redeemed by God in Jesus Christ and called to be all that they can be.

01:50:15

I would regard the death of Iraqi as equally as disastrous as the death of any other citizen.

01:50:22

Sir, could we get back to my question here? Your question is asked in such a way that it can't be answered without perjuring yourself.

01:50:29

Would it not likewise follow, sir, that your repeated references in your books to what I would call wide -eyed cultists like Fred Phelps and his tiny little cultic band of followers from Kansas really has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sober yet believing exegesis of the text of Scripture?

01:50:45

Aren't they an extreme example that by utilizing them and not responding to sober exegesis of the text that there's a prejudice involved there?

01:50:53

I haven't had sober exegetes hanging placards out and demanding my execution like I have had

01:51:00

Fred Phelps, and that's an enormous difference. I would not be here today to have this discussion with you and with this audience if I didn't want to respect your opinion and the opinions of this audience.

01:51:13

I'm bearing witness to the fact that I have a different perspective. I'm claiming that that perspective is within the bounds of the

01:51:20

Christian faith, and I'm urging a wider tolerance and a deeper knowledge of what it means to be male, female, black, white, left -handed, right -handed, gay, straight, transgender, and bisexual.

01:51:32

And when we begin to understand those differences, I think we can respond with more compassion and more love and, frankly, be more

01:51:39

Christ -like. Sir? Yes? You wrote, quote, Their special hatred is reserved for those who claim to be themselves believers and yet who reject what they are sure is the, quote, clear teaching of Scripture, end quote, in regard to the evil of homosexuality.

01:51:55

That's what you wrote, end quote. Yes, I think that's an accurate description of my feelings. Is it your position that every person who believes the

01:52:01

Bible is the Word of God and who believes it identifies homosexuality as a sexual sin must, as a result, hate those who disagree?

01:52:09

Oh, I don't think so. I hope I don't. My mother died a fundamentalist, and I loved her dearly.

01:52:16

You know, my job is not to convert fundamentalists. I have no desire to change you.

01:52:22

I have a desire to make it impossible for you or me to define

01:52:28

Christianity for all people, and I think that's what religious people tend to do. Okay, I appreciate that.

01:52:33

They tend to define Christianity in such a way that only people like them are happy within that definition.

01:52:40

I think Christianity is a much broader, bigger thing than that. Okay. I'm not proud of all of Christian history.

01:52:47

I don't see anybody that could be proud of all of Christian history, and we've done terrible, terrible things to each other.

01:52:53

But I still think it's a pilgrimage that we walk into the fullness and wonder of God, and simultaneously

01:52:59

I think we walk into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Sir, given your own ethical foundation derived from John 10 .10

01:53:07

regarding enhancement or diminishment of life, defining what is good and what is evil, which you stated just a few moments ago, how can you affirm homosexuality when statistical studies of the death rates of homosexuals drawn from their own published literature indicate a 22 -year average diminishment of lifespan and the fact that while 80 % of married heterosexual males live to old age, only 9 % of homosexual males live to old age, and that's not including deaths from AIDS.

01:53:33

How does that fit with your own stated standard of enrichment of life as the standard of what is good? Wouldn't that require you to oppose homosexuality if it diminished life on a physical level in that way?

01:53:45

No. But let me say that that question reminds me of one that was debated in the Middle Ages as to whether celibate clergy lived longer than married clergy.

01:53:54

And after a long debate, they decided no, but it just seemed longer. And I suspect that there are so many, there are so many factors that heterosexual people don't understand, that homosexual people have to put up with.

01:54:07

The suicide rate, for example, among homosexual people is far higher than it is any other way.

01:54:13

But how do you live with a cultural hatred that says what you are is not worthy to live?

01:54:21

And that's what we've said over and over again, and way after way after way we've said that.

01:54:28

I think that once we get into a society that is fully open and fully accepting, and I am completely optimistic that that's the way we're going.

01:54:37

In fact, I would say that there has never in the history of the human race been a prejudice that when it was debated publicly wasn't on its deathbed.

01:54:45

Because you don't debate it publicly until your definitions of what it means to be that person have been challenged successfully.

01:54:55

Bishop Spong, 15 minutes for your question for Dr. White. What are we doing that's different from what we've been doing?

01:55:03

At this point, you'd be just asking questions. I thought we were doing pretty well with critical questions already.

01:55:11

Just ask him questions, and then he'll have the time to respond, and then he'll have one more period where he's asking the questions, and then you respond.

01:55:21

I'd rather just go ahead and continue the discussion. If you've got something else you want to press on, because I don't have any...

01:55:27

I don't think it's very helpful to debate that way.

01:55:32

I've been trying to be very specific in asking specific questions and ask for a brief answer so that the audience can follow that specific give and take.

01:55:40

I think when we just talk for a long period of time, we end up covering five or six things. We can't go back. There's been many things that I wanted to cover, but I wasn't able to in that situation.

01:55:51

I thought you covered them all in your rebuttal. My rebuttal was exactly within the time frame that was agreed upon.

01:55:59

If you don't want your 15 minutes, I'll take my 15 minutes and ask questions. Let's do this.

01:56:05

Let's go to just 20 minutes open conversation time. I've got some specific questions that I need to ask, so I don't want to do that.

01:56:11

Specific questions, and we'll go for just 20 minutes then and call it at that time.

01:56:17

If that's what's agreeable to both sides, I don't want to go out of anything. If you want me to ask him additional questions,

01:56:25

I'll be glad to, but let him go ahead. Let's give him then his 15 minutes.

01:56:32

Actually, it's your 15 minutes. It's your 15 minutes right now. Go ahead.

01:56:38

If you have some questions for me, and let's try to make them questions so we can move the topics along. It's hard to do because the presuppositions of our conversation are so different that you almost have to unload the presuppositions before you can ask the questions.

01:56:55

I suggested earlier that the Bible reflects the mentality of people who lived in the period of history that wrote it.

01:57:01

That's inevitable. You can't do it any other way. I don't live in a world where there's a three -tiered universe and God is a person who lives above the sky manipulating the effects of history.

01:57:14

I don't know how anybody that lives in the 21st century can be there. I simply ask, how do you deal with those parts of the

01:57:22

Bible and the creeds that assume a three -tiered universe that I presume you don't accept?

01:57:28

It's tremendously ironic because in my seminary education, I went to a seminary that's considerably more liberal than my own perspectives.

01:57:35

I had to study the works of Gerhard von Rath and those who were far to my left. We learned exactly where their worldview was as well as my understanding of my own worldview.

01:57:45

It's been my experience that when people come from the other direction, they're not familiar with the vast body, we have book tables around here, the vast body of conservative scholarship that can believe in an inspired and inerrant scripture in the 21st century and have no problem with it and can do so by exegeting the text within its original context and its original language.

01:58:03

When you talk about a three -tiered universe, evidently, again, this is why I asked you a question earlier, I believe that my

01:58:09

God can reveal His truth in human language in such a way that it remains valid and communicative throughout the entirety of human history.

01:58:18

And I believe that because I do not believe that the limited technological knowledge of the

01:58:24

Israelites somehow limits the ability of God being able to communicate to me today. There is nothing in Scripture that demands that I somehow reject the findings of science to be able to follow what it is being said.

01:58:38

When, for example, you have in the Old Testament law when the people of Israel were told about the purity laws, they were told that a certain animal chewed the cud.

01:58:49

Now, we know today through biological sciences that that particular animal does not have the dual stomach that is required for chewing the cud.

01:58:56

And people said, see, these people were ignorant, they didn't know what they were talking about. But the reality is that animal, when it eats, makes the very mouth movements of chewing the cud.

01:59:06

And so it communicated to those individuals at their technological level in a way that they could understand.

01:59:11

Now, I can understand that. That doesn't mean it's somehow not the Word of God. It doesn't mean that I somehow have to interpret it outside of its own context.

01:59:19

And so there is no reason for me to go, well, since I know so much more about space travel, somehow what

01:59:26

Jesus Christ said about the only way of salvation is no longer valid for me today. I do not embrace the naturalistic materialism that is required of that kind of a scholarly perspective.

01:59:37

And there are many, many, many people, and in fact I would submit the great

01:59:43

Anglican bishops like Bishop Ryle and others, who likewise did not have to embrace that, even at the level of technology that they had in their day.

01:59:50

What year did he live? I don't know him. You don't know Bishop Ryle, one of the greatest of... Okay, that was in the 1800s.

01:59:57

We've had a lot of bishops. Is this back there, brother, by Bishop Ryle? I think we've got some back there. I could quote other

02:00:03

Anglican bishops, but that's okay. Okay, well, we could talk about Lightfoot and some others, but the point is that there is absolutely no reason why a recognition of their technological level means that what they spoke does not come from God.

02:00:20

That is the fundamental difference between us, is I believe that God can communicate through his creatures in such a way that his communication remains valid to this day, and the history of the

02:00:32

Christian Church is of interpretation of that Scripture in such a way that allows for my position.

02:00:39

I don't believe that abuses, as I've said, of reading text of Scripture means that that was what was forced by exegesis.

02:00:46

Most of the time, it is ignoring the exegesis of the text of Scripture that led to those abuses of Scripture.

02:00:52

I think you'd have to agree with me... that solid exegesis, that solid exegesis in context would have led to a different understanding if tradition had not gotten in the way.

02:01:06

I think that there's a presupposition that you're making that would make that almost impossible, and it's not just technological.

02:01:14

You know, I find in the biblical story that slavery is thought of as an acceptable institution. It's not to me.

02:01:21

I can quote Old Testament and New Testament. May I respond to that? You may respond. Let me finish asking the question.

02:01:27

I find it... I find the behavior of so much of the biblical story in treating women as second -class citizens which continued to manifest itself in this country until relatively recently, probably still does.

02:01:42

In 1874, a woman was denied the right to practice law in the state of Illinois because, according to the chief...

02:01:50

to the majority opinion, God had created the woman for the more domestic role.

02:01:56

That's the heritage that I think we've had, and I find that that is behavior, and I think it diminishes 50 % of the human race, and I'm embarrassed that I've been a part of a movement that has diminished women, including my daughters and my wife and my mother, the way

02:02:11

Christianity has diminished women. And I'd say the same thing about people of color, and today I think the battle is simply about people who are different in their sexual orientation, so I don't accept even the premise of what you're suggesting, that within the biblical story is some objective reality.

02:02:28

That does seem to be the difference between us, but there is logically no connection between the condemnation of homosexuality, the reality that slavery existed in the ancient world, and the scriptures recognizing that did not overthrow the entirety of the economic system of the day, throwing everybody into chaos, but regulated it, and did so in a humane fashion.

02:02:51

I've allowed for questions that are ten minutes in length, please allow me to at least have a few moments to respond to them. Likewise, when we look at what the scriptures state about women in comparison to the context in which it was stated, it is amazing the

02:03:07

Genesis account made in the image of God, and that's why I said if the entirety of the text of Scripture had been taken into account,

02:03:15

Ephesians 5 had been taken into account, husbands would have loved their wives as Christ loved the church, if true exegesis had taken place, the

02:03:22

Bible could never be used to attack women, but only to elevate them, but as I said in one of my previous statements, being thrown in here is the idea of some sort of egalitarianism that is unbiblical, that does not recognize the difference between men and women, and that's not the same thing as quote -unquote oppression or suppression, so if we would use language accurately, then

02:03:44

I submit to you there is no reason for any modern person today to reject what the scriptures say as having relevance to us today, because if we would apply sound rules of exegesis to them, they would not be able to be used in this abusive fashion that was just cited.

02:03:58

That's not the history of the Christian tradition, however, and let me suggest that I grew up in the south,

02:04:04

I'm glad you grew up in Minnesota, is that where it was? I grew up in the south, so I know the scourge of slavery and segregation and what it's done to people of color, and we used to argue that we could have separate but equal.

02:04:16

My friends, it was always separate, it was never equal. Women have been defined in the scriptures, even in the

02:04:22

Ten Commandments, as inferior to men, as even the property of men. The Tenth Commandment says you should not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his ox.

02:04:30

It's clear that your neighbor's a male, and that the wife is part of the property, along with the ox and the ass and the other male possessions.

02:04:37

I think that's abominable, and I think that there has been an increasing consciousness. You have said earlier that it's technological.

02:04:46

I think there's an expanding consciousness. I don't think it'd be possible for 21st century people to enslave people of color again.

02:04:53

I don't think it's possible for men to force women into second class positions again, and it will not be very long before it will not be possible for the heterosexual majority to oppress the homosexual majority by their own prejudice definitions.

02:05:08

Well, sir, a number of things. First of all, you mentioned the Ten Commandments. It's the Ten Commandments that says you shall not commit adultery.

02:05:15

That's correct. It's the Ten Commandments that protects the relationship of man and woman in marriage, and that even comes after the point in time that Jesus cites in Matthew chapter 19 that talks about them becoming one flesh.

02:05:27

We again have to take Scripture and tear it into little pieces and interpret it in a worldview utterly foreign to its writers to be able to come up with that conclusion.

02:05:35

You just talked about slavery again, even though that's not our issue today, and yet you continue to parallel that with homosexuality.

02:05:41

There is no parallel between these two things. The slavery issue goes to today how employers should treat their employees.

02:05:48

There is no parallel to the concept of homosexuality unless you assume a perspective that seems to me to be going out of style in the homosexual community, and it seems to me that you hold a view of homosexuality that's about 20 years out of date now that makes it completely a matter of genetics, and yet the homosexual community itself is recognizing that it's natural.

02:06:10

If it's left -handed and red -haired and freckled, if that's not genetic, what is it? It's not genetic. The doctors

02:06:16

I worked with at Cornell Medical Center would reject the genetic possibility. They'd also reject the environmental possibility.

02:06:22

They'd just think that's the way life is. That's the way it is, a brute fact. That's the way it is, and they would justify that with all of their history.

02:06:29

But let me respond to your commandment thing. Yes, the seventh commandment does say you shall not commit adultery, but what we don't realize is that when that commandment was given, polygamy was the style of marriage.

02:06:40

It was some 300 years after Moses was supposed to receive the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai that Solomon had a thousand wives.

02:06:50

Now help me to understand what adultery means when one man owns a thousand women. If you have a thousand wives and still have some need to commit adultery,

02:06:58

I think you've got a problem. I think you've got a huge problem. I don't even think it's a moral problem. I think it's a problem of your being.

02:07:06

So I think to use the Scriptures this way is simply an inappropriate way to address contemporary issues.

02:07:12

But sir, if you allow the Scriptures to speak for themselves, that commandment comes before Solomon and explains why

02:07:19

Solomon's heart is turned away from God, does it not? That again gets you back into a dating problem.

02:07:26

We think, most scholars think, I guess that's where we begin to quote authorities, and I don't think that's very helpful, but the bulk of Old Testament scholars would say that the

02:07:36

Moses story is written, you know, sometime well after Moses' death so that it's probably written during the reign of King Solomon.

02:07:45

The actual writing of the Ten Commandments probably came around 940, 950 in the reign of King Solomon with his thousand wives.

02:07:54

I just think you've got to be careful about how you don't isolate Scripture from the reality of the time in which it was produced.

02:08:03

Wasn't there just an isolation of Scripture from itself however by saying, well, certain scholars that I happen to accept date it within the time of King Solomon.

02:08:14

That would be a pretty dangerous thing to write the Ten Commandments, come up with the Ten Commandments at the time of Solomon. How did David, for example, have such knowledge of God's law if God's law had not been written down in the time of David?

02:08:24

Well, you've got an oral tradition, but you've also you're talking about a written tradition at this point. I don't know when the oral tradition began.

02:08:31

The oral tradition didn't include the ten words? It may well have. That's not something

02:08:36

I can know. That's just the reality. All I know is that Moses died around 1250 in the first part of the

02:08:44

Old Testament written about 300 years later. Now, I trust oral tradition, but I think you've got to leave leeway in it for we've got oral tradition for hundreds of years, we've got translations.

02:08:59

I've never met a translation that was perfect. The idea that we can wrap the Bible in these envelopes of inerrancy and infallibility,

02:09:08

I don't believe the Pope's infallible, I don't believe the Bible is inerrant, and I think we're called to live without ultimate authority and the glorious liberty of the children of God.

02:09:18

To me, that's dangerous, but it's real. How do you know who the children of God are without a word from God?

02:09:24

How do I know what? How do you know who the children of God are without a word from God? Well, I think that by your fruits you demonstrate the sense of your own sacredness.

02:09:34

Okay. Okay. Dr. White, you now have 15 minutes.

02:09:44

Bishop Spong, you have written Yes, I am convinced that Paul of Tarsus was a gay man, deeply repressed, self -loathing, rigid in denial, bound by the law that he hoped could keep this thing that he judged to be so unacceptable totally under control, a control so profound that even

02:09:59

Paul did not have to face this fact about himself. Would that be a proper rendering?

02:10:05

You're reading that out of the Sins of Scripture? Yes. When I first wrote that, I wrote it as a speculative theory.

02:10:12

I've become more convinced of its reality, but it's still my belief, and there's a difference between stating your belief and stating that you know what it is, but that's a belief, yes.

02:10:21

You are convinced of that? I am personally convinced of that, yes. Am I correct to believe that you view his words in Romans 1 as nothing more than the words of a repressed homosexual?

02:10:32

Romans 1 is a fascinating passage of Scripture, and it was actually the clue to my understanding of Paul when

02:10:39

I finally unpacked, because what Paul really says there is that if you don't worship God properly,

02:10:44

God will confuse your sexual identity. In the first place, I don't believe in a God who would do that.

02:10:50

In the second place, that led me into looking at Paul autobiographically, and Paul gives us a lot of autobiographical material in the

02:10:59

Epistles, and in there, I began to, I took this from a, I can't even remember his name,

02:11:05

Darby, I believe, a man I found in the Yale library, a book written about 1935 that suggested

02:11:10

Paul might have been a repressed gay man. And I decided I would read all of the

02:11:15

Pauline corpus as if that's true, and see if it illumined the corpus in any way. And you run into passages where Paul talks about this inner struggle going on between his mind and his body.

02:11:27

His mind follows one law, his body follows another law. He talks about sin dwelling in my members, so that my members don't obey the law of my mind.

02:11:36

And the Greek word for member is m -e -l -o -s, melos, and it means a bodily appendage.

02:11:42

I don't know anybody's arms or legs that don't obey the law of their mind, but males have another appendage, that is gland, that isn't always obedient to the law of their mind.

02:11:54

That's why we have impotency in human life. That's why Viagra has business, because it does not obey the law of the mind.

02:12:01

And I find this self -hatred in Paul, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?

02:12:08

Paul, as a God -fearing Jew, was well aware of the prescriptions in Leviticus that said that if you're homosexual, you're under the condemnation of death.

02:12:18

And then I think you don't understand Paul until you understand that whatever his conversion experience was, and I don't trust the book of Acts description of that on the

02:12:26

Damascus Road as history, because Paul never refers to it, never refers to Ananias or any of that, so I don't know what happened.

02:12:35

But I do know Paul went through a cataclysmic conversion experience. And in that conversion experience,

02:12:41

I think he came to the realization that God loved him just as he is, as we indeed sing, just as I am, without one plea.

02:12:47

That's how God loved him. And he came out of that convinced, in what I think is a very revealing statement, that nothing could finally separate him from the love of God.

02:12:56

Not even, he says, my own nakedness can separate me from the love of God. Now I don't know that Paul was gay.

02:13:04

And I have no sense that even if he were gay he ever acted it out. My sense is he lived bound by the law in such a way that it was killing him inside.

02:13:14

But his conversion experience was this sense that whatever it is that God is, God loved him as he was.

02:13:21

And so he breaks into this great epiphany of wonder, that not height, not depth, not angels, not principalities, not things present, not things to come, nothing can separate me from the love of God.

02:13:35

Now let me just finally say I don't know that Paul was gay. That's a supposition.

02:13:40

I'm personally convinced of it. I'll ask him when I get to the kingdom of heaven. It'll be a very revealing conversation.

02:13:47

But I'm content to at least make that public possibility as a way of saying that it's the dark side of a man who lived in the first century that drew us into an understanding of what the grace of God is all about.

02:14:02

And I suspect if we're honest with ourselves it's when we are able to accept whatever the dark side is of each of us that we become whole people.

02:14:10

And that's certainly what Carl Jung had to say. And I think that's worth thinking about as a gospel message.

02:14:17

Bishop Spong, why should anyone on a scholarly level examining Paul's writings conclude that his words about homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1

02:14:24

Corinthians 6 are the result of repressed homosexuality rather than a consistent application of the law and the prophets as is seen throughout his writings on a wide variety of topics and issues?

02:14:36

Well, I think you have to learn to play with the scriptures in a little bit more flexible manner than you seem able to do.

02:14:43

I know that if you read Maccabees, for example, it's not in the scriptures but it's in the Apocrypha and it's very popular literature in the first century.

02:14:51

And Paul certainly was familiar with Maccabees and Maccabees says that if you can repress all desire then you're not going to have any trouble and I think

02:15:03

Paul really tried to do that. The person that helped me to see that for the first time was a gay man who said,

02:15:09

Paul, it's just like I am. I couldn't accept the fact that I was gay either and I fought against it with all my heart. I tried to repress it.

02:15:15

I did all sorts of things. I sometimes hid in a marriage making even more people complicitous in your own inner struggle.

02:15:26

But once you accept the fact that being gay is not evil or you can act evil out of being gay, there's no doubt about that, but maybe you haven't noticed you can be pretty evil if you're heterosexual too.

02:15:39

You can be a prostitute, you can be a pimp, you can abuse children. Those are all heterosexual proclivities overwhelmingly.

02:15:46

Sexuality itself in my opinion is absolutely morally neuter. You can act out homosexuality with holiness.

02:15:53

You can act out heterosexuality with holiness. You can also act out both of them with great corruption and great destruction.

02:16:01

Bishop Spong, you wrote concerning Paul's statements about homosexuality in Romans 1, quote, is there any reason why anyone should believe that this convoluted and bizarre understanding of the tortured

02:16:11

Pauline mind could ever be called the, quote, Word of God, end quote. Could you explain, sir, why you isolated

02:16:19

Paul's statement from the context before and after, ignoring its consistency in that argumentation, and ignored the balance of the entirety of the text which addresses the entire spectrum of human sin?

02:16:29

You see, I don't see the Bible as the Word of God. I see the

02:16:34

Word of God as that which I hear through the words of the Bible, and there's a very big difference.

02:16:41

I don't want to blame God for a lot of things in the Bible. I think some of the things in the Bible are dreadful.

02:16:46

I think they reflect our tribal upbringing. They reflect the adolescence or even the childhood of our humanity.

02:16:53

I think the Bible is a growing book. There's an enormous difference between when you get into the prophets, for example, and you get

02:17:00

Malachi who says, from the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles.

02:17:05

That would have been something that the God in the book of Exodus would not have understood. In every nation, says

02:17:11

Malachi, incense shall be offered unto my name. That's the dawning of a sense that God is a universal presence drawing all human beings to God's self.

02:17:21

So to act as if this book, written between 1000 BC and 135 AD, somehow captures in some inerrant or infallible form the literal

02:17:32

Word of God, is to me to become an idol, make the Bible into an idol.

02:17:37

It becomes bibliolatry. It's not finding and engaging the Word of God in Scripture that constantly challenges our own prejudices and calls us into a deeper and deeper sense of our own humanity.

02:17:50

So you wrote, furthermore, no text in the Bible can ever be used appropriately to validate the prejudiced behavior of homophobia, which is clearly evil.

02:17:58

That kind of outcome can never be derived from the, quote, Word of God, end quote. Yes, I think that's correct.

02:18:04

Since I and almost every evangelical scholar I know are not afraid of our own sex, nor are we afraid of the sin of homosexuality, will you now address the wide and deep stream of scholarship and theology that approaches the text of Scripture in the same fashion that the

02:18:17

Lord Jesus did, and that concludes that Paul's words as an apostle of Christ are indeed representative of God's will?

02:18:24

You continue to say that Jesus sort of has a view of Scripture that agrees with yours. The New Testament wasn't written when

02:18:31

Jesus was here, and all of that was added. We didn't agree on what books would constitute

02:18:38

Scripture in a final sense until about 367 of this common era.

02:18:44

And that was in a letter from a man named Athanasius, who sent out a teaching epistle once a year, and one year he decided to list the books that were in the

02:18:52

Bible, that were legitimate canonical books. Before that time, there was a great debate. There was still a debate, even when you get to Luther in the 16th century.

02:19:00

Luther didn't think the epistle of James should have gotten into the canon and tried to get it out. There's been a lot of debates.

02:19:06

One of the great things that Dan Brown has done for our world is to open many people who read murder mysteries up to some of the early theological debates about which books go in and which books go out.

02:19:16

There's an enormous study in that area going on today. So I don't start with the premise you start with, and so I don't know even how to respond to it, except to say that's not the way

02:19:26

I would approach the Bible. Okay, Bishop Spong, wouldn't you agree that in the canonical Gospels, the view presented to us of Jesus Christ is that he had the highest view of Scripture, and in fact had a view of the

02:19:37

Scripture as the Word of God, constantly saying it has been written? Would you at least not say that at that point?

02:19:43

No, I wouldn't say that because he clearly thinks that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and David wrote the Psalms, and I think that's both of those.

02:19:50

You'd flunk if you put those on a test at any theological seminary that I'm familiar with.

02:19:55

Not in my class, sir. Okay, well, that's where the issue is.

02:20:01

Yes, it is. That's where the barrier is. Now, if you want to excommunicate all of the other

02:20:06

Christians who disagree with that very narrow, very Protestant point of view...

02:20:11

And very historical point of view, is it not? Well, see, that's part of your claim that you have the truth, that it's historical, it's canonical, it's right.

02:20:18

All I'm telling you is that Roman Catholic scholars wouldn't agree with you, and most of what I would call the great Protestant tradition of the 19th and 20th century would not agree with you.

02:20:26

And my plea is for you to recognize that they, too, are part of the body of Christ and are wandering, walking forthrightly into the mystery of God, and I hope we walk together.

02:20:38

I have no desire to put the wagons in a circle and shoot anybody who disagrees with me. I'm also not willing to have somebody define

02:20:45

Christianity within a very narrow confine and say, if you don't believe the way I believe, you're no longer a Christian.

02:20:50

That's not a world I think is going to survive. Bishop Spong, if what you're saying is true, then the illustration

02:20:57

I used, if I dress like an imam and I say I'm a Muslim, and I reject that Allah exists,

02:21:04

I reject that Muhammad was a prophet, and I reject the Quran, am I a Muslim? The question you're asking is not one that I can give a yes or no, because the presuppositions around it need to be exposed.

02:21:16

Are you suggesting that I don't believe that Jesus is the center of the Christian faith, that I don't believe he's the Son of God?

02:21:21

You do not believe in the creedal doctrine of the Trinity, right? I didn't say that. I've tried to say over and over again,

02:21:28

I'm a Trinitarian. I don't believe that I can therefore say what God is. I can say how

02:21:33

I experience God. Do you believe that Jesus Christ eternally existed as the divine Son of God, who became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, that he died upon a cross, and rose again the third day from the grave bodily?

02:21:44

You have just strung together things that were debated in the first 500 years of Christian history with enormous energy and vitality.

02:21:54

1500 years ago, yes sir, that still is our tradition, is it not? Well, I'd say that that's the orthodoxy, in my opinion, is not what's right.

02:22:01

Orthodoxy is what won the debate. And then they repressed everybody that disagreed with them, and the history of Christianity is that the repressed voices keep rising up and challenging again, and I think that's going on over and over again.

02:22:13

I could take you through, I think, whether you would accept this or not, I could take you through the

02:22:19

New Testament and show you that the affirmation is always that in Jesus of Nazareth, God has been met and engaged in a unique form.

02:22:29

But how that took place, I think, is if you line up the books of the New Testament, the order they're written, you'll find that debate rages.

02:22:36

Paul says in the first four verses of Romans that God declared Jesus to be the Son of God by the action of the

02:22:42

Spirit at the time of the resurrection. Mark says that God poured

02:22:48

God's Spirit into Jesus at the time of his baptism. Neither of them knew anything about a virgin birth.

02:22:55

Virgin birth doesn't come into the Christian tradition until the ninth decade. That's a tremendous leap of logic,

02:23:01

Bishop Spohn. Well, it's not. Certainly it is. Let me suggest. This is the very argument I had with John Dominic Cross in last year.

02:23:07

Well, I'm glad John Dominic and I agree. And I'm quite certain, and the problem is that you have a tradition here that has no basis in your own historical tradition.

02:23:19

This is totally modernism being read into the text and disassembling the text and saying, well, we can look at this text over here and this text over here and we can put them at odds with one another rather than allowing for the harmonization of these texts.

02:23:33

See, the harmonization of the text was a trick that Christians developed to try to take care of all the problems that are in the text.

02:23:40

How about that's what comes when you believe that God has actually spoken in His Word? Well, I think that's where you and I would agree.

02:23:46

It would disagree. Fundamentally, yes. The idea that God dictated the Scriptures is to me an idea that I could not ever embrace.

02:23:54

I don't want to blame God for some of the things. But let me go back to what I was trying to say. If you line up the

02:24:00

New Testament in the order in which it is written, you find that our understanding keeps growing. Virgin birth comes into the text in the ninth decade in Matthew's writing.

02:24:10

It's repeated in Mark and Luke's writing. Can you document this? Can you actually demonstrate that the order that you're assuming is actually the order that...

02:24:18

Well, you see, that's where we get to the place where we're disagreeing not on opinions, but we're disagreeing on facts.

02:24:24

Yes. But let me go back to Paul, for example. Paul says that Jesus was descended from the house of David according to the flesh.

02:24:35

Mark doesn't have any virgin birth story in it, but Mark portrays the mother of Jesus in chapters 3 and 6 as thinking

02:24:43

Jesus is out of his mind and she's going to put him away. Well, that doesn't ring very true with a woman to whom the angel

02:24:49

Gabriel appeared and said, you're going to have this child who's going to be the son of God and when he's grown up you think he's out of his mind.

02:24:56

So I think it's fairly clear that Mark had never heard the story of the virgin birth. And when you get to John, which

02:25:02

I believe, and I would say most scholars agree with this, is the last of the canonical Gospels, John doesn't have any virgin birth in him at all.

02:25:11

John refers to Jesus on two occasions, one in chapter 1, I think the other's in chapter 6, as the son of Joseph.

02:25:17

But all of them agree on what I think is the Christian affirmation that in Jesus God has been met and engaged in a way that has transformed all human life and our knowledge of God forever.

02:25:30

So that, you know, to play the fundamentalist game about the Bible does not lead me into that wonder of mystery.

02:25:37

And that is our time, folks. And we thank you, Bishop Spong and Dr. James White.

02:25:44

Don't we have closing statements? Yes, absolutely. We are going to take a five minute break as we bring the podium back.

02:25:50

I want to thank you for remaining quiet and allowing these gentlemen to speak during this time.

02:25:57

And I hope you will as well afford them that here when we get into our closing statements and then into our audience questions.

02:26:03

I am going to limit audience questions to 20 minutes. And how you're going to help me there is if you please keep your question under 30 seconds.

02:26:14

Also, please do not start with your life story. Either how you became a Christian or how you left

02:26:21

Christianity or whatever the case may be. Please ask the question directly. Allow them to answer.

02:26:26

I will hold the microphone. Okay? We had an instance last year where someone was bound and determined to convert

02:26:33

Dr. Croson last year. And he was wrestling that thing away from me. So basically we need you to ask your question.

02:26:45

Do so politely and allow these gentlemen to answer. After each gentleman answers they will have about a minute and a half to answer is basically where we want to leave it.

02:26:56

Then the other gentleman here or whatever the case may be will have about 30 seconds to respond.

02:27:02

Keep it brief. I want to make sure we all get back into our beds at a proper time and make sure food gets into their stomachs here.

02:27:09

But then at the end, those of you that are cruisers, I do have some announcements for you. So you're going to have to stay up late.

02:27:15

Alright, folks. We will start right now and actually Bishop Spong is going to be taking his mic and won't be approaching the podium.

02:27:23

It's up to him to take the stage wherever he'd like to go. Just so I can see the people.

02:27:34

I've never really liked to stand behind podiums because I think it's a mighty fortress that protects you from people and I don't ever want to act like I'm afraid of an audience because I think what we're doing is seeking the truth.

02:27:48

My concluding statement is much more of a witness than it is anything else because I don't think that,

02:27:55

I think we've identified the fact today that we start with two different presuppositions and that they pass in the night.

02:28:03

If you accept his presupposition you come to a conclusion. If you accept mine, you come to a different conclusion.

02:28:09

I'm quite content to leave it to God to decide who's right and who's wrong because I think human beings oft times are quite arrogant in the way that they say

02:28:18

I have the truth. I'd like to sort of share with you how I as a or some experiences

02:28:25

I've had that have enabled me as a person born in a southern fundamentalist evangelical tradition came to the place where I suspect that I am the point guard in my church's struggle to accept fully gay and lesbian people.

02:28:42

It was in 1988 that I wrote a book called Living in Sin with a question mark.

02:28:48

The subtitle was A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality. It was a very important book in my life.

02:28:55

I had no idea what it would do but it suddenly lifted me out of being a private citizen and my publisher

02:29:03

Harper Collins put me into a book tour and I was on the Oprah show and the Phil Donahue show and Bill Buckley's Firing Line.

02:29:10

I debated Pat Buchanan and did all sorts of interesting and exciting things and I received it was the first book in which a person from a mainline

02:29:18

Christian church had advocated a rethinking of the way that we relate to homosexual people and even call for the blessing of the sacred commitments of gay and lesbian people.

02:29:30

And it created quite a bit of storm. Time magazine, Newsweek, the media all over the country debated this book and I received an enormous amount of hate mail usually from Christians.

02:29:44

The fascinating thing about this was that about two months after this book came out when I'd been on this whirlwind tour my wife who had been ill with cancer for six and a half years died.

02:29:56

A sudden death even though we knew about the diagnosis. And so in the midst of this storm of public activity

02:30:03

I was also caught up in the deep emotional grief of having lost a wife of 37 years and the mother of my children.

02:30:13

We had her funeral service in the diocese of Newark where my clergy family and my constituents could be gathered around.

02:30:21

And then because we had lived in Richmond and owned a burial plot in Richmond we went back to Richmond to have the funeral, the burial service.

02:30:31

And because I have daughters that live in Richmond and we had a lot of friends when I served that church in Richmond we had another service in the church before we went out to the burial.

02:30:41

It was at 2 .30 on a Tuesday afternoon in August 1988. And I was sitting beside my wife's casket with my daughters and their husbands or their fiancés as it was at that point in the row with me to listen to the music that we had picked because it had been my wife's favorite.

02:31:03

About five minutes before the service began the door of this church opened and a woman whom

02:31:08

I do not know walked down the aisle pushed my wife's casket aside took her umbrella and cracked me over the back with it and said in a voice that you could hear all over that congregation quote, you son of a bitch unquote.

02:31:25

And then she walked past the front of the church where we were sitting and out through the side door where all of my pallbearers were gathered and all of them were priests from the diocese of Newark.

02:31:35

And as she walked through my pallbearer she said and I quote I've been wanting to tell that bastard what

02:31:41

I think of him for years and I finally got the opportunity and she disappeared and I have no idea who she was or what she was about.

02:31:50

I can only guess that because of the massive amount of publicity that her response was elicited by my stance in favor of opening our society to gay and lesbian people.

02:32:04

But that's not the end of the story and that's where the witness comes. When the service finally began much to my surprise the doors of that great church opened and in came in very

02:32:18

Episcopal style a crucifer carrying the cross and about a 30 voice choir, all adults.

02:32:25

I'd served as director of that church for several years before this time. I'd been elected bishop from that church and I looked at the choir members and I didn't recognize one of them.

02:32:35

And choirs don't turn over that rapidly in Christian churches. You know, people sing in choirs forever.

02:32:41

So I hadn't asked for a choir, I didn't understand that one would be there, but they added enormously to the service and I was grateful.

02:32:49

They helped carry us through a very difficult time. But when the service was over I went to find somebody in that choir so that I could thank them.

02:32:58

And I finally found the young man in his early 30's who had carried the cross and I went up to him and I said

02:33:05

I'm Jack Spong. I'd like to thank you for being here. It meant a great deal to me and my family to have the choir and the music at this service.

02:33:14

And he looked at me and he said, Bishop, he said, you don't know me but I know you.

02:33:21

You might be interested in knowing that every member of that choir today was a member of the

02:33:27

Richmond Chapter of Integrity. If you don't know Integrity, that's the organization for gay and lesbian

02:33:33

Episcopalians founded by a man named Dr. Louis Crewe. And then he said, we would do anything for you because of what you have done for us.

02:33:45

And I thought about those two experiences in that moment of grief and I had to place them side by side.

02:33:52

I am well aware that by standing at the side of the marginalized that you're also going to elicit enormous hostility.

02:34:01

I accept that as part of my just being. I was thoroughly flattered when

02:34:07

Fred Phelps came to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church and carried a placard that said

02:34:13

Spong and Tutu are fag lovers. I am delighted to be identified with Desmond Tutu under any set of circumstances.

02:34:22

But I had to put these two things together. Here was a woman whom I had clearly disturbed, who was really angry.

02:34:29

And here was a young man and members of a choir that I had clearly been an agent for opening the body of Christ so that they could come in and feel like they were members, not judged, not rejected, but accepted and loved just as they are.

02:34:46

And when you put those two things together you have to make a decision. And the decision for me is clear.

02:34:52

I will always run the risk of angering people. I will always do that.

02:34:59

And I'll take a thousand umbrellas from angry people who have had their understanding of God disturbed by something

02:35:06

I've said or something I've done. If in the process I can open the doors of the church to those people who have felt the church's rejection, the church's hostility, the church's judgment, and find a way to allow them to come in and celebrate the fact that they too are the children of God, the beloved of Jesus Christ, and called by the

02:35:29

Holy Spirit to be all that they can be. That's a witness. That's all I can do.

02:35:35

And I will continue to stand there. I hope I will stand there lovingly. I hope I will stand there respectful of people who disagree.

02:35:43

But I will never compromise. I will never bend because I'm absolutely convinced that the grace and love of God embraces us just as we are.

02:35:53

Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, left -handed, right -handed, in all of the diversity of our humanity.

02:36:00

And I cannot imagine a church that calls itself the body of Christ whose doors are not open to all that God has made and to all that God loves.

02:36:12

So thank you for letting me be with you to bear my witness. And even if you disagree,

02:36:18

I hope you recognize that the position has integrity. Thank you very much. The doors of the

02:37:07

Christian church are, in fact, the doors of the Christian church are, in fact, open to all who will repent and believe in the

02:37:18

Lord Jesus Christ. That is the most ancient message of the church. The church does not exist when repentance is removed and God's law is rejected.

02:37:30

Repent and believe is the most primitive Christian message there is, but to repent, one must know what one is repenting from.

02:37:37

And therefore, the fundamental disagreement of our debate this evening is I would assert that if God has not spoken, if God has not revealed his truth, that repentance is an empty word.

02:37:49

It is a word that Christians have not been able to use properly for all the years of the church.

02:37:56

Bishop Spong says, I am content to leave it to God, who is right and wrong, but how is God going to judge? Is there a right and wrong if God has not, in fact, spoken?

02:38:07

Bishop Spong said that some can become arrogant when they believe that they have the word of God, but I submit to you that it is not arrogant to humbly accept

02:38:15

God's revelation. In fact, if God has, in fact, spoken, then to dismiss what he has said is the very height of hubris, and we as creatures cannot engage in that.

02:38:27

Our subject this evening is extremely important, and it is extremely not only important, but weighty for everyone here.

02:38:40

I would like to point out a little bit more about a study I mentioned earlier to illustrate this.

02:38:48

Obituaries numbering 6 ,516 from 16 U .S. homosexual journals over 12 years were compared to a large sample of obituaries from regular newspapers.

02:39:00

The obituaries from the regular newspapers were similar to U .S. averages for longevity. The median age of death of married men was 75.

02:39:08

80 % of them died old, 65 or older. For unmarried or divorced men, the median age of death was 57, and 32 % of them died old.

02:39:20

Us men don't help the women out as much. Married women averaged age 79 at death, 85 % died old, and unmarried and divorced women averaged age 71, and 60 % of them died old.

02:39:31

In other words, guys, it's better to be married, and ladies, well, you're stuck with us. However, the median age of death for homosexuals was virtually the same nationwide, and overall, less than 2 % survived to old age.

02:39:51

If AIDS was the cause of death, the median age? 39. For the 829 gays who died of something other than AIDS, the median age of death was 42, and 9 % died old.

02:40:06

The 163 lesbians had a median age of death of 44, and 20 % died old.

02:40:13

2 .8 % of gays died violently. There were 116 times more apt to be murdered, 24 times more apt to commit suicide, and had a traffic accident death rate 18 times the rate of comparably aged white males.

02:40:30

20 % of lesbians died of murder, suicide, or accident, a rate 487 times higher than that of white females aged 25 to 44.

02:40:44

Life itself is the issue this evening. This is not just an academic debate, though we have tried to engage the academic issues.

02:40:55

We've done so, unfortunately, in such a way that we have had to come to recognize a fundamental contradiction of worldview between the two sides.

02:41:06

The reason I try to ask questions about who in Christian history has ever believed in non -theistic gods who are the ground of life, but whether they can reveal divine truth is because I don't believe that there really is any way to argue against the fact that that's what

02:41:21

Christians had always believed up until last century. And if we cannot define what

02:41:29

Christianity is, remember what the thesis of the debate tonight is. Homosexuality is compatible with authentic biblical

02:41:35

Christianity. Well, only one side believes that you can define authentic biblical

02:41:40

Christianity in the first place. Otherwise, it changes from generation to generation, place to place, language to language, and time to time.

02:41:47

And there's really no way to end up debating that particular thesis. I am sorry to hear, and I had heard other stories.

02:41:56

I took the time prior to this debate to listen to many hours of Bishop Spong's lectures, obtain his books.

02:42:04

It was never my intention, and I don't believe that I did misrepresent Bishop Spong.

02:42:11

But I am sorry that Bishop Spong has experienced hatred. So have I. But for some reason, in his writings, he seems to project that onto anyone who believes in the quote, and I keep using quote because that's what he does in his books, puts in quotes, word of God, and project onto them hatred, prejudice, bias.

02:42:36

And it is my assertion to you that you can believe that the Bible is the word of God. You can accept it as the word of God, and you can live consistently within its parameters without mistreating anyone.

02:42:51

I do not believe it is mistreatment in any way, shape, or form to disagree. And in fact, I do not believe it is mistreatment to say to Bishop Spong that I do not believe that the definition of the

02:43:02

Trinity as life is good, life is love, be all you can be, a ground of being,

02:43:09

Paul Tillich, and so on and so forth. No, I believe that there would be many Anglican bishops of the past who would agree with me that's not

02:43:15

Christianity. That does not fall within the parameters. Call it what you will, but we have to have the right to define our own faith.

02:43:23

And if we can't even define it at the level of who God is, rational discourse has come to an end.

02:43:30

We cannot discuss anything at all at that point. This debate is not about personal experience.

02:43:38

It's not about whether homosexuality is something that can be accepted within a naturalistic worldview.

02:43:46

It is about whether homosexuality is compatible with authentic, biblical Christianity.

02:43:52

And if one side cannot even affirm that we can define that meaningfully, then I think the debate is clear.

02:44:00

Bishop Spong spoke about being accepted and loved. What does that mean? All of us want to be accepted and loved by God.

02:44:09

What does that mean? Do we have the right to demand of God what his standards will be?

02:44:18

The Christian faith tells us that God has revealed his standards and that he has gone so far as to provide in the person of his son a sacrifice for sin.

02:44:32

That is the heart of Christianity, is the cross. And the cross is not merely the idea that we crucified the one who showed us

02:44:43

God's love. That's not even what Jesus said in any way, shape, or form. And you'll notice when we tried to get to what Jesus' words were, well, you know, we've got canon issues and you've got

02:44:51

Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter and we don't even know what the New Testament was. There is an agnosticism about the words of Jesus.

02:45:00

But I submit to you that just as Jesus knew what the Old Testament was, the canon of the

02:45:06

Old Testament, having developed over the same period of time as the canon of the New Testament, that since God has spoken,

02:45:13

God knows how to reveal to his people what is and what is not his word. God has that capacity and he did so.

02:45:20

And when we look at what Jesus himself said, he defined his own mission as coming to seek and to save that which was lost and he did so by laying down his life for his sheep.

02:45:32

Now why would he have to do that? If there is no law that has been broken, if there is no law that has been broken, my friends, there is no reason for a sacrifice.

02:45:48

Christianity does not exist without a divine Savior who gives his life as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin and who rises again the third day and calls us to follow him, to follow him in his life, to follow him in his obedience to the

02:46:06

Father. He gives us an example of how we are to live and he honored God's law. He honored that law that this evening has been relegated to the mere speculations of ancient men who were ignorant about modern scientific discoveries that homosexuality just is.

02:46:25

I believe that we're created in the image of God, so nothing we do just is. We may be born with a propensity, for example, to overeat, a propensity to be overly zealous in pursuing the other sex, but God's will calls us to be obedient to his law in those areas and to exercise discipline and to seek his

02:46:52

Spirit's assistance in those ways. Bishop Spong spoke of homosexuals being judged by the church.

02:47:01

Well, if the church has any moral standard in regards to what God's law is, then the church judges fornicators and adulterers and liars and people who are hateful and murderers and thieves.

02:47:13

If the church is going to proclaim God's will as to how we are to live, then there has to be judgment, but it is that very judgment that brings an understanding of who

02:47:23

Christ is and why he died. A church without the ability to judge is a church with no message.

02:47:30

It becomes a religious social club. Judgment is not wrong when that judgment is then used by the

02:47:37

Holy Spirit of God to bring conviction of sin. I take you back to the words of the

02:47:44

Apostle Paul, who was not a repressed homosexual. His words are far more easily seen and have been down through history as being a consistent application of what he believed the law of God was in all aspects of human life.

02:48:01

After talking about homosexuals and fornicators and thieves and adulterers, he said to the

02:48:12

Corinthians, and such were some of you. That's a message of hope to everyone here today.

02:48:20

What does that say? Because when you start going through those lists and I start looking through the faces in this crowd, we don't have to just talk about homosexuality.

02:48:32

We can talk about lust. We can talk about impatience. We can talk about disobedience.

02:48:39

And every single person sitting in this room needs to hear a word of hope. The difference is,

02:48:47

I think for the majority in this room, you haven't started a movement that says, God must accept me the way

02:48:55

I am. Rather than saying, I want God to change me, to be the best that I can be, to conform me to the image of Christ.

02:49:03

I will not demand that he accept my standards. I, as his creature, want to know what his are.

02:49:10

And can we know what his are? I submit to you that the united voice of the Christian people down through the ages, the united voice of every single one of the writers of Holy Scripture, is that yes,

02:49:22

God has spoken. That's what Jesus said. When the Sadducees came and tested him about the woman who had married seven brothers,

02:49:30

Jesus' response to them was, have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

02:49:38

Have you not read what God spoke to you? He did not say, have you not read what

02:49:43

God wrote to you? He did not say, have you not heard what God spoke to you? He said, have you not read what

02:49:49

God spoke to you? He considered the word of God to speak to those individuals to whom he was speaking at that time.

02:49:59

That means God's word speaks to every generation and he holds us accountable there too. Yes, his view of Scripture in all of the

02:50:08

Gospels and there are no other Gospels we can look at that would even begin to be relevant to this particular point in time, all of Jesus' views about Scripture are very clear, it's

02:50:18

God speaking. What about you today? Do you need to hear a word of hope?

02:50:26

That word of hope remains just as true today as it was when Paul wrote to that church and he said such were some of you, but you were washed, you were cleansed, you were justified, you were sanctified not by anything you did, not by any actions you did, but through repentance and faith in the

02:50:47

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Thank you very much. Thank you,

02:50:52

Dr. White. Okay, we have made this very simple for you.

02:51:04

We have actually Okay, here we go.

02:51:09

This is directed towards Dr. White. Can't even believe what

02:51:16

I say. Dr. White, could you please explain to me what is the gospel of salvation?

02:51:25

What is the gospel of salvation? I tried to summarize it just a moment ago, but fundamentally the gospel of salvation is summed up by the

02:51:36

Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 when he says that Jesus Christ died for sinners, that he was buried and he rose again, and that we are called to repent and believe in him.

02:51:52

Jesus Christ is the way that God has provided for any person who is willing to repent and believe, to receive full remission of their sins, and to be, as Paul puts it in Romans 5 .1,

02:52:03

at peace with God. That's the Greek term Irenae, behind it is the Hebrew term Shalom.

02:52:10

Shalom does not exist in Israel today. Anyone who is running around with weapons on them, even if there is not a bombing going on or a war going on, that means peace does not exist.

02:52:22

Shalom is wellness of relationship.

02:52:28

And if a person wants to have peace with God, wellness of relationship with him, no reason for fearing the wrath of God, there is only one way of having that, and that is in and through Jesus Christ.

02:52:41

To say there is another way is to say, as Paul said, we are making the cross of Christ void or empty of its effect.

02:52:49

Now we may need to schedule a debate on pluralism or inclusivism or something like that, but that is the message that the

02:52:55

Apostle Paul delivered. Repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. Bishop Spong?

02:53:01

I hear a great deal of what sounds like guilt talk. How can you repent of who you are?

02:53:09

How can you repent of being male or female? How can you repent of being left -handed or right -handed? How can you repent of being gay or straight?

02:53:16

As I say, you can live it out very disastrously either way, but you can't repent of who you are.

02:53:23

So there is a basic problem here. I don't believe that people are helped by being told how wretched they are.

02:53:30

I think the church often times engages in character assassination under the guise of worship.

02:53:37

I think the way salvation comes is that God's love embraces you just as you are, and then sanctification, to use those wonderful old words, is the process of growing into all that you can be.

02:53:51

But you don't start by being told how wretched and miserable you are because I think that only gets you deep into guilt and deep into an increasing sense of human inadequacy, and it's out of that that we kill each other.

02:54:01

Can we please close the doors that we have there? We have some wonderful chads coming in.

02:54:12

Yes, what I would like to know is how you can read the Bible 25 times, the

02:54:18

Word of God, and not understand what He's saying to you. Well, that's a good question.

02:54:25

It's highly a prejudicial question. I read the Bible because I love it.

02:54:30

I've read it every day of my life since I was 12 years old. I don't read it as a fundamentalist, and I don't think that God can be captured by the writings of any human being at any time and in any place.

02:54:42

There's an enormous difference in the Bible between even in the Jesus story, where Mark says the only word

02:54:48

Jesus spoke from the cross was, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But that disappears by the time you get to John's Gospel, and you hear

02:54:57

Jesus then saying, It is finished, or in Luke saying, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. That means between the time that Mark wrote and the time that Luke and John wrote, some tremendous new thought had entered into the

02:55:08

Christian story. I think you've got to read the Bible as an open -ended book, and you've got to get inside it, and you've got to walk in it, and you've got to walk very, very deeply.

02:55:18

I worry about those people that see the Bible as only a controlling process and see

02:55:23

God only as a punishing parent. I think the church has done guilt better than it's done anything else in the world, and I don't think people are helped by being filled with guilt and a sense of inadequacy.

02:55:35

I would direct anyone to the exact discussion of exactly what Dr. Spong said in regards to Mark and John in my debate with John Dominick Crossan last year in this series of debates because we demonstrated that that was,

02:55:46

I think, a grave misreading of the text, and it does not allow for, of course, the honest reading of each author to speak the truth within his context, in other words, harmonization.

02:55:57

And as far as guilt goes, a person who is not guilty will not be looking for a guilt -bearer in the

02:56:02

Savior Jesus Christ. Okay, and a question for Dr.

02:56:07

White? Thank you. I would like to know what your definition of unconditional love is.

02:56:17

Definition of unconditional love, well, there's no particular biblical passage that uses that language, so I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that.

02:56:29

God's love is unconditional for His people in the sense that it provides everything that they need to have peace with Him.

02:56:36

It is not a love that denies His own nature. It's not a love that gets rid of His own holiness, His own law.

02:56:42

It's not a love that winks at sin, but it is a law that provides everything in and of Himself in Jesus Christ for any person who would repent and believe in Him.

02:56:51

And so it really is one of the reasons that I am a biblical monergist. I believe that God saves, and God saves alone, is because in His love,

02:57:01

He has provided a perfect means of salvation in Jesus Christ that I cannot add anything to, and because I can't add anything to it,

02:57:09

I have to do nothing more than just simply fall at the feet of God, and my boasting can only be in Him.

02:57:15

I don't believe there is anything in the Bible about an unconditional love that allows for a violation of God's holy nature.

02:57:23

I'm just trying to apply it to the topic of our debate this evening, if that's what the question is about, and that is that there could be an unconditional love that actually causes

02:57:31

God to deny His own nature, which He has revealed in His Word. There wouldn't be anything in Scripture that would substantiate that.

02:57:37

I still hear nothing except judgment in those comments, and I think judgment belongs to God.

02:57:44

It doesn't belong to you. It doesn't belong to me. I don't think of the cross as a sacrifice.

02:57:50

I think of the cross as a place where the love of God was demonstrably revealed in the fact that no matter what people did to Jesus, He responded by loving them.

02:58:01

They denied Him. He loved the denier. They betrayed Him. He loved the betrayer. They forsook Him. He loved the forsakers.

02:58:07

They persecuted Him. He loved the persecutors. They killed Him, and the cross is the place where I think

02:58:13

He demonstrates what the love of God is all about, and it is quite unconditional. There is nothing you can do and nothing you can be that separates you from the love of God.

02:58:21

That's the message I see in the cross of Christ. I don't see a sacrifice demanded by an angry

02:58:26

God to take care of guilt -ridden people, and I think that's nothing except the religion of control, which is finally not life -giving to most people.

02:58:35

Thank you. Dr. Spong or Bishop Spong? Either way.

02:58:41

Six -time Dr. Spong. Excuse me. Is the Muslim or Hindu experience with God and their revelation experience with God as valid as yours?

02:58:55

If so, why are you a Christian? If not, who will Jesus judge when

02:59:00

He returns? That's a good question. I don't think it's up to me to make that judgment. I can tell you that Jesus is essential for me.

02:59:11

If I ever say that Jesus is therefore essential for everybody else, I've spoken in a way that I think only

02:59:18

God can speak. I leave God to judge other people. It's not my business to judge them.

02:59:24

Jesus is essential for me. I walk the Christ path. I believe that if I walk the

02:59:29

Christ path and arrive into the mystery and wonder of God, and that other people who walk a different path, if they also arrive into the mystery and wonder of God, then we can be brothers and sisters.

02:59:40

And I will not spit on the path that they walk, and I hope they will not spit on the path

02:59:45

I walk. I have to walk my path. Jesus is necessary to salvation for me, but I cannot say that Jesus is necessary for everybody else without presuming that I have the right to judge everybody else as if I'm God and I'm not

03:00:00

God. Please note that Bishop Spong just said, when I speak like that,

03:00:06

I have spoken in a way only God can speak. If you speak of Christianity as superior or other than Islam and Buddhism.

03:00:14

That's exactly the point. That's what God has done in His Word, and that's the fundamental difference between us this evening. God has spoken in His Word in that way.

03:00:22

It's not arrogant for me to accept what He's said. The point is, if that's what He said, then I have to accept it. And He has said that in Jesus Christ.

03:00:29

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. Okay, any questions for Dr.

03:00:36

White? Dr. White, Paul discusses those who sin sexually as sinning against their own body.

03:00:49

Given that text, and perhaps any other specifically as it relates to homosexuality, would you lump homosexuality along with, say, fornication and adultery into a special category of greater sins?

03:01:03

Well, greater sins not in the sense of receiving from God anything other than the wrath that all sin is due and the separation from God that comes from that, and that's why you have to have the sacrifice and that's why the

03:01:18

New Testament writers speak of sacrifice and define the cross within that way. But they are possibly more personal and the wrath is more immediate because it's a sin against our own body.

03:01:31

There are certain sins you can commit that you can basically get away with it in this life. But sins against your own body tend to sort of catch up with you in this life and as a result can be a little bit easier to see, shall we say, or illustrate.

03:01:46

But as far as there being a special category of sins that are somehow worse, I think there are levels of judgment.

03:01:54

The Apostle Paul spoke of Chorazin and Bethsaida. It would be more tolerable in the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than Chorazin and Bethsaida, but that was based upon the level of revelation that they had received.

03:02:04

These people are rejecting the very incarnate Son of God whereas Sodom and Gomorrah did not have that kind of revelation given to them.

03:02:11

And so I think if we keep those categories straight, we'll be able to understand what he's referring to there. I still hear words like judgment, a punishing parent deity, demanding a sacrifice.

03:02:24

I wonder what kind of God it is that demands a sacrifice, a human offering, rather than a

03:02:29

God who can say, I love you like you are and I accept you for what you are. I haven't got time to develop it tonight, but let me tell you that the idea of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb comes out of the

03:02:41

Jewish observance of Yom Kippur where a lamb was picked from the flocks who was sinless in the fact that lambs lived below the level of human freedom and could not sin.

03:02:52

The lamb had to be physically perfect, no broken bones, and then the lamb was symbolic of what human beings yearned to be, and then they slaughtered the lamb and they took the blood of the lamb and they sprinkled it all over the mercy seat of God and the

03:03:05

Holy of Holies so that people could say, now through the blood of this innocent lamb we have come into the presence of God.

03:03:11

And then the high priest would take some of the blood of the lamb and sprinkle it on the people so that they could be washed in the blood of the lamb.

03:03:17

This was the sacrificial observance of Yom Kippur. There's no question but that Jesus was interpreted by those

03:03:25

Jewish people in the first century in terms of that liturgy. There's also no doubt that that liturgy stood for the human aspirations and yearnings to be at one with God and should not have been literalized into making

03:03:38

God an ogre in the sky who demands a human sacrifice in making Jesus the victim and causing the rest of us to be guilt ridden because we are responsible for the death of Jesus.

03:03:48

I don't believe that's good news and I don't believe that's a gospel message. Bishop Spahn, nice to talk to a fellow

03:03:54

New Jerseyan. Tonight it seems like the sovereignty of God has come into question. The Bible says faith in Hebrews, now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

03:04:09

I'm wondering where your faith is in. I think that's exactly right and to me that's a great passage from Hebrews because faith there doesn't mean believing a set of propositions.

03:04:21

Faith means trusting God to be present in the world no matter what happens. What faith means to me is the ability to walk into the unknown and to know that God is present.

03:04:30

It doesn't mean to be able to have God locked up in a little book that I can take with me and always be assured.

03:04:37

I think you need to embrace some uncertainty and some insecurity. I don't believe that Christianity makes you secure.

03:04:43

I think Christianity gives you the courage to live in a radically insecure world and not fall apart because you trust that God is always present in the midst of that insecurity and that's a very different approach.

03:04:54

By and large when I find people that find security in their religion I think their humanity is diminished and I think their religion becomes something that alienates them from other people because they immediately become judgmental.

03:05:09

I have the truth, you don't. I'm okay, you're not okay. I don't believe the gospel is proclaimed by being hostile to other people.

03:05:18

The biblical doctrine of faith always has an object and that that object is God's revelation.

03:05:24

God has revealed his truth and we can accept his promises and his truth. The definition that Bishop Spong gave just simply isn't the definition the writer of Hebrews gave.

03:05:32

So it becomes an issue where, well, what's your authority for defining faith that way? If you reject the inspiration of the text that you're dealing with then how can we possibly actually define this in any other way?

03:05:42

And I do not believe that God is locked up in a little book. What I do believe is that God has given his revelation and that I cannot begin to ignore it.

03:05:52

It does not give me authority to read his word. He has not locked himself up in a little book, but what he wants us to know, he has made sure that we can know so that we can grow in the grace and knowledge of the

03:06:05

Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, well, powers that are beyond me at this point have just stated that our debate has ended and our question time has ended.