This is Not the Word of the Lord!
I went to my own parish church on a Sunday in June. The music was excellent. The sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. James Jones, an honorary and part time member of the staff of St. Peter's Church in Morristown, New Jersey, was one of the best I have heard in years. The summer congregation was relaxed, casually dressed and friendly. The only thing wrong with that worship service turned out to be the Bible. What a strange indictment. One of the three lessons from the Bible that Sunday was so dreadful that I first cringed as I heard it read, then I railed against it silently. What I really wanted to do was to shout loudly: "That is not true."
...What was the offending passage that bothered me so viscerally? It was the conclusion to the story of David's adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, which was coupled with David's conspiracy to have Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, murdered on the battlefield. The narrative continues by informing us that David was confronted by the prophet Nathan, armed only with a sense of the righteousness of God, who forced David to acknowledge his wrong doing. Nathan's tactic was to tell a story in which another person has acted in a similar manner to the way David had acted. Upon hearing this story the Bible says that King David's anger was kindled against this villainy and he proclaimed that the person who had acted this way was worthy of death. Then Nathan the prophet, in an act of rare courage, looked at the King and said to David" "Thou art the man!" David had in fact condemned his own behavior.
What is so offensive or so wrong about that, you ask. Well, nothing so far. The story, however, moves on and the prophet Nathan spells out the punishment that God will inflict. God, said Nathan in this narrative, was going to slay the child conceived in this adulterous relationship. God was going to make this child's life the payment required for the sin of David and Bathsheba. That was the dreadful lesson from the Bible that this well-trained Episcopal congregation, would declare to be the "Word of God."
My offense was not caused by a lack of conviction on my part that both adultery and murder are wrong and should not be condoned. The question about the absence of morality found in this biblical passage lay solely in the implication that God's decision to destroy the baby born of this adulterous relationship was in any sense proper. That idea, so clear in this text and so morally bankrupt, was why I wanted to scream in protest.
What kind of God is this? That was my question. Why should the innocent child be destroyed for the sins of the child's parents? Where is there any sense of justice in this presumably divine act? For centuries the Christian Church treated those children it called "illegitimate" as pariahs, sometimes not even allowing them to be baptized. Church leaders apparently believed themselves to be following the clear teaching of the Bible.
There was, perhaps, one other thing that made me particularly sensitive to the horror of this biblical passage as I heard it being read on this Sunday morning. I found myself sitting in our church about four rows behind a family consisting of two parents and their only daughter about whom I care deeply, so I was watching them as the lesson was read. Less than a year ago this family lost their vivacious and lively, twenty-four year old daughter and older sister in a mountain climbing accident. That young woman had been a favorite of mine since she was a small child. The news of her death was heartrending to me and I could only imagine the pain her parents and sister endured, and yet here they were in their church listening to a lesson from the Bible which implied that God might cause a child to die as a way of punishing the parents. Such a God, in my opinion, could only be viewed as demonic.
I have been a pastor for more than fifty years. I know that among the most destructive and debilitating elements in human grief is guilt. There is in human tragedy almost an inevitable question that is raised: "What did I do to deserve this?" Why was my child punished with death, or why was I punished with my child's death? It is a question rising out of a seriously flawed theology, by which many people are violated. This theology defines God as a punishing judge who delights in exacting a literal pound of flesh from those defined as sinful. The assumption is also present that this God operates on a fairness principle dispensing rewards and punishments.
As I heard this lesson read that morning my mind also ranged back to another family that lost a child. Early in my priestly career an eleven year old girl in my congregation received a leukemia diagnosis. She died within a year. I knew this child and her parents well. They were not just church members but also close friends. This child's father was a middle management executive and her mother was a homemaker, a status in that small town thought to be a mark of social rank. This family was indeed upwardly mobile. Their roots, however, were quite humble. As children both of them had been members of a Pentecostal Holiness Church that served a working class, not very well educated, congregation. Their minister was a fundamentalist who constantly railed against the sins of the flesh, proclaiming God's condemnation of sexual sins in particular and suggesting that anyone who deviated from God's path of righteousness as revealed in scripture should expect to receive God's wrath. This little girl's parents had, they believed, violated that rule as their first-born daughter had been conceived out of wedlock. They felt the full disapproval of both sets of their parents and of their Pentecostal church community. They dealt with this crisis by arranging a hasty marriage, hoping that this step might mute the punishment that they were quite sure God had in store for them. For a long time guilt was their daily bread. They, nevertheless, established their home, the new father managed to get his college degree despite the economic pressure that parenthood placed on this family. His career prospered and a promotion took them to a new town where they had a new start. Other children followed. Eventually, they joined the Episcopal Church. It was for them a very different, even a healing experience. Their future looked bright. Then came their daughter's sickness, her diagnosis and finally her death. Their grief was not only overwhelming, but their repressed guilt and the God of their youth also came rushing back with a vengeance. They interpreted their daughter's death as that almost expected vengeful act of a punishing God. God had waited, they thought, for them to reach this new place in life and then God struck. Their "sin" had caused the death of their child. Irrational it was, but also powerful in its demonic terror. Rationality is always a casualty of emotion. Each relieved his or her guilt by blaming the other. The stress was more than the marriage could take. Within a year of their daughter's death, they separated. A literal Bible told them quite clearly that God had killed the child of David and Bathsheba, conceived in an adulterous relationship, as a punishment for their sins. I watched these lives being destroyed by the words of scripture to which they attributed ultimate truth. Having lived through that experience with that couple I can no longer keep silent as the dark side of the Bible and the negative theistic definitions of God claim another victim, distort another life, fill decent people with the fear of judgment, and make guilt the primary gift of the Church to its people.
That approach to the Bible must be challenged as must the debilitating message that so many hear in church. The Bible is filled with dark, unlearned themes that in the hands of "the righteous" give rise to an abusive use. It has in its pages what I have called: "The Sins of Scripture." It is time for the Christian Church to say that publicly, openly, honestly.
John Shelby Spong
Anyone care to have the courage? How would one go about such a "clean-up"? Generally, & in LDSism specifically? Roger