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Theology I learned in a hospital cardiac ward

Spencer D Gear

heart diagram

(image courtesy WPClipart)

On 28th February 2003, I was released from the cardiac ward of an Australian hospital after my 4th valve replacement open-heart surgery (I had a 5th such surgery in 2013). What follows in no way minimises the superb care I received at the hands of all of the caring medical & other staff at that excellent hospital.

However, from a number of different staff people and a visitor, I received some profound reflections on life and life-after-death issues that need to be examined and/or challenged.

This is theology from the cardiac ward.

I am young enough never to have heard Francis Schaeffer in person, although he lived and died (d. 15 May, 1984 from cancer) in my generation, but old enough to have read just about everything he wrote, learned deeply from him, and admired him from a distance.

He has taught me the necessity to think of all of life “worldviewishly” – seeing our world and life as a whole and not as bits and pieces. [1] It was Schaeffer who challenged us: “When people refuse God’s answer, they are living against the revelation of the universe and against the revelation of themselves.” [2]

He put it another way:

The strength of the Christian system – the acid test of it – is that everything fits under the apex of the existing, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits. That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic. In all the other systems something “sticks out,” something cannot be included; it has to be mutilated or ignored. [2a]

The revelation of the universe is stated clearly in:

Romans 1:19-20 (ESV), “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” [3]

The revelation of themselves is clear in:

Romans 2:14-16 (ESV), “For when Gentiles [non-Jews], who do not have the law [of God], by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

If you would like to investigate evidence for the accuracy and dependability of the Bible, see:

Can you trust the Bible? Part 1

Can you trust the Bible? Part 2

Can you trust the Bible? Part 3

Can you trust the Bible? Part 4

A. After death – zip!

(image courtesy ChristArt)

I had the following conversation with a nurse:

Nurse (N): You are so much younger than many who have cardiac surgery here (everything is relative since I’m a 1946 model).

SG: Yeh!

N: Last week there was a fellow here for by-pass surgery at age 92. I don’t know why we waste money & other resources on expensive surgery for these oldies. They’ll never have a productive life again.

SG: So, what do you think we should do about it?

N: They should recognise that their time is up. There is nothing after death, so why waste precious resources?

Response:

1. Is death the dead end?

How do we know what happens at death? Is death the end and the snuffing out of all life? Do we disappear into dust, or do we live beyond the grave?

“When I die, I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive,” said the late British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970. [4] We can hardly argue with that assessment: “When I die, I shall rot!” That is exactly what happens to the human body when placed in the ground. Three years after he published that statement, Russell had died. But is it the whole truth? Does the real “me” disappear?

Elsewhere, Russell stated: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.” [4a] Russell most assuredly knows now whether his philosophical and atheistic ponderings about death were correct. But there’s a better way to have a more sure word about what happens at death (see below).

C. S. Lewis, Britain’s favourite fantasy writer of the Narnia series and other writings such as Mere Christianity [5] wrote that “There are no ordinary people. . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” [6]

Senior pastor at Moody Church, Chicago, Edwin W. Lutzer comes to a very different conclusion to Bertrand Russell:

One minute after you slip behind the parted curtain, you will either be enjoying a personal welcome from Christ or catching your first glimpse of gloom as you have never known it. Either way, your future will be irrevocably fixed and eternally unchangeable. [7]

In Indiana, USA, I understand that there is a tombstone with this epitaph:

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so you will be
So prepare for death and follow me

An unknown passerby read the words and scratched this reply below the above verse:

To follow you I’m not content
Until I know which way you went. [8]

2. Which way?

Down through the centuries there have been may who have attempted to roll back the curtain of what happens after death through channelling, a doctrine of reincarnation and an examination of near-death experiences.

It’s pretty natural to want to think that all will be OK beyond death or that death ends it all. Larry Gordon, chief executive of Largo Entertainment, commented, “We all want to believe that death isn’t so bad.” [9]

Some try to contact people after death through the demonic – through spirit mediums. Bishop James Pike tried to do it to contact his son who had committed suicide His son reportedly said, “I’m confused. . . I am not in purgatory, but something like Hell, here, . . . yet nobody blames me here.” [10]

Listen to Shirley MacLaine and she claims that

we can eliminate the fear of death by proclaiming that it does not exist. Through contact in the spirit world, she has discovered that in a previous existence she was a princess in Atlantis, an Inca in Peru, and even was a child raised by elephants. In some previous existences, she was male; in others, female. [11]

Raymond Moody, in Life After Life[12], recorded interviews with those who were near death and had been successfully resuscitated. The stories contained

many similar elements: the patient would hear himself being pronounced dead; he would be out of his body, watching the doctors work over his corpse. While in this state, he would meet relatives or friends who had died and then encounter a “being of light.” When he knows that he must return to his body, he does so reluctantly because the experience of love and peace has engulfed him. [13]

Melvin Morse tells of the near-death experiences of children in Closer to the Light [14] and most of the kids’ experiences are positive. Betty Eadie tells of her own experience on the “other side” in Embraced by the Light [15]. The title gives the clincher for her. She claims to have seen Christ and dedicates the book to him: “To the Light, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom I owe all that I have.”

In Doug Groothius’s comments on this book in Deceived by the Light, he wrote:

The initial printing of 20,000 copies [of Eadie’s book] sold in two weeks and the second printing of 30,000 also went quickly. Within six months the book was on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for well over a year, selling more than a million copies. Paperback rights for the book were sold for nearly two million dollars, after which the paperback edition zoomed to the bestseller lists as well. And at the time of this writing, Eadie is busy speaking around the country and writing another book.

The dust jacket claims that the book offers “astonishing proof of a life after physical death,” and that Eadie “saw more, perhaps, than any other person has seen before, and she came back with an almost photographic view.” [16]

BUT . . . Eadie’s Jesus is radically different from the Jesus of the New Testament.

He is separate from the Father and would do nothing to offend her.
She had no reason to regret deeds committed in the past.
We human beings are not sinful people.
Human “spirit beings” assisted the heavenly Father at creation.[17]

It is common to hear of positive near-death experiences, but other research indicates that many people tell terrifying stories of the life beyond. Some speak of a lake of fire, darkness, and tormented people who are awaiting judgment. For this alternate view of near-death experiences, see Philip J. Swihart, The Edge of Death [18] and Maurice Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door [19]. Rawlings is a cardiologist and cardiovascular specialist who has revived many patients. In his second book on near-death experiences, To Hell and Back, Dr. Rawlings notes:

Most people are deathly afraid of dying. They say, “Doctor, I’m afraid of dying.” But I have never heard one of them say, “Doctor, I’m afraid of judgment.” And judgment is the main concern of patients who have been there and returned to tell about it. . . Drs. Moody and Ring, both now actively engaged in the paranormal – Moody into mirrors and crystal balls and Ring into UFOs — reviewed several thousand NDEs in the Evergreen Study and reported that less than 1 percent (actually only 0.3 percent) had hellish experiences and would have us think that life after death is, after all the evidence is reviewed, entirely a heavenly affair. Fortunately, a few observers are beginning to disagree. One of the disagreements was by researcher Dr. Charles Garfield who noted, “Not everyone dies a blissful, accepting death. . . Almost as many of the dying patients interviewed reported negative visions (demons and so forth), as reported blissful experiences, while some reported both. Note his ratio of roughly 50/50 for negative/positive. I am not the only researcher claiming large amounts of existing negative material [emphasis in original]. [20]

Dr. Rawlings relates the case of a patient who was resuscitated in the excitement of the Knoxville football stadium (Tennessee, USA) and was later transferred to the doctor’s clinic at the Diagnostic Center. The patient related:

I was moving through a vacuum as if life never ended, so black you could almost touch it. Black, frightening, and desolate. I was all alone somewhere in outer space. I was in front of some type of conveyor belt which carried huge pieces of puzzle in weird colors that had to be fitted together rapidly under severe penalty from an unseen force. It was horrible. Impossible. I was shrieking and crying. I was deathly afraid of this force. I knew it was Hell, but there was no fire or heat or anything that I had expected. I was alone, isolated from all sound, until I heard a mumbling, and I could vaguely see a kneeling form. It was my wife. She was praying at my bedside. I never wanted to be a Christian, but I surely am now. Hell is too real. [21]

Woody Allen, in his whimsical way, got to the point: “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens” [22]

For a critique of Eadie’s near-death experiences and some thought-provoking questions and answers about life after death, I recommend Doug Groothuis, Deceived by the Light. [23]

Is there a better way to be determine how we can be as sure as possible about what happens at death? There certainly is and we will be eternally poorer if we neglect it.

3. A more certain word on life beyond the grave

The best person to ask about what happens at death is to seek the One who made the human being immortal – God Himself – and gives the most sure word on life-after-death. Jesus states that “I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18).

God has spoken decisively on what happens at death and we do well to listen to Him and act upon His exhortations. A brief summary of what to expect includes the following [24]:

(image courtesy ChristArt)

a. Death is abnormal

It was caused by the fall of human beings into sin (see Gen. 3:19; Rom. 5:12). The last enemy to be destroyed will be death (I Cor. 15:26).

b. Immortality (meaning deathlessness) and eternal life. Only God is immortal (I Tim. 6:16), yet through His death, Jesus Christ “brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10). God’s promise for the Christian believer is that he/she will live forever and this is a certain hope (I Cor. 15:44; 2 Cor. 5:1).

c. The Christian & resurrection

The uniqueness of Christianity is not only the assurance of eternal life but that, because of Christ’s resurrection, Christians will be resurrected at the last day ( I Cor. 15:17-18). This will be a resurrection and not a resuscitation, and the believer will inherit intellectual powers and wisdom (I Cor. 13:12).

d. Conscious experience after death. Death has no mastery over the Christian believer (Rom. 6:9). There will be rest from labor (including rest from toil, sorrow, pain and sin). There will be work, but in God’s service (Matt. 25:21).

e. New language for the death experience for believers. After Christ’s resurrection, the disciples did not refer to death when they spoke of the ending of human life, but their language was:

- To “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23),
- “Those who have fallen asleep” in Jesus (I Thess. 4:15), and
- “Away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).

The Christian who departs this life goes immediately into the presence of Christ and will be forever with Him.

f. Do believers go straight to heaven? After the death and resurrection of Christ, the spirits of Christians go immediately into the presence of Christ in a place that is called heaven, paradise or the Father’s house (see 2 Cor. 12:2, 4; John 14:2-3). “After the death and ascension of Jesus the believer no longer has to pass through the portals of Hades [as in the Old Testament times], but instead goes immediately to be with Him.” [25]

g. Hell and the unbeliever. The doctrine of hell is never a pleasant topic of conversation and some have tried to deny it or snuff out its impact by substituting annihilation as an alternative. The Bible is clear according to Matthew 25:46, “And these [the unbelievers on Jesus’ ‘left’] will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” But doesn’t 2 Thess. 1:9 support annihilation: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” The word translated “destruction” means “ruin.”

There are no verses to support the doctrine of purgatory and many to contradict it.

There are many verses that reveal the existence of heaven (for the Christian believer) and hell (for the unbeliever). See Ps. 1; 73; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 7:13-14, 24-27; 25:1-13; John 3:16; 2 Thess. 1:8-10; Rev. 20:11-15; 22:14-15.

Conclusion: There is no biblical evidence for death being a dead-end. For the believer, it will be entrance into the presence of the Lord and heaven. For the unbeliever, it will be entrance into the presence of the Lord and hell. The Bible presents no other alternatives.

G. K. Chesterton once stated that “hell is the greatest compliment God has ever paid to the dignity of human freedom.” [26] What about others outside of Christ? C. S. Lewis offered the challenge: “If you are worried about the people outside [of Christ], the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself.” [27]

B. Christianity the crutch

(image courtesy ChristArt)

When I related this story of the nurse’s statement that there is nothing at death, to a Christian friend who visited me in hospital, he told of a medical situation involving a mutual acquaintance who was in her late 60s & in hospital on the morning of surgery. As a doctor moved towards her bed, he asked what she was reading. When she explained that it was a Christian devotional book and that she was praying, the doctor’s response was: “Don’t you trust us? Why do you need a crutch?” She was too weak and in a pre-med state to give a response.

Response:

How are Christians to respond to the allegation that their dependence on Christ alone for salvation and their calling upon Him in prayer in difficult circumstances is the use of a “crutch”? It’s a fairly standard line from the soap-box, populist university agitator, “Ha! Ha! You Christians are weak and Christ is your crutch.” Karl Marx reinforced this stereotype with his proclamation, “Religion is the opiate of the people.”

The inference in this complaint against Christianity is that only weak people need a crutch. Real men/women can make it through life on their own without supernatural resources.

Amazingly, this snigger against Christ can raise some core issues with which to challenge the university atheist, sceptical medical doctor, and others.

1. The Crutch Defined

A literal, physical crutch is “a staff or support to assist a lame or infirm person in walking,” but it is used also as a colloquial expression to mean “anything relied on or trusted.” [28]

2. Only the sick need a crutch

There is a sense in which Christianity could be described metaphorically as a crutch – all people have a terminal spiritual disease (the sin problem) and they need help for that disease. But this problem is more than a “disease.”

Also, if a crutch is something that we rely on or trust in, that applies also to the Christ of the cross and the resurrection in whom Christians put their trust.

But Christianity defined as a “crutch” comes with too much negative baggage to be of significant use in explaining the Christian faith. However, there is a sense in which “crutch” is ok and not ok. Consider the following:

Matthew 15:18-19: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”

Romans 3:10-12: “As it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.’”

Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one
man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

The Bible takes sin seriously because it is the core human problem. Unless we solve the sin problem, there is no hope for each person or for the whole human race. R. C. Sproul correctly summarises our human dilemma as diagnosed by the Bible:

“The biblical meaning of sin is to miss the mark of God’s righteousness.“All human beings are sinners.“Sin involves a failure to conform to (omission) and a transgression of (commission) the law of God.“Only moral agents can be guilty of sin.“Each sin committed incurs greater guilt.“Sin violates God and people.” [29]

As politically incorrect as it is to state it this way – sin is the problem, not just for criminals and other rebels, but for all of us.

3. But the sin-sick need more than a crutch

In the Bible verses above, we’ve stated the problem – all of us have violated the law of God and stand guilty as sinners. The problem is very deep. Is there a solution that is more than a fanciful “crutch”? There is and that’s the good news:

Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

1 John 1:8-10: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

If you are really serious about doing business with God and not seeking a crutch (superficial answer), consider these essentials:

God is holy and absolutely just.

We are sinners and God hates sin.

God inflicts his wrath on sin; how can it be pacified?

Consider who Jesus Christ really is and what he has done to deal with the sin problem through his death on the cross and the shedding of his blood.

What does God demand of you for real change to happen in your life?

What happens to those who reject God’s offer of salvation?

If you want to know more, consider the Content of the Gospel.

By now you should understand that the diagnosis is far too serious and the solution radical enough to need something more than a crutch.

4. It doesn’t sound or look like a crutch

Throughout history, many Christians could not be described as those overcome by weakness. They have sought anything but a crutch.

The early Christians . . . endured shunning, mocking, slander, illegal search and seizure, false arrest, kangaroo trials with perjured testimony, floggings, beatings, imprisonment, and stonings for their beliefs. They were crucified, burned alive, mutilated by lions, and hung on poles and covered with pitch and used as wicks to light [Roman Emperor] Nero’s gardens. They hardly sound like weaklings. Not a single crutch in sight. The history of the Christian church up to this very day is associated with reality – the martyrs’ blood has often been the nutrient of growth. [29a]

For a sample of some of the sufferings that Christians have endured for their faith, see

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and

By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century [29b]

In the latter book, James and Marti Hefley wrote:

It appears likely that Dr. Paul Carlson was correct when he told Congolese believers before his martyrdom, that more believers have died for Christ in this [20th] century than in all the previous centuries combined. Of course, there is no hard evidence to prove this, since the records of most martyrdoms before the twentieth century are lost, and the names of countless martyrs in this [20th] century (those who died in the Soviet Union and China, for example) are not available for scrutiny. [29c]

If Christianity is a crutch, why is it that the children of martyrs have now become missionaries themselves for the Christian faith?

Dr. David and Rebecca Thompson, for instance, are now serving with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Africa. Dr. Thompson’s father and mother were killed at Banmethuot, Vietnam, in 1968. Mrs Thompson’s father, Archie Mitchell, was captured by Communist Viet Cong in Vietnam in 1962, and is still unaccounted for, and her mother endured almost a year’s communist captivity in 1975. And five of six sons of Hector McMillan, martyred in Zaire, in 1964, are either already missionaries or under appointment to go. The remaining son has spent six months helping missionaries in Africa. Their mother died from cancer in 1976. [29d]

Christianity as a “crutch” is an accusation that doesn’t hold up. Even though resistance to the Christian faith may increase, more martyrs will fall, those totally committed to Jesus Christ will continue to proclaim him as Saviour, Redeemer, Reconciler and Resurrected Lord – until Jesus Christ returns. This proclamation by Christians will continue at home and in other countries, no matter what the risk. The Christian faith is no crutch at all. It is the faith for those seeking eternal life with God Himself – and it may lead to a martyr’s grave.

C. Beat up on the church

(image courtesy WPClipart)

A nurse was pulling the wires out of my chest that were connected to my heart (the wires were there in case an electric charge was needed after surgery), so she needed to distract me from this minimally painful event. Out of the blue, she attacked “these Christians who are abusers of children.” Why? This was the first day that I was well enough to read extensively and my wife, Desley, had brought two contrasting books (at my request): a New International Version New Testament and John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Historical Jesus (studying for my doctoral thesis). [30]

I had divulged the content of my reading, so it was time to flog the church for its worst examples.

Playing by the wrong rules

I would never judge that hospital’s medical care by the nurses who might have abused patients or did the illegal. But it’s still OK to flog the church for its hypocrites. I’m ashamed of people like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and others who have given the church a terrible public reputation.

However, there is a fundamental problem about this nurse’s response and Jesus knew it. He stated it clearly in the incident with the woman taken in adultery: John 8:7, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Even after a person becomes a Christian he/she is still a sinner – a redeemed sinner. Romans 7 details the Christians life-long struggle with sin. Note Romans 7:17 , “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” To believers, John wrote: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

I deeply regret the gross and much publicised sinful activity of some Christians that has become a blight on the church and a point of accusation against Christian believers. I have shown repentant remorse over my own sin and will continue to do that should I commit any known sin in the future.

But the facts are that Christians live by the power of God, sometimes fall into sin bringing a reproach on the Name of Christ, but God is still working on us and in us. This is not an excuse. This is just the way it is.

Perfection is for those who are in heaven. Until than, Christians live by the laws of sin and forgiveness, thanks to Christ’s redemptive work. Romans 6:11 states the battle, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

D. I don’t believe anything any more

I spoke with a nurse who saw the unorthodox material I was reading (John D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus). She said that she read the book about 10 years ago when she did a graduate diploma in theology at a Roman Catholic (RC) seminary and then added: “But the sad fact is that now I don’t believe anything.” [An overstatement, but an attempt to convey that she has abandoned the faith of her fathers.]

Now, she was investigating Islam and commended the RC school that was teaching her grandchildren Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and other world religions – all as worthy possibilities of following.

My wife and I had an open conversation with her as she transparently revealed that she (age 60) was raised “in a strict Irish RC family” who believed that “you need to have faith and don’t question.” She, a questioning person, could not accept the blind faith that was fed to her, read widely, and today doesn’t know what to believe.

This conversation raised three enduring issues for me:

There is no power in civil religion without a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Telling anybody, especially our children, to “just believe and don’t question,” is useless in preparing them for eternity and does not give them a foundation on which to build a Christian worldview of substance.

We must provide answers of substance to refute writers like John Dominic Crossan, the fellows of the Jesus Seminar, and others who are eroding confidence in the Scriptures by their reconstruction of biblical history.

Let’s examine these issues!

1. Civil religion has no power

There is no staying power in civil religion – attending church and being part of organised religion – even if that religion is part of Christianity. The key is stated clearly in John 1:12-13 (ESV): “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

The keys are:

Receive Christ by believing on the person of the crucified and resurrected Christ;
To these, Christ gives the right and privilege to become children of God, in relationship with Him;
The people in relationship with Christ are born of God.
If you’d like to know more, see The Content of the Gospel.

2. An apologetic against: “Just believe and don’t question”

There is a great lack of emphasis on apologetics in training in theological colleges and seminaries. It is one of the main branches of systematic theology and is critical to our preparing all of God’s people, especially the young, for defending their faith.

An enduring faith is one built on factual evidence for the faith, the evidence of which can be tested. Leading apologist and theologian, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, hit the mark when he said: “Lose the Bible and you lose the best evidence for God; defend the Bible and you discover ‘many infallible proofs’ for the salvation revealed once for all through the death and resurrection of His Son (Acts 1:3).” [31]

a. Some reasons to believe

Basic biblical Christianity requires these dimensions:

(1) Proclaim the gospel and disciple believers

The Bible’s statements are clear:

Mark 13:10: “And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations.”

Matthew 28:19-20:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Linked with these commands by Jesus to take the gospel into all the world and disciple believers, is the requirement for gifted church leaders to equip believers for this kind of ministry:

(2) Equip believers for ministry

Ephesians. 4:10-14,

He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.) And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministryfor building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. (emphasis added)

Proclaiming the gospel and discipling believers are at the core of New Testament Christianity. So is the need for the people with ministry gifts (Eph. 4) to engage in training/equipping the people of God for ministry. This is a neglected area in the contemporary church where I live in Australia.

But there’s more to it than a simple proclamation of the Gospel and the equipping ministry of those gifted by God.

(3) The need to defend (give reasons) for the Christian faith.

Francis Schaeffer.jpg

Francis Schaeffer (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Francis Schaeffer saw this need, understood the Bible’s message, and practised what he preached. He wrote:

At times I get tired of being asked why I don’t just preach the “simple gospel.” You have to preach the simple gospel so that it is simple to the person to whom you are talking, so it is no longer simple. The dilemma of modern man is simple: he does not know why man has any meaning. He is lost. Man remains a zero. This is the damnation of our generation, the heart of modern man’s problem. . . It is the Christian who has the answer at this point – a titanic answer! So why have we as Christians gone on saying the great truths in ways that nobody understands? Why do we keep talking to ourselves, if men are lost and we say we love them? Man’s damnation today is that he can find no meaning for man, but if we begin with the personal beginning we have an absolutely opposite situation. . . . Only one fills the philosophical need of existence, of Being, and it is the Judeo-Christian God – not just an abstract concept, but rather that this God is really there. He exists. There is no other answer, and orthodox Christians ought to be ashamed of having been defensive for so long. It is not a time to be defensive. There is no other answer. . . . Christianity is not only true to the dogmas, it is not only true to what God has said in the Bible, but it is also true to what is there, and you will never fall off the end of the world! It is not just an approximate model; it is true to what is there. When the evangelical catches that – when evangelicalism catches that – we may have our revolution. [32]

Basic Christianity requires faith (the just/righteous shall live by faith, Rom. 1:17), but Christianity requires more than what Francis Schaeffer calls “the simple gospel.”

1 Peter 3:15 declares: “But in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”

Giving reasons for why we believe (making a defense) is core Christianity. This is the ministry of apologetics that is in such short supply in today’s church. This nurse in the cardiac ward was subjected to anaemic Christianity – Christianity without reasons.

Foundational material is found in Francis Schaeffer’s early books on the infinite-personal God who exists, is there, and has spoken. [33]

This kind of foundation would have been an excellent antidote for the nurse who “now believes nothing.” However, she was exposed to the doubts and reconstruction of writers such as John Dominic Crossan. That would be enough to give any searching person the turn-off for a long time [see below].

a. Some recommended reading

If you are serious about seeking meaning in life and investigating the Christian faith, the following are recommended:

John Blanchard, Does God Believe in Atheists? Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000 [John is a British author, teacher and conference speaker. This is one of the most provocative books I have read in a long while – 600 pages – but well worth the read if you want evidence and challenges.]

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1994 [Craig comes out with the big guns in defense of Christianity. This is not for those who prefer light reading.]

Stephen Gaukroger, It Makes Sense. London: Scripture Union, 1989 [an excellent lay-level introduction to the key evidence for Christianity. Sadly, it is now out of print.]

Norman Geisler & Ron Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences. Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1990. [Recommended]

John Warwick Montgomery, Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics. Newburgh, IN: Trinity Press, , 1978.

Francis A. Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview (Vols. 1-5). Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1982.

Francis A. Schaeffer, Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (3 books in 1 vol.): The God Who Is There; Escape from Reason; He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1990. [In speaking to the people of our times, Francis Schaeffer was one of the best. These are his foundational books in one volume. Highly recommended.]

R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner & Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Academie Books (Zondervan Publishing Company), 1984.

Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House (Willow Creek Resources), 1998 [Strobel builds a strong case for the Christian faith as an investigative journalist. It is packed with facts to give excellent evidence for the faith.]

Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House (Willow Creek Resources), 2000 [Again, highly recommended.]

(4) A brief response to John Dominic Crossan, the reconstructionist

John Dominic Crossan (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

The havoc of historical and biblical reconstructionists such as John Dominic Crossan cannot be over-estimated in the negative impact on the Christian community and for others who are seeking God, or for those whose faith is not firmly grounded in the foundations of the faith.

It is not surprising that the nurse “believes in nothing” after reading Crossan. Take a read!

a. Out of the mind of Dom Crossan

Consider his views:

(1) “It is precisely that fourfold record [the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John] that constitutes the core problem. . . The gospels are, in other words, interpretations.” [34]

(2) “What those first Christians experienced as the continuing presence of the risen Jesus or the abiding empowerment of the Spirit gave the transmitters of the Jesus tradition a creative freedom we would never have dared postulate had such a conclusion not been forced upon us by the evidence. Even when, for example, Matthew and Luke are using Mark as a source for what Jesus said or did or what others said or did in relation to Jesus, they are unnervingly free about omission and addition, about change, correction, or creation in their own individual accounts. . . The gospels are neither histories nor biographies.” [35]

(3) “The journey to and from Nazareth for census and tax registration [in the birth story of Jesus] is a pure fiction, a creation of Luke’s own imagination. . . . I understand the virginal conception of Jesus to be a confessional statement about Jesus’ status and not a biological statement about Mary’s’ body. It is later faith in Jesus as an adult retrojected mythologically onto Jesus as an infant. . .” [36]

(4) Concerning the “son of man” sayings about Jesus: “It was thereafter easier to create and place upon his [Jesus’]] lips certain titular ‘Son of Man’ sayings as the tradition of his words grew after his death.” [37]

b. Crossan declares his hand

(1) “This is the central problem of what Jesus was doing in his healing miracles. Was he curing the disease through an intervention in the physical world, or was he healing the illness through an intervention in the social world? I presume that Jesus, who did not and could not cure that disease or any other one, healed the poor man’s illness by refusing to accept the disease’s ritual uncleanness and social ostracization. . . . But miracles are not changes in the physical world so much as changes in the social world.” [38]

(2) “I myself, for example, do not believe that there are personal supernatural spirits who invade our bodies from outside and, for either good or evil, replace or jostle for place with our own personality. But the vast, vast majority of the world’s people have always so believed, and according to one recent cross-cultural survey, about 75 percent still do.” [39]

(3) Concerning the raising of Lazarus by Jesus: “While I do not think this event ever did or could happen, I think it is absolutely true…. I understand, therefore, the story of Lazarus as process incarnated in event and not the reverse. I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.” [40]

(4) “My proposal is that Jesus’ first followers knew almost nothing whatsoever about the details of his crucifixion, death or burial. What we have now in those detailed passion accounts [in the Bible’s gospels] is not history remembered but prophecy historicized. And it is necessary to be very clear on what I mean here by prophecy. I do not mean texts, events, or persons that predicted or forshadowed the future, that projected themselves forward toward a distant fulfillment. I mean such units sought out backward, as it were, sought out after the events of Jesus’ life were already known and his followers declared that texts from the Hebrew Scriptures had been written with him in mind. Prophecy, in this sense, is known after rather than before the fact.” [41]

(5) How do we deal with the death, burial, empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus? Crossan’s response is: “Is this fact or fiction, history or mythology? Do fiction and mythology crowd closely around the end of the story just as they did around its beginning? And if there is fiction or mythology, on what is it based? I have already argued, for instance, that Jesus’ burial by his friends was totally fictional and unhistorical. He was buried, if buried at all, by his enemies, and the necessarily shallow grave would have been easy prey for scavenging animals.” [42]

(6)”The core problem is compounded by another one. Those four gospels do not represent all the early gospels available or even a random sample within them but are instead a calculated collection known as the canonical gospels.” [43] In fact, Crossan prefers the material in the extracanonical gospels to the four canonical gospels.

Note what Crossan has done. In the above section, “Crossan declares his hand,” there is evidence of his presuppositions that drive his conclusions. Crossan ends where he begins — with his presuppositions. This is circular reasoning and is cheating. He does not listen to what the documents say, but imposes his views on them. It is expected that he will come out with conclusions that agree with his presuppositions. His presuppositions include:

He does not believe that Jesus healed physical disease. Nobody, including Jesus, brings dead people back to life again. He’s a naturalist, disguised as a sociologist.

He does not believe in supernatural spirits.

He does not believe in supernatural foretelling in prophecy, but links it to mythology and fiction. He rejects the Bible as the authoritative Word of God.

Therefore, he prefers the extracanonical gospels over the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

He calls it reconstruction; I call it dishonesty. He has personal reasons to debunk the biblical revelation and he does not allow the Scriptures to speak for themselves. His presuppositions drive his agenda.

He admits that his writings, based on 80% of his correspondence, have met the needs of

A group in this country [USA] who claim a center of the road between the extremes of secularism and fundamentalism. They are also dissatisfied, disappointed, or even disgusted with classical Christianity and their denominational tradition. They hold on with anger or leave with nostalgia, but are not happy with either decision. . . But they know now that those roots must be in a renewed Christianity whose validity does not reject every other religion’s integrity, a renewed Christianity that has purged itself of rationalism, fundamentalism, and literalism, whether of book, tradition, community or leader. [44]

In spite of his repudiation of much of the Bible, he still wants to see himself as “a Christian.” [45] The reality of his theology is seen in this blasphemous statement from his memoir:

Mine eyes decline the glory of the coming of the Lord who will trample out the vintage made of human beings as grapes. I decline the first or second coming of such a Jesus and, even more emphatically, of a God whose final solution to the existence of evil and the problem of injustice is the extermination of all those considered evil or unjust. I reject, and I think we should all reject, that vision from the final book of the Christian Bible, from the book of Revelation, where “the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles”. [46]

c. How should we respond to Crossan’s approach to the Gospel of Christ?

The Scripture warns us of those who proclaim another gospel:

Matthew 12:30, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (see also Luke 9:50; 11:23; Mark 9:40)

2 Cor. 11:4, “For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.”

Galatians 1:8-9, “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. [9] As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.”

It is very clear that John D. Crossan is proclaiming a gospel that is contrary to that of the New Testament.

For a different assessment of what will happen to those who reject Christ, see Hell & Judgment.

What is Jesus’ assessment of a denial of Himself? Matthew 10:33 states, “But whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” Where does that leave John Dominic Crossan?

E. The happy wanderer

Five days before I exited that cardiac ward, Vince came to our room of 4 as a patient. He was the life of the “party.” He had such a happy disposition that he brought “sunshine” to that ward. He joked, laughed with us (sometimes a pain for my zipper chest) and we became the best of mates (Aussie for buddies) in such a short time. He gave the nurses heaps and put a sign on his bed, “Is there any Dr. who will claim me?” He had been admitted to hospital with suspected angina, had a series of tests, but for 2 days he was not visited by a Dr. because she thought that he had been discharged. Now that did bring some laughter to the room. I believe Vince brought to that ward a dimension of Prov. 17:22: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

F. Now what?

1. Australian Christians have a long way to go in proclaiming the Gospel clearly so that ordinary, thinking people have a clear understanding of what happens when the last breath leaves the human body?

2. Religion as a crutch is a common rebuff. There’s a need to defend the faith here as Dr John W. Montgomery would say, “It is faith founded on fact.” A crutch that sends some Christians to a martyr’s grave hardly seems that it needs a crutch for a weakling.

3. When the unbeliever raises examples of Christian hypocrites who offend them, I want to empathasise with them. They offend me also. But we don’t judge any religion or anything else on the worst examples. Nursing is not judged by its worst representatives.

4. Civil religion and “faith” not based on evidence are due for a burial – sooner than later.

5. There’s an urgent need for all of us to be active apologists (see I Peter 3:15), if we are convinced by and have experienced the power of the crucified Christ. Those who have the gifts and motivation should be doing much more public defense of the faith in secular countries like my own.

6. Unorthodox proclaimers such as John Dominic Crossan and his mates from the Jesus Seminar need thorough refutations from convinced Christian apologists.

7. In all our seriousness, never forget that “a cheerful heart is good medicine.”

8. I must not forget to thank God for a godly wife who prayed, read Scripture, and meditated during 7.5 hours of surgery and was there to sit for hours per day beside my bed as I was in the intensive care unit (where it seems that I lost 2 days of my life) and then in the cardiac ward – for the 4th time.

G. From the cardiac ward

These are my personal, theological and apologetic reminisces from time spent in the cardiac ward of an Australian hospital. I am grateful to my living Lord God Almighty for every breath I breathe. To my last breath I will praise him with the knowledge that, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Ps. 116:15) and we “would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). I am assured that I will not leave this earth one minute before God’s appointed time for me (and all others):

Psalm 139:16:

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there were none of them.

Endnotes

1. See especially, Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, “The Abolition of Truth and Morality” in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview (Vol. 5), p. 423-4. Here, Schaeffer stated:

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, and the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality – each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about dur to a shift in world view – that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different – toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. They have not see that this world view has taken the place of the one that had previously dominated Northern European culture, including the United States [and my own country of Australia], which was at least Christian in memory, even if the individuals were not individually Christian.

These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results – including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law.

It is not that these two world views are different only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results. The operative word here is inevitably. It is not just that they happen to bring forth different results, but it is absolutely inevitable that they will bring forth different results.

2. Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, Appendix A: “The Question of Apologetics” in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview (Vol. 1). Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1982, p. 180.
2a Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview (Vol. 1). Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1982, p. 339.
3. ESV refers to The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Bibles (A division of Good News Publishers), 2001. Unless otherwise stated, all Bible quotations are from the ESV.
4. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian. London: Unwin Books, 1967, p. 47.
4a. In J. Kerby Anderson, Life, Death & Beyond. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1980, p. 66.
5. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (rev. & exp. ed.). New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1952.
6. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (rev. & exp. ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 18-19.
7. Erwin W. Lutzer, One Minute After You Die: A Preview of Your Final Destination. Chicago: Moody Press, 1997, p. 9.
8. In ibid., p. 11.
9. Martha Smigis, Hollywood Goes to Heaven,” Time, 3 June 1991, p. 70, in Lutzer p. 17.
10. James A. Pike, The Other Side. New York: Doubleday, 1968, p. 115, in Lutzer, p. 18.
11. In Lutzer, p. 21.
12. Raymond Moody, Life After Life. Covington, GA: Mockingbird, 1975.
13. Lutzer’s description, p. 22.
14. Melvin Morse, Closer to the Light. New York: Ivy, 1990.
15. Betty J. Eadie and Curtis Taylor, Embraced by the Light. Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf, 1992.
16. Doug Groothuis, Deceived by the Light. Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1997, p. 11.
17. Eadie & Taylor, Embraced by the Light.
18. Philip J. Swihart, The Edge of Death. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1978.
19. Maurice S. Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1978. (Also released by New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1979.)
20. Maurice Rawlings, To Hell and Back. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993, pp. 32, 73
21. Ibid., p. 79.
22. In Groothuis, p. 9.
23. Ibid.
24. Based on J. Kerby Anderson, ch. 8, “Our lives beyond death,” p. 145 ff.
25. Ibid., p. 158.
26. In ibid., p. 167.
27. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 66.
28. The Macquarie Dictionary: Australia’s National Dictionary (3rd. ed.). Macquarie University, NSW, Australia: The Macquarie Library, 1997, p. 524.
29. R. C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1992, p. 144.
29a. D. James Kennedy, Skeptics Answered: Handling Tough Questiona about the Christian Faith. Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Books, 1997, p. 142.
29b. W. Grinton Berry (ed.), Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1978; James and Marti Hefley, By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century. Milford MI: Mott Media, 1979.
29c. In James and Marti Hefley, p. 589.
29d. Ibid., p. 590.
30. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.
31. John Warwick Montgomery, Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics. Newburgh, IN: Trinity Press, , 1978, p. xiii.
32. Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent in Complete Works (Vol. 1), pp. 285-287, 290.
33. Schaeffer’s foundational material is now available as a separate volume: Francis A. Schaeffer, Francis A. Schaeffer Trilogy (3 books in 1 vol.): The God Who Is There; Escape from Reason; He Is There and He Is Not Silent. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1990.
34. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography [this is an abbreviated version of his earlier book, The Historical Jesus]. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, p. x.
35. Ibid., p. xiii.
36. Ibid., p. 21, 23.
37. Ibid., p. 51.
38. Ibid., p. 82.
39. Ibid., p. 85.
40. Ibid., pp. 94-95.
41. Ibid., p. 145, emphasis in the original.
42. Ibid., p. 160.
43. Ibid., p. x.
44. John Dominic Crossan, A Long Way from Tipperary: A Memoir. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000, p. xx.
45. Ibid., p. xix.
46. Ibid., p. 185.
47. Ibid.

Romans 8:28:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Spong’s deadly Christianity

J S Spong 2006 (courtesy Wikipedia)

By Spencer D Gear

I read the article, “An Evening with John Shelby Spong,” in the Uniting Church of Queensland’s, Journey magazine, online (28 September 2007). Then, I read the positive letter towards Spong’s Christianity by Noel Preston.

1. Dear editor

I wrote this letter-to-the-editor of Journey:[1]

Letters to the editor,
Journey
Sent 27 Oct 2007 to: journey@ucaqld.com.au

Dear Editor,

It is with sadness that I must disagree profoundly with Noel Preston’s assessment of Bishop Spong as having “the positive impact . . . on behalf of Christian faith” (Journey, Letters, Nov. 07). While Spong was Bishop of Newark, NJ, the Episcopalians voted with their feet. Membership dropped by more than 40%. That redefines “positive impact.”

Spong throws out core Christian beliefs such as the atonement, calling it an “offensive idea.” He denies the bodily resurrection of Christ, yet still wants to say: “I am a Christian. I believe that God is real. I call Jesus my Lord. Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being. I believe passionately in God. This God is not identified with doctrines, creeds, and traditions” (A New Christianity for a New World, pp. 3, 10, 64, 74).

Luke T. Johnson, a scholar of NT & Christian origins, states that “having a bishop [Spong] with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to ‘rethink pipes.’ Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past, but he has not. He remains defined by the literalism he so doggedly battles” (The Real Jesus, p. 33).

Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, and former Oxford scholar, N. T. Wright, takes Spong’s view to task in, Who Was Jesus?

Another has described Spong as “Mr. I-am-a-bishop-who-believes-nothing-of-the-Gospel”.[2]

Yet, Rev. Preston wants to link Spong to professing “his allegiance to Jesus Christ despite challenging certain questionable beliefs.” Which Jesus?

Spong’s denial of central Christian beliefs makes him heterodox in his theology. To call his ministry “prophetic” is an abuse of the word. Spong’s Jesus is no more than regurgitated 19th century liberalism.

“Didn’t it happen to Jesus of Nazareth?” Rev. Preston asks? Yes it did, but not for an anaemic Christ stripped of his essence by bishops like Spong. Spongian “christianity” is deadly to church life.

Sincerely,
Spencer Gear,
Hervey Bay

2. The pro-Spong letter

This is the Noel Preston letter to which I was referring:

Spong again[3]

I write to commend you for the October Journey.

I was especially appreciative of the three commentaries on Bishop Spong’s public meeting in Brisbane.

I do not dissent from the impressions reported and share with Bruce Johnson a measure of disappointment that the address I heard from Jack Spong was short on the detail of “a new approach” to theology, though I have great admiration for the positive impact the Bishop has had on behalf of Christian faith throughout a courageous ministry lasting decades.

Your editorial on the subject mused over what it is that causes such a reaction by many to the 78 year old Bishop.

I suspect its intensity has something to do with his determination to profess his allegiance to Jesus Christ despite challenging certain questionable beliefs, moral codes and institutional norms which have been dubiously confused with the essence of the Gospel.

Perhaps his detractors might opine: “If he could just stop pretending to be a disciple it would be easier to tolerate him!”

This is not an unusual story.

As some of your readers would recognise, attempts to be prophetic from within a religious tradition often bring forth a vehement reaction.

Didn’t it happen to Jesus of Nazareth?

Noel Preston
Auchenflower

3. The edited letter

If you have written letters to editors of newspapers and magazines, you will know that an original letter can be edited to eliminate some of the original material. This is what happened with my letter.

This is how my letter appeared in Journey, December 2007, p. 19.

Spong again

It is with sadness that I must disagree profoundly with Noel Preston’s assessment of Bishop Spong as having “the positive impact on behalf of Christian faith” (November Journey).

While Spong was Bishop of Newark, the Episcopalians voted with their feet. Membership dropped by more than 40%. That redefines “positive impact”.

Spong throws out core Christian beliefs such as the atonement, calling it an “offensive idea”.

He denies the bodily resurrection of Christ, yet still wants to say: “I am a Christian. I believe that God is real. I call Jesus my Lord. Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being” (A New Christianity for a New World).

Luke T. Johnson, a scholar of New Testament and Christian origins, states that “having a bishop [Spong] with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to ‘rethink pipes’.

Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past, but he has not.

To call his ministry ‘prophetic’ is an abuse of the word.

Spong’s Jesus is no more than regurgitated 19th century liberalism.

“Didn’t it happen to Jesus of Nazareth?” Rev Preston asks.

Yes it did, but not for an anaemic Christ stripped of his essence by bishops like Spong.

Spongian ‘Christianity’ is deadly to church life.

Spencer Gear, Hervey Bay

a. Please note what was edited from my letter

The page reference numbers for Spong’s A New Christianity for a New World (Spong 2001) were eliminated. Not including these prevents others from checking out my quotes with ease. But that is inconsequential compared with other more substantive issues that were edited out.

This is what I stated about Luke Johnson, ‘Luke T. Johnson, a scholar of NT & Christian origins, states that “having a bishop [Spong] with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to ‘rethink pipes’. Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past, but he has not. He remains defined by the literalism he so doggedly battles’ (The Real Jesus, p. 33). How was it edited in my published letter?

Luke T. Johnson, a scholar of New Testament and Christian origins, states that “having a bishop [Spong] with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to ‘rethink pipes’.

Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past, but he has not.

The Journey publication of my letter reads as though I wrote the last sentence. That sentence was not created by me. It is a quote from Luke T Johnson (1996:33). This is unacceptable editing when I am made to say something another author wrote. It makes it look like plagiarism when that is not the way I presented it in my letter.

What I stated from Anglican scholar, N T Wright, was excised. I wrote: ‘Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, and former Oxford scholar, N. T. Wright, takes Spong’s view to task in, Who Was Jesus?’

It was important to note that Wright provided a refutation of Spong in Wright’s book, Who Was Jesus? (1993). This is because both Spong and Wright are Anglicans but reach radically different conclusions concerning Jesus. Wright’s scholarship is regarded by many scholars as more substantive than Spong’s, and there are reasons for this.

Wright challenged Spong:

In particular, talk of ‘my Christ’ is the kind of thing that, as Spong must realize, leaves him wide open to the charge of sheer subjectivism – especially when it is combined with a continual downplaying of historical truth. How do we know that Spong’s ‘Christ’ is the real Christ?…

Spong has, in short, cut himself off from serious historical study. The world that he has opened up is a world which he himself calls midrash, however inaccurately. It is a world where the modern exegete can reconstruct a fantasy-history in the interests of a current ideology (Wright 1993:67, 91).

4. A theologian’s critique of Spong

Gerald O’Collins, Professor of fundamental theology, Gregorian University, Rome, reviewed Spong’s book, Resurrection: Myth or reality (1994). In the first paragraph of his review, O’Collins stated that Spong ‘seems a caring, prayerful person. But a kindly heart and lots of fine rhetoric cannot make up for the lack of scholarship and critical judgement shown throughout this book’ (O’Collins 2000:112).

He wrote of Spong’s inaccuracy as a scholar:

What is said about a key verb St Paul uses in Gal. i:15f. shows that the bishop has forgotten any Greek he ever knew….

Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer are listed among those unfortunates who have “found themselves removed, silenced, harassed, or compromised in some way”. This is news to me. Fr Brown has been and Fr Fitzmyer is a member of the papal biblical commission. Is this a Machiavellian way of compromising them?

Later in the book both turn up again in company with 15 other “New Testament scholars”, who all allegedly join with the bishop in “rejecting

the literal narratives about the Resurrection” as no more than “Christian legends”.

They and some others on that list might well consider bringing a legal action against the bishop and/or his publishers for professional defamation.

Brown and Fitzmyer have repeatedly gone on record as accepting the historicity of the burial by Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus’s post-Resurrection appearances and the discovery of his empty tomb – all of which Spong rejects.

In a curious fashion the bishop talks of his seventeen “New Testament scholars” in the present tense: “we who are convinced”, “we who reject”, and so forth.

Half of them (like William Albright, Rudolf Bultmann, C. H . Dodd, E. C. Hoskyns and Karl Rahner) are long dead and have no chance of dissociating themselves from Spong and his views.

Some of them, such as Karl Rahner, Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx, cannot be classified as New Testament scholars in the proper sense of the term. Does the bishop really care about accuracy and truth? Or is all this part of what he calls floating with him “on a sea of timelessness”? (O’Collins 2000:112).

So what is O’Collins estimate of Crossan’s scholarship?

His work simply does not belong to the world of international scholarship. No genuine scholars will be taken in by this book. But ordinary readers who are not too familiar with modern biblical studies could easily be impressed by Spong’s title of “bishop” and his pretended scholarship (O’Collins 2000:113).

5. Spong’s shoddy Greek knowledge

***Wphthe* vs. *apokalupsa***

What was O’Collins’ complaint about Spong’s use of Greek in relation to Galatians 1:15? He did not present details in his review but it becomes obvious with an examination of what Spong wrote, if one has a introductory knowledge of NT Greek.

Galatians 1:15-16 states, ‘But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, ¹⁶was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood’ (RSV). The RSV was the version used in Spong (1994).

Spong stated of Gal 1:15-16a,

The word for ‘reveal’ in this text is ?phth?, the same word used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures to describe the appearances of God (theophanies) or angels of God (angelophanies). The Septuagint uses ?phth? to describe a theophany to Abraham: ‘then the Lord appeared [?phth?] to Abram, and said, “To your descendants I will give this land”’ (Gen 12:7. What was the nature of the theophany? Was it really ‘physical’? What was the means of hearing God’s voice speak? Was it audible to any ear? Was it capable of being recorded or objectified?…

?phth? means to have one’s eyes opened to see dimensions beyond the physical. It means to have a revelatory encounter with the holy. It relates to the nature of visions, but not so much subjective hallucinations as seeing into that which is ultimately real, into God or God’s inbreaking future.

Luke used this same word when he had the disciples say Jesus ‘has appeared to Simon’ (Luke 24:34) [Spong 1994:53-54].

Spong’s shoddy understanding of Greek comes to the fore here. He is completely wrong with the verb he names and then expounds in Gal 1:16a. The word used in this verse is not ?phth?, but apokalupsai, which is the present tense, middle voice, subjunctive mood verb of apokalupt?.

Spong named the wrong Greek verb and set about expounding a wrong verb in Gal 1:16a that did not exist in that verse. This accounts for O’Collins’ sarcastic comment ‘that the bishop has forgotten any Greek he ever knew’. So what Spong said about the verb for ‘reveal’ in Gal 1:15-16a was wrong because that was not the verb used for ‘reveal’ in Gal 1:16a. How could an author, published with a major publisher, make such a basic error I his knowledge of NT Greek?

6. Further objections to the edited letter

The letter that I sent to Journey, stated: ‘Another has described Spong as “Mr. I-am-a-bishop-who-believes-nothing-of-the-Gospel”’. This was eliminated from the published letter, but this is only a minor point of editorial deletion.
However, this statement by me was a signification deletion in my published letter: ‘Yet, Rev. Preston wants to link Spong to professing “his allegiance to Jesus Christ despite challenging certain questionable beliefs.” Which Jesus?’ Why not publish this statement? I was challenging Rev Dr Noel Preston’s positive support for Spong’s unorthodox teaching. Spong’s Jesus is not the Jesus revealed in the New Testament. So to ask, ‘Which Jesus?’ is a valid inquiry. Spong’s view of Jesus versus that revealed in Scripture should be exposed, whether in a letter or in an article.

These articles discuss the demise of liberal Christianity:

Albert Mohler, ‘A New Exodus? Americans are Exiting Liberal Churches’ (6 June 2005);
Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Let liberal churches stop fooling themselves’, (25 March 1931);
‘The National Council of Churches Should Have Died’ (25 March 2007);
Former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey, ‘Church of England ‘will be extinct in one generation,’ warns ex-archbishop’ (18 November 2013).

7. Conclusion

John Shelby Spong is promoting a radical agenda of ‘another Jesus’ who is not revealed in Scripture. Spong’s Jesus is that of liberal, historical-critical Christianity that has proceeded to empty churches for more than a century.

It is important to review the content of a letter-to-the-editor published when compared with the original. Take opportunities to write again to that newspaper or journal to take up the editorial censorship/deletions by the editor of letters. If this second letter is not published by way of correction, use online facilities to correct it – as I’ve attempted to do here.

For my other exposes of Spong’s unorthodox (heretical) teachings, see my articles:

Works consulted

Johnson, L T 1996. The real Jesus: The misguided quest for the historical Jesus and the truth of the traditional Gospels. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

O’Collins, G 2000. What of the Spong song? “Resurrection: Myth or reality”, A bishop’s search for the origins of Christianity; Review by Gerald O’Collins (online), [4]112-113. Apologia: The journal of the Wellington Christian Apologetics Society (Inc.), vol 7(2/3). Available at: http://www.christian-apologetics.org/pdf/SpongRev20Web.pdf (Accessed 21 November 2013).

Spong, J S 1994. Resurrection: Myth or reality? A bishop’s search for the origins of Christianity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Spong, J. S. 2001. A new Christianity for a new world. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Wright, N T 1993. Who Was Jesus? Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.[5]

Notes:

[1] This letter was published in ‘Letters’, Journey, December 2007, p. 19, available at: http://www.journeyonline.com.au/download.php?pdfId=66.

[2] Amazon review by ‘matt’ of N T Wright’s, Who was Jesus? (1993, Eerdmans), available at: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Was-Jesus-Wright/product-reviews/0802806945 (Accessed 21 November 2013).

[3] The following letter is in “Letters,” Journey, November 2007, p. 15. Journey is published by the Uniting Church in Australia, Queensland Synod. This is available online at: http://www.journeyonline.com.au/download.php?pdfId=65 (Accessed 21 November 2013). However, on 1 December 2015 it was no longer available online.

[4] This republishing of the article stated that it was ‘First published in the Tablet (London) (10 September, 1994). Republished in Welcome (September 1994, No. 101)’ [O’Collins 2000:112].

[5] This was first published by SPCK, London, in 1992.

John Shelby Spong and the Churches of Christ (Victoria, Australia)

John Shelby Spong 2006 (image courtesy Wikipedia)

By Spencer D Gear

When I read Merrill Kitchen’s [2] favourable article towards ex-Bishop Spong, in “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong” [3], I wondered if Kitchen and I were reading the same author. This is only one view by a leader within the Churches of Christ in Australia, but she is in a position of influence — the principal of a theological college of influence in Melbourne, Australia.

I thought I had read an adequate sample of Spong’s views in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Born of a Woman, Resurrection Myth or Reality?, and his latest which he claims will be his last — Spong’s swan song — A New Christianity for a New World. [4] But I was not ready for the sanitised version of Spong in this article. [5]

This is the Spong who rejects fundamental doctrines of the faith, yet Kitchen gave him the honoured status of being “clearly a believer but one who refuses to toe the ecclesiastical line when doctrine and tradition inhibit spiritual growth.” She claims Spong is calling us back to “a New Testament Church style and proclamation.” [6] Really?

A. The nature of Spongian religion

Kitchen rightly asks, “So what does Spong believe?” Yes, he believes the things that Kitchen raised in the article, but he believes much more that tell us what kind of a believer he really is and what his new style of church will look like in the future.

Will it be like the New Testament church (e.g. the Book of Acts and the Epistles) or more like Spong’s own brand of religion? To arrive at her sympathetic understanding of Spong, Kitchen has forgotten to tell us about some of the fundamentals of the faith that have been rejected or redefined by Spong. He sees his “task of seeking to redefine Jesus” as something that he does not take “easily or lightly.” [7]

1. How is the faith redefined?

He claims he is a Christian, believes God is real and calls Jesus his Lord. Yet he does not define God as a supernatural being. In fact, for him, “Theism is dead, I joyfully proclaim, but God is real.” [8] By theism, he means supernatural Christianity. He believes passionately in God, but this God is not identified with doctrines, creeds, and traditions. [9]

For prayer, he proposes “substitute words” that have been identified down through the centuries “with the mystical disciplines of spiritual development — words such as meditation and contemplation” that will include “centering prayer” and breathing exercises. [10]

He’s against evangelism and missionary enterprises, the latter being “base-born, rejecting, negative, and yes, I would even say evil.” [11] This shocking redefinition of missions as “evil” is associated with his universalism and theory that “we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth.” [12]

2. The characteristics of Spong’s new brand of Christianity

The fundamentals are gone. What would cause him to come to conclusions that are so contrary to historic, classical Christianity? He’s all for life and love because they “transcend all boundaries” but

“Exclusive religious propaganda can no longer be sustained. The idea that Jesus is the only way to God or that only those who have been washed in the blood of Christ are ever to be listed among the saved, has become anathema and even dangerous in our shrinking world.” [13]His assumptions are driving his theological agenda: God is not a personal being; he throws out Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. There is no literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead nor a literal star or virgin birth — that’s mythology! There’s no ascension of Jesus Christ and there will be no Second Coming of Christ.

Christ did not found a church. We are not born sinful. The fall into sin by Adam and Eve is mythical. Women are not less human and less holy than men (I agree!). Homosexuals are not morally depraved; the Bible is not the literal word of God and certainly is not inspired. Forget about absolute Christian ethics because “time makes ancient good uncouth.” [14] The colour of one’s skin or ethnic background does not constitute grounds for making one superior or inferior (I agree!).

He repudiates baptism and the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. “Since the diagnosis (sinful human nature) was wrong, the prescribed cure (atonement) cannot be right.” Since the fall into sin is a wrong diagnosis, baptism “to wash away the effects of a fall into sin that never occurred is inappropriate.” As for the Eucharist, this “reenactment of a sacrifice . . . becomes theological nonsense.” [15]

The supernatural is out. There will be no singing of praises to a theistic deity: “I treat the language of worship like I treat the language of love. It is primitive, excessive, flowery, poetic, evocative. No one really believes it literally.” [16] There will be his ill-defined, mystical “God-experience”. We could do that in a mosque, temple, synagogue, holy place, or ecclesia (his preferred word). There will be no confessing our sins to a “parental judge.” [17] There will be no literalised faith story. It will “never claim that it already possesses truth by divine revelation.” [18]

3. The church of tomorrow

As for the church of tomorrow, will it be a return to the New Testament church style as Kitchen suggests? Hardly!

The ecclesia of the future will be a place for “Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and heretic, liberal and evangelical, Jew and Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu” and where worship of this “god” will not be “bounded by our formulas, our creeds, our doctrines, our liturgies, or even our Bible, but still real, infinitely real.” [19] God is not a personal being, not even the highest being but the one he experiences as “the Ground and Source of All Being and therefore the presence that calls me to step beyond every boundary.” [20] This is a rejuvenated liberalism of Paul Tillich.

This new community, the ecclesia, “must be able to allow God and Satan to come together in each of us. It must allow light and darkness to be united. It must bind good and evil into one. It must unite Christ with Anti-Christ, Jesus with Judas, male with female, heterosexual with homosexual.” [21]

This is a church built in cloud cuckoo land – out of the minds of Spong and his friends! It is beyond radical. It is blasphemous!

B. Spong and evangelicals

Spong has a particular aversion to evangelical, Bible-believing Christianity (he calls it fundamentalism). He is not interested in “confronting or challenging those conservative, fundamentalist elements of Christianity that are so prevalent today. Why? He believes they will “die of their own irrelevance” as they cling “to attitudes of the past that are simply withering on the vine.” [22]

He goes to great lengths in denigrating traditional, evangelical Christianity, even to the point of making blasphemous statements such as these: “I am free of the God who was deemed to be incomplete unless constantly receiving our endless praises; the God who required that we acknowledge ourselves as born in sin and therefore as helpless; the God who seemed to delight in punishing sinners; the God who, we were told, gloried in our childlike, groveling dependency. Worshiping that theistic God did not allow us to grow into the new humanity.” [23]

In spite of these blasphemous statements about the Almighty God, Kitchen wants to give him this kind of credit: “. . . He is far from being an atheist and is certainly more than a philosophical humanist. . . Spong’s faith is firmly bonded to the person of Jesus.” [24] But which Jesus? Paul, the Apostle, warned of the one who “comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received” (2 Cor. 11:4, English Standard Version). It is evident from the writings of Spong that he wants nothing to do with the New Testament picture of Jesus Christ, yet Kitchen lauds him as “clearly a believer.” [25] Both Kitchen and Spong have redefined believers, if this is the case.

Spong does not want to deal with conservative, fundamentalist Christianity, and believes that it has no application to life today. He comments that “nowhere is this better seen than when one observes how the word Christian is used in our contemporary world.” [26] This is the pot calling the kettle black! It is Spong who has demolished the Bible’s definition of a Christian.

Among Spong’s 205 items in the bibliography of his latest book, [27] it is not surprising that there is not one that refutes his views or presents a scholarly evangelical perspective. I looked for Don Carson, William Lane Craig, Ben Witherington III., N. T. Wright, J. P. Moreland, Ravi Zacharias, Australia’s Paul Barnett, and other leading defenders of the evangelical faith., but they were absent.

His theological supporters from the Jesus Seminar and other liberals are everywhere – John Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robert Funk, Michael Goulder, John Hick, John A. T. Robinson, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Don Cupitt. Spongism is one-eyed religion that is intolerant of opposing views, especially those of the “fundamentalists” (evangelicals).

C. Emptying or growing churches? Spongian religion has a killer instinct.

One of the most damning pieces of evidence against Spong’s views are that the facts do not stack up concerning the demise of supernatural Christianity. What’s the truth about the death of theism? Wherever theological liberalism has taken hold, church numbers have crashed. Based on The Episcopal Church Annual (USA), membership of that dominantly theological liberal denomination, fell from a high of 3.6 million baptised Episcopalians in 1965, to 2.3 million in 1997– a loss of fully one-third of its membership. [28] The average Sunday attendance in the year 1998 was 843,213. [29] Two years later (the year 2000), it had further declined to 839,760. [30] “Mainline [church] membership is down (by nearly 6 million members) since 1965” in the USA. [31]

It is no wonder that the Newark Diocese of the Episcopal Church is talking about the need for church growth. [31a]

Church growth around the world

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (David Barrett), world-wide“around 17 million people become church members each year through conversion, and some 7 million leave the church.” This leaves an annual net growth of approximately 10 million people. We would love to see more, but this is hard evidence against Spong’s death of theism. [32]

There are some other strong indicators that Jesus is alive and well and the church is growing. In the Ukraine, in the past three years, some 70 new house churches have been planted in Crimea, most in places previously without a church. [33]

In the city of Xinjiang, China, there were 20-30 small churches with about 300 believers in 1994. Through courage, vision and the Lord’s direction, five couples have been used to enable rapid growth. Over a period of three years, the growth has been so strong that there are now almost 500 churches with about 100,000 members in four districts. This growth has so concerned the Government that it has infiltrated the churches, persecuted the believers, and gone on television, accusing the groups of being a cult. [34]

During the last 10 years of the “Decade of Harvest” among the Nigerian Assemblies of God in Africa, there has been extraordinary growth. The church has not only gained 1.2 million new members, but also ordained 5,026 new pastors and planted 4,044 new churches in Nigeria. The emphasis on reaching previously unreached people groups led to 75 churches being planted in areas previously untouched by Christianity. [35]

World-wide, the Pentecostal movement has grown from no adherents in 1906 to approximately 500 million today. Yet Spong has the audacity to say that “Christianity as we have known it increasingly displays signs of rigor mortis.” [36]

There certainly are areas where the Christian church is showing significant decline, especially in the Western world. About 100 years ago, Wales experienced a heaven-sent revival. The proportion of the total Welsh population attending church has declined from 14.6% in 1982 to 8.7% in 1995. [37]

God’s church is being persecuted around the world, but is showing growth internationally. Spong’s thesis is dead in the water. It is his ideology, a la John A. T. Robinson, radical theological liberalism, that kills churches.

The Episcopalians of Spong’s diocese voted with their feet while he was bishop. One report said that

“Spong [had] been the Episcopal Bishop of Newark [New Jersey] since 1976. He has presided over one of the most rapid witherings of any diocese in the Episcopal Church [USA]. The most charitable assessment shows that Newark’s parish membership rolls have evaporated by more than 42 percent. Less charitable accounts put the rate at over 50 percent.” [38]

When we throw out the Scriptures as the standard for theology, where do we go for answers? Here we have a new kind of religion, out of the minds of Spong himself and his friends. Yet Spong thinks his views are the future of faith, a new Christianity for a new world! Welcome to Spongism, “Christianity” with a killer instinct. He is searching “for that elusive truth of God that lies beneath the literal words of that sacred text.” [39] When the up-front words are too offensive to the human mind, instead of reading and interpreting them as any other piece of literature, you invent your own approach. Here, Spong wants to find the meaning behind the text. We shall see that this type of interpretation leads him to accept many things that are politically correct in our secular society — out with the supernatural, no heaven or hell in the afterlife, acceptance of homosexuality, etc.

Yet, Spong is so blind that he cannot admit what his brand of Christianity does to churches:

“Only those whom the traditionalists mistakenly call liberals carry within themselves the seeds of renewal and future life for the religious traditions of yesterday. A title more proper than ‘liberal’ might well be ‘open’ or ‘realist.'” [40]

D. Is Spongian religion the future of the church?

I have written at length providing some of the evidence, because Kitchen’s article does not give an accurate picture of John Shelby Spong’s world-view. He is not “the future of the church” as the article’s title indicates. His brand of Christianity has a track record – the death of congregations. On Spong’s recent visit to Australia, the then Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth (who at the time of writing this article was Australia’s Governor-General), prevented his speaking in Brisbane Anglican Churches. Instead, the Uniting Church (a merger of Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches) accepted him as a speaker.

Paul warned the Corinthians: “But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough” (2 Corinthians 11:3-4). Spong is preaching another Jesus to that of the Scriptures. His writings tell us what kind of a believer he is and what kind of a church he wants to see developed in the future. He is not a believer in the Jesus of the Scriptures, nor is his church one aligned with the New Testament.

The Spongian Jesus is not the real Jesus of the New Testament.

1. Theology does matter

Based on her article, what are the elements of Spongian theology that are part of this new style of church? “Spong is calling people back to a New Testament style of proclamation, which is not a new idea for the movement we call Churches of Christ.” [41] What is a new idea, however, is a prominent representative of a formerly evangelical denomination in Victoria, supporting the heretical teachings of John Shelby Spong.

This is the principal of the Churches of Christ theological college in the state of Victoria, Australia, identifying Spong’s “New Testament style of proclamation” with the Churches of Christ movement. “Is [Spong] a “contemporary heretic who must be silenced” or “does he offer hope to a struggling Church in a post-Christian age?” [42] The tone of Kitchen’s article infers that Spong is offering hope to the church, even the Churches of Christ in Victoria.

What kind of hope is this?

2. Spong’s theology and the Churches of Christ

Spong’s theology offers the Churches of Christ (Australia) and any person or denomination the following views: [43]

Re-envisioning our concepts of God:
God is “a presence at the heart of life, available to everyone and not as the special possession of a religious institution”;
God is not an ancient deity who is “distant, apart and above the lives of a sinful humanity”;
God is not “the kind of supernatural being who engages in instant gratification, magical wizardry and capricious favouritism”;
God is “to be seen and experienced as intimately present in all creation” [Note: This sounds more like monism/Hinduism, than Christianity, to me!]; God’s identity “is revealed when barriers are broken and community is formed”;
God’s identity “is revealed when barriers are broken and community is formed”;
God is not “a record keeping deity before whom I will appear at the day of judgment to have my eternal destination announced. . . My heart will never worship what my mind has rejected.”
Spong has “his doubts about the process of resurrection [of Jesus],” according to Kitchen. Doubts? Hardly!

Spong is straight forward about his views on resurrection. Speaking of the resurrection of Jesus, he wrote:

“It is easy to identify the legendary elements of the resurrection narratives. Angels who descend in earthquakes, speak, and roll back stones; tombs that are empty; apparitions that appear and disappear; rich men who make graves available; thieves who comment from their crosses of pain — these are legends all. Sacred legends, I might add, but legends nonetheless. . . What happened that gave birth to the legendary details [in the New Testament records] that gathered around the moment of Easter? Why did they gather? Hundreds of millions of people have lived and died on this earth — some of them famous, powerful people — and no similar legends gathered around them. Why this one man, at this time, in this place? . . .“The primacy of Galilee [and not Jerusalem for the crucifixion and resurrection] means that all of the appearance narratives that purport to be the physical manifestations of the dead body that somehow was enabled to be revivified and to walk out of a tomb are also legends and myths that cannot be literalized. The risen Jesus did not literally eat fish in Jerusalem. Thomas did not touch the physical wounds. Resurrection may mean many things, but these details are not literally a part of that reality. To affirm Galilee as the primary locale in the experience of Easter is a radical step, but it is nonetheless a step that the Bible itself seems to acknowledge” [44]

This new style of church will mean a re-evaluation of what it means to be the Church. It will

not be hierarchical;
be honest in its worship;
be focussed on real life and not an escape from reality;
recognise God’s journeying presence;
have a commitment to communality;
acknowledge that all who gather at the Lord’s table are ministers and need to function as such [Note: I agree. But why should it be limited to those who gather for the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper? “All are ministers” should apply to all Christian believers. See I Cor. 14:26.];
“be a celebration of life in all its complexity.”
“rejoice in Scripture, but not be bound by ancient ‘cultic or cultural limitations'”

[Note: How can this church follow Spong in its rejoicing in Scripture when “the biblical texts themselves” have “proved to be quite untrustworthy”? [45] This must be the mystical God-experience of Spong’s invention that is unrelated to what the text says directly. To understand what Spong is getting at, he speaks of John’s Gospel as “the least literal and the most accurate. . . Literalize John and you will lose this Gospel. For that which is literalized becomes nonsense, while truth that is approached through sign and symbol becomes the very doorway into God.” [46] It’s amazing what conclusions are reached when one throws out the Bible and makes up his own “sign and symbol” religion! What are the limits?].

There will be “a mystery and wonder that exceeds the dogmatic assertions of religious formulations.”
But “Spong’s faith is firmly bonded to the person of Jesus,” says Kitchen. This Jesus “was a God experience of the reality of that Ground of Being.” Spong claims that “Christpower, written as one word, has become for me a way to describe the Christ life that is the gift of the Spirit, the mark of membership in the Christian community.” [47]

Spong’s own words tell us how deeply he is committed to the value of experience, rather than to the content of the propositional revelation of the Word of God:

“Behind the narrative [of Scripture] is an unnarrated proclamation. Behind the proclamation is an intense life-giving experience. The task of Bible study is to lead believers into truth, a truth that is never captured in mere words but a truth that is real, a truth that when experienced erupts within us in expanding ways, calling us simultaneously deeper and deeper into life, and not coincidentally, deeper and deeper into God. . .“Human life alone could not produce that which we have experienced in Jesus Christ. He is of God, so the Christmas story points to truth, but the words used to describe or capture that truth are not themselves true in any literal sense.” [48]

[Note: This is the existential Christ of theological liberals such as Paul Tillich, John A. T. Robinson, Rudolf Bultmann, etc. It is a redefined Jesus who is radically different to the Jesus of the New Testament.]

This new kind of church includes a belief in life after death, but it is an eternity “that lies beyond the limits of my human finitude and in which I can participate.” Elsewhere, Spong is more specific. After five years of study on life after death, this study:
“seemed to lead me to no final conclusions. . . I still do not know what to say or how to express my convictions on this subject except with a consuming vagueness.” [49]
“I dismiss heaven as a place of reward, and I dismiss hell as a place of punishment. I find neither definition either believable or appealing.” [50]

If this kind of theology still makes Spong “clearly a believer,” according to Kitchen, what kind of a believer is he? What will believers in this new style church be like?;
Spong “refuses to toe the ecclesiastical line when doctrine and tradition inhibit spiritual growth, or deny the reality of human experience, or discriminate against any person.” [51]

E. Conclusion

Spongian religion is out of the mind of Spong and his theological ilk. His statements about heaven and hell, in rejecting the orthodox doctrines, are testimony to this fact: “I find neither definition either believable or appealing.” [52] It does not matter what the authoritative Word of God states, it must be “believable and appealing” to Spong for him to accept it. In this writer’s view, this represents theological arrogance and autonomy.

When you invent your own religion, there is no need to listen to the text of Scripture. Therefore, Spongian theology and its counterparts (Tillich, J.A.T. Robinson, Bonhoeffer) can assert:

1. “There was no biologically literal virgin birth, no miraculous overcoming of barrenness in the birth of John the Baptist, no angel Gabriel who appeared to Mary, no deaf muteness, no angelic chorus that peopled the heavens to announce Jesus’ birth to hillside shepherds, no journey to Bethlehem, no presentation or purification in Jerusalem, and no childhood temple story.” [53]

2. Paul, the man from Tarsus, was “a rigidly controlled gay male, I believe, [who] taught the Christian church what the love of God means and what, therefore, Christ means as God’s agent.” [54]

3. Rationalistic, humanistic, existential views are promoted. The Bible is myth. [55] The mythology of Mark’s Gospel is superseded by today’s knowledge. “We understand what causes wind and wave, epilepsy and deaf muteness in ways that involve no appeal to supernatural forces.” [56]

4. There’s no need for the supernatural in our modern world. Spong’s language is, “Theism is dead.” [57] But this kind of statement is not original with Spong; it is found in his mentor and friend, John A. T. Robinson [58], who wrote about “the end of theism.” [59] Paul Tillich had spoken of three kinds of theism, one [60] of which “must be transcended because it is irrelevant” and another kind [61] “must be transcended because it is wrong. It is bad theology.” [62]

5. Autonomous humanistic godlessness reigns. In the preface to his latest book, Spong highlights, thus supporting, the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. . . Go is weak and powerless in the world.” [63]

6. The Bible’s authors are out of date: “They are not in touch with emerging contemporary knowledge.” [64]

7. If you don’t like what the literal words are saying, make up your own and than claim they are the truth. That’s what Spong has done with the birth narratives of Jesus: “My purpose here [with the birth story] is to see the truth to which these narratives point. Birth narratives tell us nothing about the birth of the person who is featured in those narratives. They do tell us a great deal, however, about the adult life of the one whose birth is being narrated.” [65]

Who said so? Spong did. Reinterpretation according to Spong’s own meaning is the order of the day for his theological inventions. Pity help me if I read his book with the same disdain for literal interpretation.

Since theology matters, Kitchen’s views in support of Spong, if promoted and accepted, will spell the demise of the Churches of Christ if her views are widely accepted. We know it from Spong’s own track record and the record of theological liberalism world-wide.

Pray for the Churches of Christ, Victoria, to return to biblical Christianity!

Endnotes:

2. Merrill Kitchen is the principal of the Churches of Christ Theological College, Mulgrave, Vic., Australia.

3. Merrill Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” The Australian Christian, 28 November 2001, p. 17. This article appeared in the “Theology Matters” feature of the magazine. The Australian Christian is an official Churches of Christ magazine in Australia.

4. John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

5. For ease of reference, I will refer only to his latest book (ibid.), but similar beliefs are documented in his other books that I have read.

6. Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” p. 17.

7. Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, p. 130.

8. Ibid., p. 77.

9. See ibid., pp. 3, 64, 74.

10. Ibid., p. 193.

11. Ibid., p. 178.

12. Ibid., p. 179.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., pp. 2, 6. Elsewhere, Spong writes: “In time the virgin birth account will join Adam and Eve and the story of the cosmic ascension as clearly recognized mythological elements in our faith tradition whose purpose was not to describe a literal event but to capture the transcendent dimensions of God in the earthbound words and concepts of first-century human beings” (John Shelby Spong, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, p. 45).

15. Ibid., p. 124.

16. Ibid., p. 204.

17. Ibid., p. 206.

18. Ibid., p. 214.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., pp. 59-60.

21. Ibid., p. 167.

22. Ibid., p. 12.

23. Ibid., p. 75.

24. Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” p. 17.

25. Ibid.

26. Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, p. 12.

27. A New Christianity for a New World.

28. These figures of decline are based on Louie Crew, “Charting the Episcopal Church. Retrieved on November 4, 2001, from http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/chartecusa.html, p. 9 (A4 size, printed).

29. Rev. Dr. Leslie P. Fairfield, “Modernist Decline and Biblical Renewal: The Episcopal Church from 1870-2000,” American Anglican Council website, posted January 24, 2001. Retrieved on October 15, 2001, from http://www.americananglican.org/Issues/Issues.dfm?ID-91. On 6 May 2007, it was available from: http://www.strategicnetwork.org/index.php?loc=kb&view=v&id=3486&fto=1081&

30. Louie Crew, “Growth and Decline in ECUSA Attendance, 1991-2000.” Retrieved on 6 May 2007, from:http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/growthdecline90-00.html. The Episcopalian Church USA has shown “30 years of membership decline and over a million members lost” [The Institute on Religion and Democracy, “Episcopal Action.” Retrieved on 6 May 2007 from: http://www.ird-renew.org/site/pp.asp?c=fvKVLfMVIsG&b=308889. See also, “Charting the Episcopal Church,” Louie Crew. Retrieved on June 6, 2004, from http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/chartecusa.html.

31. Robert Wuthnow, “Still Toeing the Mainline,” retrieved on November 4, 2001, from http://www.beliefnet.com/story/31/story_3171_1.html. This article states that, “More than 20 million Americans still hold membership in mainline churches. The largest mainline denominations are the United Methodist Church, with 8.7 million members; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with 5.2 million members; the Presbyterian Church (USA), with 2.6 million members; the Episcopal Church, with 2.5 million members; and the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ, each with 1.5 million members.”

31a. The 2003 Diocesan Conference on Church Growth, October 24-25, 2003 – Xavier Center, Convent Station, NJ, retrieved from: http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/churchgrowth/ [26th December 2003]

32. “10M new converts, 32M Christian children per year,” [Source: Justin Long, Assoc. Editor of World Christian Encyclopedia (David Barrett)]. World-wide statistics plus news from Bulgaria, Chile, Brazil, DAWN Fridayfax 1998 #04. Retrieved on November 4, 2001, from http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/1998/dawn9804.html.

33. “Ukraine: 70 new house churches in the Crimea,” DAWN Fridayfax 2001 #24, News from Germany, Ukraine and China. Retrieved on November 4, 2001, from http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/2001/dawn24.html.

34. “China: 100,000 new believers in Xinjiang in 3 years,” DAWN Fridayfax 2001 #24, News from Germany, Ukraine and China. Retrieved on November 4, 2001, from http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/2001/dawn24.html.

35. “Nigeria: Assemblies of God plant 4,044 new churches in 10 years,” DAWN Fridayfax 2001#3. Retrieved on November 14, 2001, from http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/2001/dawn03.html. The source is the AoG news, 3 January 2001.

36. Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, p. 8.

37. “Wales: Church decline generally but slight increase for Anglicans,” Anglican Communion News Service (ACNS), 7 March 1997. Retrieved on November 3, 2001, from www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns1100/acns1153.html. The report went on to say that “the Church in Wales congregations (Anglicans) report that there has been a slight increase in the size of their congregations in the last five years [i.e.. prior to 1997]. The report also found that Churches identifying themselves as Anglo-Catholic or Broad, or Charismatic were growing the most.”

38. “Rescuing Christianity from Bishop Kevorkian,” D. Marty Lasley, review of John Shelby Spong’s, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for Anglican Voice, posted June 2 1999. Retrieved on 6 May 2007 from: http://listserv.episcopalian.org/wa.exe?A2=ind9906&L=virtuosity&H=1&P=272 (this link was no longer available in Oct 2013, but it is available at: http://listserv.virtueonline.org/pipermail/virtueonline_listserv.virtueonline.org/1999-June/000415.html (Accessed 15 October 2013).

39. Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, pp. x, xi.

40. Spong, Born of a Woman, p. 176.

41. Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” p. 17 (emphasis added).

42. Ibid.

43. These are based on Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” p. 17.

44. John Shelby Spong, Resurrection Myth or Reality? A Bishop’s Search for the Origins of Christianity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, pp. 233, 235-236.

45. Ibid., p. 235.

46. John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p. 207.

47. Ibid., ch. 13, n4, p. 253.

48. Ibid., p. 225.

49. Spong, Resurrection Myth or Reality, p. 287.

50. Ibid., p. 288.

51. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in the bullet points above are from Kitchen, “The Future Church and Bishop John Shelby Spong,” p. 17.

52. Spong, Resurrection Myth or Reality?, p. 288.

53. Spong, Born of a Woman, pp. 157-158.

54. Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p. 125.

55. John A. T. Robinson speaks the same kind of language about “the Genesis stories of the Creation and Fall were representations of the deepest truths about man and the universe in the form of myth rather than history, and were non the less valid for that” (Honest to God. London: SCM Press Ltd, 1963, p. 33). Rudolf Bultmann, the demythologiser of the Bible, took a similar line: “There is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age” (Kerygma and Myth, vol. 1, p. 3, in Robinson, ibid., p. 34).

56. Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p. 143.

57. Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, p. 77.

58. Spong writes that one of the tasks of his book “is to move forward the work begun in the last century by a man who was my mentor and my friend. His name was John Arthur Thomas Robinson” (ibid., p. x).

59. Robinson, Honest to God, p. 39.

60. This is the theism of “the unspecified affirmation of God” (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1952, p. 182).

61. This is “theological theism. . . It usually develops the so-called arguments for the ‘existence’ of God” (ibid., p. 184). Elsewhere, Tillich rejects the existence of the God proclaimed by orthodoxy: “Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. . .” (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1. Digswell Place: James Nisbet & Co Ltd, 1968, p. 271).

62. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 184.

63. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, dated July 16, 1944. A fuller quote reads: “God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. . . Before God and with God we live without God. . . Go is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us.” (in Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, p. ix).

64. Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, p. 9.

65. Ibid., p. 215.

Do you want life or death in the church?

The Gospel Distortion: A reply to John Shelby Spong [1]

By Spencer D Gear

Spong during CrossWalk America 2006 (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Does the Bible need to be rescued from fundamentalism? Does “old time religion” disenfranchise the homosexuals, women and others in the church? Or is Bishop Spong promoting another agenda?

In building his case to support Bishop Spong’s opposition to fundamentalism, (“The Gospel Truth?” The Canberra Times, August 4, 1991), Robert Macklin used a number of unfair methods to distort the views of Bible-believing Christians.

It is erroneous to argue from the basis of such a logical fallacy as name-calling. Labelling certain church groups, with which one disagrees, as “fundamentalists” and associating them with the names of people like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell & Jimmy Swaggart is an unhelpful way of dealing with these Christians because it fails to confront the facts of their beliefs.

However, one of the main themes that pervades this article is the writer’s and Bishop Spong’s opposition to the literal interpretation of the Bible, which they associate with fundamentalism. No definition of “literalism” is given. I am left to assume that this is the standard approach of theological liberalism, which does not want to take the Bible at face value. They find supernaturalism difficult to accommodate in a rationalistic, naturalistic, materialistic world-view.

The literal interpretation of any piece of literature means that narrative, poetry, prophecy, and figures of speech are read as such. If I were to read The Canberra Times the way Bishop Spong wants me to read the Bible, it would lose all comprehension because I would always be looking for the deeper meaning behind the actual words.

Just imagine the imaginative dreams (deeper meaning!) one could create by looking for the hidden, secret meaning behind a Canberra Times statement such as, “Meninga smashes record” (CT, August 1, 1991). There is no warrant for reading this newspaper in such a manner. Neither is there any justification for such an approach to New Testament interpretation. Literalism is nothing more than the natural way of reading books, magazines and newspapers. It is not the “beast” to be expunged from fundamentalism. Rather than “destroying Christianity by their literalistic claims,” fundamentalists are using the common sense way of reading any piece of literature.

The difficulty Bishop Spong seems to have, is accepting the supernaturalism he reads when he comes to the Scripture. That, however, is not a struggle with literalism, but presuppositional bias.

There is inaccurate stereotyping of these Christians throughout the article. Macklin claims fundamentalist churches are the fastest growing in Australian Christianity because they often appeal “to men, especially those in social crisis, either from divorce, alcohol, gambling, or spiritual despair.” My 30 years of experience in Bible-believing churches has not revealed this emphasis. Yes, there have been males and females whose lives have been radically changed through an encounter with the living Christ. But to say that conservative Christianity focuses on socially displaced males is distortion.

Abominable claims are made about fundamentalists: the earth is the centre of the universe and the world is flat. Such allegations should be treated with jocular disdain. Surely, the readers are not so naive as to believe that “evolution is a fact of life.” Molecular biologist, Michael Denton of the Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, in his seminal book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis [2], helped put an end to that myth. Evolution is a theory, not fact, and a very shaky theory at that.

Several invalid assumptions need to be addressed. “The rejection of reason for faith” is not part of biblical Christianity. The apostle Paul is a staunch example. He reasoned, persuaded, and powerfully refuted both the religious and irreligious. For him it was faith founded on fact, not a mindless leap of faith into the dark.

To conclude that after the scientific method was developed in the 18th century, “faith and science were largely regarded as incompatible,” is refuted by the evidence. The scientific method requires repeated observations in the present time and recording of data to support or falsify an hypothesis. Such an approach is impossible for any historical document, whether it be Captain Arthur Phillip’s writings or the Bible.

Scholar, theologian and apologist, Dr. John Montgomery says that for any historical writing, one must “go directly to the documents themselves and subject them to the tests of reliability employed in general historiography and literary criticism.” [3] These tests are bibliographical (an analysis of the textual tradition), the internal evidence, and external evidence.

After subjecting the Bible to this type of scrutiny, Professor Clark Pinnock concluded:

There exists no document from the ancient world witnessed by so excellent a set of textual and historical testimonies, and offering so superb an array of historical data on which an intelligent decision may be made. An honest [person] cannot dismiss a source of this kind. Scepticism regarding the historical credentials of Christianity is based upon an irrational bias. [4]To call Bishop Spong’s book “revolutionary scholarship” fails to come to terms with some of the comments Spong made in the article. He says, “I know of no reputable biblical scholar in the world today who takes these birth narratives [in the Gospels] literally. Telephone calls to three Australian scholars, Dr. Clifford Wilson (Pacific College of Graduate Studies, Melbourne), Dr. David Williams (Ridley College, University of Melbourne), and world-renowned New Testament scholar, Dr. Leon Morris (formerly, Principal, Ridley College, University of Melbourne) revealed that all three accept the birth narratives in the Gospel as literally true. As do Dr. F.F. Bruce (England), Dr. Donald Carson (USA) and a host of other New Testament scholars Dr. Spong chooses to ignore.

Dr. Leon Morris’s commentary on the Gospel of John is one of the most substantial and scholarly in the English language. He says “the basic reason for holding that the author was John the Apostle is that this appears to be what the Gospel itself teaches… It is also the case that there are some claims to eyewitness testimony” (by John, Christ’s personal disciple). [5] Yet Bishop Spong claims that “the words of Jesus (in John’s Gospel) … cannot possibl[y] have been the literal words of the historic Jesus.” Other scholars disagree, yet Spong’s writing is called “revolutionary scholarship.” Hardly! It is warmed up theological liberalism with its anti-supernatural bias.

Bishop Spong attributes “the tone, the feat, the passion, and the behaviour” of the apostle Paul to “the realisation that he was a homosexual male.” When I mentioned this to Melbourne scholar, Dr. David Williams, he asked, “What’s the ground for this? Paul condemns homosexuality.”

It seems that Spong’s rejection of the literal interpretation of the Bible forces him to insert the wanderings of his own imagination. If he accepted the Scripture at face value, he would find the simple answer to Paul’s motivation: “The love of Christ controls us” — not a gay relationship. Paul’s conversion to Christ on the Damascus Road was the sole reason for his zeal to promote Christ’s gospel. To attribute it to epilepsy, as Spong does, is fanciful speculation without a basis in fact. With his weak view of Scripture and anti-supernatural bias, it is not surprising that he also rejects the virgin birth of Christ.

While Bishop Spong has aimed his theological canons at fundamentalism in 1991, his hypotheses are old-time theological liberalism in a new garb. These hypotheses have been successfully refuted in books such as George Eldon Ladd’s The New Testament and Criticism. Ladd concludes that

An evangelical (fundamentalist) understanding of the Bible as the Word of God is not per se hostile to a sober criticism; rather, an evangelical faith demands a critical methodology in the reconstruction of the historical side of the process of revelation. [5]

Rather than rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism, Spong would be better advised to rescue himself from the view of Scripture that distorts the natural meaning of the text. Clergy with his view are helping to empty the mainline churches. Fundamentalism is growing because it takes God at his literal word, proclaims the Gospel of freedom from bondage and oppression through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Anything less is a distortion of the Gospel truth.

Notes:

1. This manuscript was submitted to The Canberra Times, Canberra, ACT, Australia, for consideration for publication as a response to Robert Macklin’s article, “The Gospel Truth?”, The Canberra Times (Sunday, August 4, 1991, p. 17). It was published as “Distorting the Gospel Truth,” The Canberra Times, August 11, 1991, p. 10. At that time I was Senior Minister of Woden Valley (Waramanga) and Tuggeranong Alliance Churches, ACT (Canberra), Australia.

2. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. London: Burnett Books, 1985. (The USA edition was published by Adler & Adler).

3. John Warwick Montgomery, History & Christianity: A Vigorous, convincing Presentation of the Evidence for a Historical Jesus. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House Publishers, 1965, p. 26. Military historian, C. Sanders, said that these tests were bibliographical, internal, and external (see C. Sanders, Introduction to Research in English Literary History. NewYork: Macmillan, 1952, pp. 143 ff. In Montgomery, pp. 26ff)

4. Clark Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case. New Jersey: The Craig Press, 1968, p. 58, in Josh McDowell, More Than A Carpenter. Eastbourne, E. Sussex (England): Kingsway Publications, 1977, p. 56. [The USA edition was published by Tyndale House Publishers, 1977.]

5. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (The New International Commentary on the New Testament (F. F. Bruce, Gen. Ed.). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971, pp. 9, 15.

6. George Eldon Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967, p. 215.

Spong’s swan song — at last! [1]

By Spencer D Gear

John Shelby Spong (public domain)

Review & Analysis: John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

This is a shocker! It is vintage Spong – extremely readable but heretical at its heart! He throws out core Christian beliefs such as the atonement (an “offensive idea”, p. 10) and the bodily resurrection of Christ, yet still wants to say: “I am a Christian. I believe that God is real. I call Jesus my Lord. Yet I do not define God as a supernatural being. I believe passionately in God. This God is not identified with doctrines, creeds, and traditions” (pp. 3, 64, 74).

He rejoices that “the blinding idolatry of traditional theism [read, supernatural Christianity] has finally departed from my life” (p. 74). More than that, he proclaims, “Theism is dead, I joyfully proclaim, but God is real” (p.77).

Spong’s version of God

But what kind of God is he or it? He admits that his God-experience is a “God-concept that I grope to find words to convey” (p. 76). He’s not the only one groping. Throughout the book’s 276 pages, I tried to understand what Spong’s God was like, but all I could conclude was that this mystical “God-experience” is filled with unique Spongian content.

For prayer, he proposes “substitute words” that have been identified down through the centuries “with the mystical disciplines of spiritual development—words such as meditation and contemplation” that will include “centering prayer” and breathing exercises (p. 193).

He’s against evangelism and missionary enterprises, the latter being “base-born, rejecting, negative, and yes, I would even say evil” (p. 178). This shocking redefinition of missions as “evil” is associated with his universalism and theory that “we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth” (p. 179).

What would cause him to come to conclusions that are so contrary to classical Christianity? He’s all for life and love because they “transcend all boundaries” but “exclusive religious propaganda can no longer be sustained. The idea that Jesus is the only way to God or that only those who have been washed in the blood of Christ are ever to be listed among the saved, has become anathema [a curse] and even dangerous in our shrinking world” (p. 179).

Beginning at the conclusion

When we throw out the Scriptures as the standard for theology, where do we go for answers? Here we have a new kind of religion, out of the minds of Spong himself and his friends. Their goal is to try to tell the world through the mass media and extensive publications that conservative, Bible-believing (“fundamentalist” is his term) Christians are out of touch for a postmodern, scientific world. When a religion comes out of the mind of Spong, it means that almost anything goes, religiously.

Spong claims that theism is dead. Is this true? He has not provided concrete evidence of churches supporting supernatural Christianity that are dying and his breed are growing. As we shall see, the facts do not support the death of theism. It’s the other way round. Spongism is killing faith and churches.

Spong’s first chapter is titled, “A Place to Begin”, but he begins with his conclusions. That’s cheating! His assumptions are: God is not a being; there is no literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead or a literal star at the birth of Jesus or a virgin birth — that’s mythology! There’s no ascension of Jesus Christ and Christ did not found a church. We are not born sinful. The fall into sin by Adam and Eve is mythical. Women are not less human and less holy than men (I agree!). Homosexuals are not morally depraved; the Bible is not the literal word of God and certainly is not inspired. Forget about absolute Christian ethics because “time makes ancient good uncouth” (p. 6). The colour of one’s skin or ethnic background does not constitute grounds for making one superior or inferior (I agree!). This kind of teaching amounts to Spong’s conclusions, but he claims it is where he begins.

The heresy continues with his repudiation of baptism and the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. “Since the diagnosis (sinful human nature) was wrong, the prescribed cure (atonement) cannot be right.” Since the fall into sin is a wrong diagnosis, baptism “to wash away the effects of a fall into sin that never occurred is inappropriate.” As for the eucharist, this “reenactment of a sacrifice . . . becomes theological nonsense” (p. 124).

Jesus redefined

Spong’s primary question to answer in this book is: “Can a person claim with integrity to be a Christian and at the same time dismiss, as I have done, so much of what has traditionally defined the content of the Christian faith?” (p. 7) He sees his “task of seeking to redefine Jesus” as something that he does not take “easily or lightly” (p. 130).

Spong raises the question of whether he can be a person of integrity in his answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:15-16).

Spong answers with further questions, “Is it still possible for me to use these same words? How flexible are they? How open to new meanings? Is it honest to wrench these words out of that past and to open them to new meanings?” His reply is, “I believe that it is. Words change” (p. 130). But he also is aware that he might be open to the charge that the “genuine reformation of Christianity” that he is seeling may be understood that he is “deluded and in my suppressed fear attempting to hid from or to cover up the death of Christianity” (p. 130).

In the early history of the church when it was fighting for doctrinal survival and the promotion of orthodoxy, it took a hard line on false doctrine. If Spong had been Arius, Apollinarius, Eutyches or Nestorius in the early centuries of the Christian church, his views on the nature of Christ and other doctrines, would have been condemned at a General Council of the Church such as at Nicea, Ephesus, Constantinople or Chalcedon.

But not so with Spong! Even though the Episcopal Church USA did not denounce his views as heretical, the former Archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth (now Governor General of Australia), prevented his preaching in Brisbane Anglican churches on Spong’s visit to Australia in 2001. Instead, he spoke in Uniting Churches.

Space limitations prevent a refutation of Spong’s view in support of the genetic cause of homosexuality, that it is “more like left-handedness”. He considers those evangelical organisations that advertise that “they can cure homosexuality” are “not just ignorant, but actually fraudulent” (p. 14). Sexual orientations are “morally neutral” and he “cannot imagine being part of a church that discriminates against gay and lesbian people on the basis of their being” (p. 6). There is contrary scientific and biblical evidence to this view.

What is Spong’s biggest beef with the church? He can’t stand “the literal way that human beings have chosen to articulate that faith” (p. 7). Instead, he wants to continue as part of the church as “I seek the God-experience” (p. 8). Pity help me if I read his book with the same disdain for literal interpretation as he gives to the Bible.

Why would Spong believe that theism is dead? He wraps it in a package with his commitment to Darwinian evolution. The survival of the fittest means that we must move beyond supernatural Christianity to a more modern view – his view. Spongism enlarges on the ideas of people like his mentor and theological liberal, the late John A. T. Robinson, who wrote an assault on biblical Christianity in 1963, Honest to God. What was the bud in Robinson is in full bloom in Spong.

He says that it will “probably be the final theological book of my life and career” (p. xxi) – his swan song at last! I almost shouted, Praise the Lord, except that I know that his kind of “radically reformed Christianity” (p. 18) will continue with others and get continuing mass media coverage.

What are the characteristics of Spong’s new Christianity? The fundamentals are gone. He throws out the inspired and literal Scripture, the miraculous virgin birth, Christ as the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins, the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the Second Coming of Christ (p. 2).

The church of tomorrow

What will his “ecclesia (church) of tomorrow” look like? The supernatural is out. There will be no singing praises to a theistic deity. “I treat the language of worship like I treat the language of love. It is primitive, excessive, flowery, poetic, evocative. No one really believes it literally” (p. 204). There will be his ill-defined, mystical “God-experience”. We could do that in a mosque, temple, synagogue, holy place, or ecclesia (his preferred word). There will be no confessing our sins to a “parental judge” (p. 206). There will be no literalised faith story. It will “never claim that it already possesses truth by divine revelation” (p. 214).

The ecclesia of the future will be a place for “Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and heretic, liberal and evangelical, Jew and Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu” and where worship of this “god” will not be “bounded by our formulas, our creeds, our doctrines, our liturgies, or even our Bible, but still real, infinitely real” (p. 214). God is not a personal being, not even the highest being but the one he experiences as “the Ground and Source of All Being and therefore the presence that calls me to step beyond every boundary” (pp. 59-60). This is the rejuvenated liberalism of Paul Tillich.

This is a church built in cloud cuckoo land – out of the minds of Spong and his friends! It is beyond radical. It is blasphemous!

Is theism dead?

What’s the truth about the death of theism? Wherever theological liberalism has taken hold, church numbers have crashed. Based on The Episcopal Church Annual (USA), membership fell from a high of 3.6 million baptised Episcopalians in 1965, to 2.3 million in 1997– a loss of fully one-third of its membership (based on Crew, 2001). The average Sunday attendance in the year 1998 was 843,213 (Fairfield, 2001). Two years later (the year 2000), it had further declined to 839,760 (Crew, 2001a). The Episcopal Church USA has shown “30 years of membership decline and over a million members lost” (Episcopal Action, 2001; see also Crew, 2001). “Mainline [church] membership is down (by nearly 6 million members) since 1965” in the USA. “More than 20 million Americans still hold membership in mainline churches. The largest mainline denominations are the United Methodist Church, with 8.7 million members; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with 5.2 million members; the Presbyterian Church (USA), with 2.6 million members; the Episcopal Church, with 2.5 million members; and the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ, each with 1.5 million members” (Wuthnow, 2001).

Jeffrey Walton’s assessment of the decline in the USA Episcopal Church was:

The 2013 reporting year saw a continuation of the downward trend, with a membership drop of 27,423 to 1,866,758 (1.4 percent) while attendance dropped 16,451 to 623,691 (2.6 percent). A net 45 parishes were closed, and the denomination has largely ceased to plant new congregations.

The new numbers do not factor in the departure of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, of which the church continues to report over 28,000 members and over 12,000 attendees, despite the majority of South Carolina congregations severing their relationship with the Episcopal Church at the end of 2012. If South Carolina departures were factored in, the membership loss would be closer to 50,000 persons’ (Walton 2014).

According to the World Christian Encyclopedia (David Barrett), worldwide “around 17 million people become church members each year through conversion, and some 7 million leave the church.” This leaves an annual net growth of approx. 10 million people. We would love to see more, but this is hard evidence against Spong’s death of theism (Long, 1998).

There are some other strong indicators that Jesus is alive and well and the church is growing. In the Ukraine, in the past three years, some 70 new house churches have been planted in Crimea, most in places previously without a church (Ukraine, 2001).

In the city of Xinjiang, China, there were 20-30 small churches with about 300 believers in 1994. Through courage, vision and the Lord’s direction, five couples have been used to enable rapid growth. Over a period of three years, the growth has been so strong that there are now almost 500 churches with about 100,000 members in four districts. This growth has so concerned the Government that it has infiltrated the churches, persecuted the believers, and gone on television, accusing the groups of being a cult (China, 2001).

During the last 10 years of the “Decade of Harvest” among the Nigerian Assemblies of God in Africa, there has been extraordinary growth. The church has not only gained 1.2 million new members, but also ordained 5,026 new pastors and planted 4,044 new churches in Nigeria. The emphasis on reaching previously unreached people groups led to 75 churches being planted in areas previously untouched by Christianity (Nigeria, 2001).

The Pew Research Center has found this about Pentecostal and charismatic church growth in Nigeria:

The Forum’s 2006 pentecostal survey suggests that renewalists – including charismatics and pentecostals – account for approximately three-in-ten Nigerians. The survey also finds that roughly six-in-ten Protestants in Nigeria are either pentecostal or charismatic, and three-in-ten Nigerian Catholics surveyed can be classified as charismatic (Pew Research Center 2006).

Worldwide, the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has grown from no adherents in 1901 to “well over 420,000,000 persons in 1993” (Synan, 2006). Yet Spong has the audacity to say that “Christianity as we have known it increasingly displays signs of rigor mortis [the stiffness of death]” (p. 8).

Lee Grady wrote that:

Third-World Christianity kept growing. There are now about 600 million Christians in Africa. Protestant Christianity grew 600 percent in Vietnam in the last decade. In China, where a 50,000-member megachurch was raided in Shanxi province a few weeks ago, there are now an estimated 130 million churchgoers.

“We have no reason to fear the future. Whatever challenges loom ahead, the same God who carried us through this past decade will give us sucess in the next one.”

Astounding church growth has occurred in Guatemala, Brazil, India and Ethiopia. In Nepal, which had no Christians in 1960, there are now a half-million believers. The Christian population of Indonesia has mushroomed from 1.3 million to 11 million in 40 years.

Smug scholars in Europe and the United States love to cite Islam as the world’s fastest-growing religion, but observers know the facts: Christianity, while waning especially in Europe, is growing faster than ever in the Southern hemisphere. Philip Jenkins, who wrote The Next Christendom in 2002, declared: “The center of gravity has moved to the global south. So if we’re looking for the religion that is going to affect the largest number of lives in the 21st century, it is almost certainly going to be Christianity (Grady 2015).

There certainly are areas where the Christian church is showing significant decline, especially in the Western world. About 100 years ago, Wales experienced a heaven-sent revival. The proportion of the total Welsh population attending church has declined from 14.6% in 1982 to 8.7% in 1995. This report went on to say that “the Church in Wales congregations (Anglicans) report that there has been a slight increase in the size of their congregations in the last five years [i.e. prior to 1997]. The report also found that Churches identifying themselves as Anglo-Catholic or Broad, or Charismatic were growing the most” (Wales, 1997).

Many of these statistics on church growth were obtained from the DAWN website.

Spong’s dislike of evangelicals

Spong is not interested in “confronting or challenging those conservative, fundamentalist elements of Christianity that are so prevalent today.” Why? He believes they will “die of their own irrelevance” as they cling “to attitudes of the past that are simply withering on the vine” (p. 12).

Among Spong’s 205 items in his bibliography, there is not one that refutes his views or presents a scholarly evangelical perspective. I looked for Don Carson, William Lane Craig, Ben Witherington III., N. T. Wright, J. P. Moreland, Ravi Zacharias, Australia’s Paul Barnett, and other leading defenders of the evangelical faith., but they were absent. Dixon and Torrey’s, The Fundamentals, is included but Spong’s overall thrust is to denigrate these essentials of Bible-believing faith.

Early church leader of the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo, gets a mention because Spong believes he is seeking “some experience inside my life” that “is that restlessness about which Augustine spoke that remains unresolved until we rest in God” (p. 193). I think Augustine would turn over in his grave if he considered his restlessness was anything akin to Spong’s mystical inner experience.

His partners in postmodern theological liberalism from the “Jesus Seminar” and other liberals are everywhere – John Crossan, Marcus Borg, Robert Funk, Michael Goulder, John Hick, John A. T. Robinson, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Don Cupitt. Spongism is one-eyed religion that is intolerant of opposing views, especially those of the “fundamentalists”.

Spong’s religion linked to death

The Episcopalians of Spong’s diocese voted with their feet while he was bishop there. One report said that

Spong [had] been the Episcopal Bishop of Newark [New Jersey] since 1976. He has presided over one of the most rapid witherings of any diocese in the Episcopal Church [USA]. The most charitable assessment shows that Newark’s parish membership rolls have evaporated by more than 42 percent. Less charitable accounts put the rate at over 50 percent. (Lasley, 1999).

What can we learn from Spong?

Is there anything of value for evangelicals in reading Spong? I exhort leaders to be familiar with his views for several reasons:

1. These kinds of perspectives will continue to command mass media coverage. On his recent Australian visit, there were articles by Spong in The Agenewspaper, Melbourne (eg., Spong, 2001), The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney. There also was significant television and radio coverage. You must know the enemy.

2. For the sake of all Christians committed to the Gospel, but especially for the young, we need a strong apologetic against his views — from the pulpit and in other teaching ministries. Spong sees “a new portrait of Jesus” (p. 131). It’s an heretical view against which there is a substantial refutation in the Almighty Lord God, the Christ of the cross, the God-breathed and inspired Bible, and the living Christ (through the Spirit), who lives in every true believer and among the people of God. The ministry of apologetics has fallen on hard times in many churches and Bible-training institutions in Australia. This must change with this new breed of Bible-bashers from the liberal theological establishment.

3. What’s the truth? Evangelical, Bible-believing Christianity is growing throughout the world, not Spong’s brand of “Christianity”. Spong’s views need to be refuted with solid evidence.

4. Spong has a point when he says that “most churches will die of boredom long before they die of controversy” (p. 125). Solid biblical teaching must communicate with today’s generation. I observe that some of today’s preaching is boring. This is a call to vigilance in the training of pastor-teachers and the practice of preaching that connects with people.

5. Christ always is relevant to any people, but sometimes the dirge of the church service turns people off. I believe Spong is correct in observing, “For vast numbers of modern people, including modern religious people, the church is less and less an option” (p. 126). We must investigate why this is so, especially in the West, and begin to address it — immediately. Examining what we do is often difficult for the church. This must change. Does Spong have a point when he says that “premodern symbols do not work in a postmodern world. To do nothing is to vote for death” (p. 126)?

6. The time is long overdue for the church to become more proactive in addressing some of the big questions of today. Spong does this from his liberal theological view. Some of the big questions include: Why is suicide becoming an option for more people, especially the young? Why is divorce on the rise? How can the church help with better parenting in families? Is the Bible trustworthy for a modern world? How can I be genuinely Christian in a multicultural Australia? What does it mean to proclaim “Jesus is Lord”? Why are evangelicals not as strong as the liberals in the areas of social responsibility? Is the CEO pastor biblical? When we gather as a church, why are most Christians mute? What can we do about teenage rebellion? Is there a biblical perspective on the use of drugs? Is the Holy Spirit too often just a force to be noticed for some Christians? How can relevant Christianity be communicated without froth and bubble or dry irrelevance?

Spong does not want to deal with conservative, fundamentalist Christianity, and believes that it has no application to life today. He comments that “nowhere is this better seen than when one observes how the word Christianis used in our contemporary world” (p. 12). This is the pot calling the kettle black! It is Spong who has demolished the Bible’s definition of a Christian.

Yet he thinks his views are the future of faith, a new Christianity for a new world! Welcome to Spongism, “Christianity” with a killer instinct.

Endnotes:

1. A version of this article was published in the British magazine, Vanguard, June 2002.

Works consulted

China 2001. 100,000 new believers in Xinjiang in 3 years, Pulpit Helps, September.Available at: http://www.pulpithelps.com/www/docs/988-5476 (Accessed 31 March 2015)

Crew, L 2001. Charting the Episcopal Church (online). Available at: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/chartecusa.html (Accessed 4 November 2001). This URL unavailable online, 31 March 2015.

Crew, L 2001a Growth and decline in ECUSA [Episcopalian Church USA] attendance, 1991-2000 (online). .Available at: http://www.andromeda/rutgers.edu/~/lcrew/growthdecline90-00.html (Accessed November 17, 2001). URL unavailable online, 31 March 2015.

Episcopal Action [The Institute on Religion and Democracy] 2001. Available at: http://www.ird-renew.org/Episcopal/Episcopalmain.cfm (Accessed November 14, 2001). URL unavailable, 31 March 2015.

Fairfield, L. P. 2001. Modernist decline and biblical renewal: The Episcopal Church from 1870-2000,” American Anglican Council. January 24. Available at: http://www.americananglican.org/Issues/Issues.dfm?ID-91 (Accessed October 15, 2001). URL unavailable, 31 March 2015.

Grady, J L 2009. Where is God going? Seven spiritual trends of the ‘00 decade. Charisma magazine (online), 29 December. Available at: http://www.charismamag.com/blogs/fire-in-my-bones/8433-where-is-god-going-seven-spiritual-trends-of-the-00-decade (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Lasley, D. M. 1999. Rescuing Christianity from Bishop Kevorkian, review of John Shelby Spong’s, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, for Anglican Voice (online) , posted June 2 1999. Available at: http://www.anglicanvoice.org/voice/spong0699.htm (Accessed November 4, 2001). On 31 March 2015 it was available as, ‘Rescuing Christianity from Bishop Kevorkian – A Baptist looks at Spong’, David Virtue (June 2, 1999). Available at: http://listserv.virtueonline.org/pipermail/virtueonline_listserv.virtueonline.org/1999-June/000415.html (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Long, J. 1998. World Christian Encyclopedia:David Barrett (Assoc. Ed.). Worldwide statistics plus news from Bulgaria, Chile, Brazil, DAWN Fridayfax 1998 #04. Available at: http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/1998/dawn9804.html (Accessed November 4, 2001). URL unavailable, 31 March 2015.

Nigeria 2001. Assemblies of God plant 4,044 new churches in 10 years, DAWN Fridayfax 2001#3 (online). Available at: http://www.jesus.org.uk/dawn/2001/dawn03.html (Source: AoG news, January 3, 2001) (Accessed November 14, 2001). URL unavailable, 31 March 2015.

Pew Research Center 2006. Historical overview of Pentecostalism in Nigeria (online), October 5. Available at: http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-nigeria/ (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Spong, J. S. 2001. Meditation on the reason for prayer. The Age, October 6. Available at: http://theage.com.au/news/state/2001/10/06/FFXAEOBCFSC.html (Accessed October 11, 2001). The URL was unavailable, 31 March 2015.

Synan, V. 2006. The origins of the Pentecostal movement. Holy Spirit Research Center (Oral Roberts University). Available at: http://www.oru.edu/library/special_collections/holy_spirit_research_center/pentecostal_history.php (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Ukraine 2001. 70 new house churches in the Crimea. National Pastors’ Prayer Network: Global Update (online), 13 July. Available at: http://www.nppn.org/images/GlobalNews/Global07132001.htm#a21 (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Wales 1997. Church decline generally but slight increase for Anglicans, Anglican Communion News Service (ACNS), 7 March. Available at: www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/acnsarchive/acns1100/acns1153.html (Accessed 3 November 2001).

Walton, J 2014. Episcopal church continues shedding members. Juicy Ecumenism: The Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Blog (online), October 14. Available at: http://juicyecumenism.com/2014/10/14/episcopal-church-continues-shedding-members/ (Accessed 31 March 2015).

Wuthnow, R 2001). Still toeing the mainline. Available at: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/31/story_3171_1.html (Accessed November 14, 2001).

God’s view of sex

Free From Jail ChristArt

1. Freedom

There’s a lot of talk these days about sexual freedom. What is freedom? Freedom to do anything? The apostle Paul to the Corinthians explains in I Corinthians 6:12-13 (New English Bible):

‘I am free to do anything’, you say. Yes, but not everything is for my good. No doubt I am free to do anything, but I for one will not let anything make free with me. “Food is for the belly and the belly for food”, you say. True; and one day God will put an end to both. But it is not true that the body is for lust; it is for the Lord‘ (emphasis added).

The Bible is clear:

‘You shall not commit adultery’ (Ex 20:14; Mt 5:27; Rom 13:9);
‘Flee from sexual immorality’ (1 Cor 6:18);
Romans 1:26-27 speaks of homosexuality as involving ‘dishonorable passions’ and ‘shameful acts’; the sexual relations between a man and a woman are called ‘natural relations’ (ESV).

God, being God, does not have to explain his commands, yet he chose to do so. In I Corinthians 6:13 he tells us why premarital and extramarital heterosexual sex and homosexual sex are wrong: “But it is not true that the body is for lust [i.e. fornication/sexual immorality]; it is for the Lord.”

2. Purpose

God defines freedom according to the purpose for which something is designed or made: “The body is not meant for sexual immorality” (I Cor. 6:13 NIV). The world in which we live is one where everything has a design and function. John White’s explanation helped me:

You don’t set a fish free from the ocean (poor fish! so confined and restricted!) or birds from the necessity of flight. Birds were designed to fly and fish to swim. They are freest when they are doing what they were designed to do. In the same way your body was not designed for premarital sex [or extramarital sex or homosexual sex] and will never be truly free when you engage in it. . .

The experience of freedom has to do with being loved and loving. God designed you because he loved you. His purposes for you are an expression of his love to you. And as you respond in love to his commands (about sex or anything else) you are set free, free to be and to do what both you and God want. The more completely you are enslaved to his blessed will, the freer you will discover yourself to be (White 1997: 46-47).

I don’t think the best question to ask is: When are sexual relations wrong? But, when are they right? God is very clear, and we are told our purpose, sexually, from the beginning of creation. From creation, God said and we need to understand it for a God-honouring sexual relationship. We can conclude this from God’s description of creation in the early chapters of Genesis:

1. Gen 1:27: Human beings are created spiritual beings, “in the image of God”. God is spirit.

2. Gen 1:27: “Male and female he created them”. God’s revealed will is heterosexuality, from the beginning of creation.

3. Gen 1:28: “God blessed them [male and female] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth.” Sexual intercourse is a gift of God and God’s purpose is that it involves male and female.” One purpose of sexual intercourse is to have children.

4. Gen 1:31: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Sex (between male and female) is very good in God’s sight.

5. Gen 2:18: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'” God brought the animals and birds to Adam to name, “but for Adam no suitable helper was found” (Gen 2:20). So “the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and brought her to the man.” (2:22). And what was the man’s response? “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man” (2:23). That phrase “this is now” could be paraphrased “Wolf whistle”. Man was alone; he needed completion, but that did not come with an animal, nor with another man, but with a woman. Sexuality involves more than behaviour. “It is not good for the man to be alone.” There is a deep yearning for intimacy, connection with another–not a lustful, seductive encounter.

As a former homosexual, Andrew Comiskey explains that this yearning

grows from that God-inspired desire within each of us to break out of the walls of the lone self and merge with another human being. Intercourse is only one expression of this merging…

Sexuality involves longing and desire. The body longs for human touch; the soul desires a companion to ease its aloneness. Such yearning is not a concession to our fallenness. According to the Bible, God deemed Adam–prior to the fall–as not suited to being alone (see Gen. 2:18). The Creator shaped a complement for Adam to provide for his unique emotional and physical needs, as well as for hers… Although Adam and Eve had clear access to God, He realized they needed something more. So He provided for each the gift of the other” (Comiskey (1989:37).

3. Genesis 2:24 and sexual bonding

This topic has the potential of being controversial. I know from the last 17 years as a full time counsellor and counselling manager (recently retired). When I’ve raised the topic with secular counsellors, they don’t know how to respond as they don’t experience some of these dimensions in counselling.

Why? Their world and life view does not even allow them to get close to asking some of the questions to draw a couple out on this issue. Only occasionally would a couple raise this matter voluntarily with me, but they sure knew how to put one another down if sex wasn’t fulfilling in their relationship (someone, it was alleged, wasn’t performing as he/she ought).

However, I would approach the topic for couples in a rocky relationship with some specific open-ended questions. With the right questions, people have opened up lots for me over the years in therapy.

But very few therapists I have worked with deal with this issue.Let’s get to some biblical basics to help us see what happens in sexual relationships and bonding,

There is more to the creation account in Genesis that has contemporary relevance in a secular society.

Genesis 2:24 states, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ (ESV).

“One flesh” is a powerful symbol of this heterosexual coming together between a man and a woman in marriage. In the act of sexual intercourse, the male and female merge bodies and souls with a bonding that is difficult to describe. However, when this sexual union is ruined through promiscuity, people know it and they’ve told it to me in counselling in various ways down through the years.

Here, one husband unites with one wife to become one flesh. This is monogamous heterosexual marriage which is God’s design for ultimate satisfaction and benefit in marriage. What does it mean for a man and a woman in the sexual relationship to ‘become one flesh’?

Let’s hear from a couple of Hebrew exegetes and how they explain it:

H C Leupold: ‘”Becoming one flesh” involves the complete identification of one personality with the other in a community of interests and pursuits, a union consummated in intercourse’ (Leupold 1942:137).

C F Keil & F Delitzsch: Genesis 2:24 is

to exhibit marriage as the deepest corporeal and spiritual unity of man and woman, and to hold up monogamy before the eyes of the people of Israel as the form of marriage ordained by God. But as the words of Moses, they are the utterance of divine revelation; and Christ could quote them, therefore, as the word of God (Matt. xix.5). By the leaving of mother and father, which applies to the woman as well as the man, the conjugal union is shown to be a spiritual oneness, a vital communion of heart as well as of body, in which it finds its consummation. This union is of a totally different nature from that of parents and children…. Marriage itself, notwithstanding the fact that it demands the leaving of father and mother, is a holy appointment of God (Keil & Delitzsch n d:90-91).

So important is this ‘one flesh’ union (bonding) of a man and a woman in sexual intercourse of one man for one woman that Jesus repeats it in Matthew 19:5. This sexual consummation is critical to an understanding of God’s view of marriage. In this biblical aspect of marriage, the only thing that should fracture this union and longevity is sexual infidelity (see Matt 5;31-32; 19:3-12; Mark 10:7-9). Sexual unfaithfulness is one of the reasons for divorce according to Matthew. First Corinthians 7 gives another.

3. My observations as a counsellor

I obviously will not be giving confidential information from my 34 years of counselling. But I will note some trends that I noticed in counselling with people who have been in multiple sexual relationships:

For many men it is not difficult to have an orgasm. However, many men want the woman to have an orgasmic experience to identify with pleasure and for him to feel fulfilled;
After multiple sex partners, there is often a lack of sexual responses in both male and female, but especially with the female; orgasmic experiences are difficult to have.
This is because God designed sexual intercourse with a purpose: It should be one man for one woman in sexual union as a bonding, one flesh, experience. One flesh is a deeper union than being a sexual mate. When that is violated time after time through sexual union with many partners, there is an inner ‘tearing’ of the human being – the soul – that takes place.
Practically speaking, this makes it difficult to maintain a healthy sex life and leads to the break down in relationships between a man and a woman. So there is break up after break up in relationships. Multiple sex partners will lead to fragile relationships. They cannot last. That’s because God’s purpose is a ‘one flesh’ relationship between a man and a woman in marriage. I’ve had to deal with men and women weeping bitterly because they cannot get deep satisfaction in the sexual relationship and that flows into the cohabitation/defacto relationship they are having. Break ups then happen. And sometimes there are children who suffer in this trauma.
When a secular society promotes freedom to the extent of anything goes in sex – and there is no understanding of the intimate bonding between a man and a woman – there is a natural progression that happens. Sexual relationships break up and the promiscuous cycle goes on and on.
Is there a solution? God’s salvation through repentance and forgiveness in Christ brings healing? But too often there are residual thought patterns and hurt that can influence future relationships. Continuous healing is necessary.
I pray that this kind of message can get through to youth before their first sexual encounter. The bonding in the sexual relationship is a God-given union that should take place between one man and one woman in marriage. Warn our youth about the consequences of promiscuity. Sexual freedom leads to sexual bondage when fuelled by a secular worldview.
And I haven’t discussed the tragedy of contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD), including HIV.
Therefore, ‘necking’ is a dangerous sexual ‘sport’ to play as our emotions lead from one thing to another and before long an illicit sexual relationship is formed. It is extremely difficult to convince youth of the dangers of necking and illicit sex – especially with the availability of condoms and contraceptives.
However, illicit sex is dangerous to long-term sexual satisfaction in marriage.
Please understand that what I have written above will be challenged by secular psychologists and counsellors who do not understand the deep nature of God’s purpose in sexual intercourse, of bonding through one man for one woman. I have tried to share this with some counsellors and it zooms past them.

God upholds healthy, heterosexual, monogamous relationships as His intention for us. But Genesis 3 tells how the male-female relationship fell from innocence. The entry of sin into the human race caused sexuality to become depraved. All of us are sexually vulnerable. As a result, the heterosexual relationships are just as fallen as homosexual tendencies. So we have a world invaded by fornication (premarital sex), adultery, incest, bestiality, homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, etc. Andrew Comiskey explains:

God never intended for man or woman to seek completion in the same sex. Thus, homosexual pursuit of erotic and emotional bonding violates something basic to our humanity. The Creator, in His inspired Scriptures, has shown that homosexual feelings and behaviors must be identified as resulting from the fall. Homosexuality is one of the many sexual disorders that have become woven into the fabric of sinful humanity (1989:43).This is one example of sexual brokenness. Our only hope for wholeness (to truly love others) is a restored relationship with the Almighty Creator God, through Jesus Christ. When united to Christ, “we grasp our true sexual identity. Our sexual desires must encounter the greater reality of [God] Himself” (Comiskey 1989:13). The God-inspired “longing to connect and ultimately merge with another defines our sexuality” (Comiskey 1989:13). But the whole human race living in sin confuses it.

Works consulted

Comiskey, A 1989. Pursuing sexual wholeness. Lake Mary, Florida: Creation House.

Keil, C F & Delitzsch, F n d. Commentary on the Old Testament: The Pentateuch, vol 1. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Leupold, H C 1942. Exposition of Genesis, vol 1. London: Evangelical Press.

White, J 1977. Eros defiled. Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press.

Sex at its best

Heart Of Love

PublicDomainPictures

By Spencer D Gear

In the early 1990s, I was travelling through Wellington, NSW, Australia (between Orange and Dubbo) on my way from Canberra to Queensland. In the men’s public toilet I read this graffiti:

‘You saw him, you liked him;You liked him, you loved him;You loved him, you let him;You let him; you lost him’. [1]

Young people, will you be like the teenager who said: “I always thought of myself as a good kid with decent morals. I just wanted freedom and tried to achieve what I thought would be maximum pleasure. I became painfully disappointed when I found guilt instead of freedom, pain instead of love, suffering instead of pleasure, and distance instead of closeness.” [2]

A. MYTHS AND HALF TRUTHS

This is a permissive, wicked society. Wherever you turn, you are bombarded with sexual/sensual messages that are meant to turn you on sexually. It is far worse for you than it was for me as a teenager over (well) 35 years ago.

Recently my wife reminded me of the Brisbane radio announcer in the late 1960s who played the song, “Let it all hang out.” He said something like: “If I did that, I would be charged with indecent exposure.” If I remember correctly, he was fired before the end of the next song. Now compare that with what you hear on most radio stations.

In this climate you are being sold some myths or half truths:[3]

1. Sex is purely a physical need that is unrelated to the past, has no ramifications for the future, and has no or few negative implications for the present.

2. Others aren’t going through what I am going through. They have it all together.

3. It is possible to be sexually active without harm. There are no lingering consequences. Sex doesn’t touch your inner self.

4. Our immediate choices do not bear results into the future.

5. When things go wrong and relationships fall apart, or we can’t get into a meaningful relationship without self-destructing, we blame ourselves for not being able to cope, instead of examining the practices of our lives.

6. I am making my sexual decisions independent of society, culture, and my immediate environment.

Because of the way sex operates (the way it was designed to do so by God), these myths promote a delusion that overlooks this fact:

The devastating power of sex reverberates through

your emotions,
your mind,
your spirit, and
your body.

B. SEX AND THE WOMAN

Dr. Givens notes how sex affects women: “Casual affairs so tax a person’s energy and self-esteem that few [women] pursue recreational sex for long periods of time. They lose respect, both for themselves and for their partners.”[4] This emotional pain generally won’t be experienced during the relationship, but at the end when she feels like an object that has been used.

One woman who had been into casual sex compared the feeling to “dry ice tearing off a layer of skin.” [5] This is because for a woman sex is woven in closely with the whole relationship. Loose, casual sex cuts deep into a woman’s being.

We can argue for equal pay, equal working conditions, equal vote, equality before God, and stacks of other ways men and women are equal. But we must never conclude that equality equals sameness.

Women, you lose more than your dignity when you jump into bed with some bloke who claims he loves you. As one women said, based on experience:

None of us is “capable of sailing off into the airy brightness of a concluded love affair… Inevitably there are consequences both internal and external. If bodies are being killed all over the world because of politics rather than love, spirits are being smashed right next door, in apartment houses and shacks and on the street because of love.” [6]

C. SEX AND THE MAN

It is said that a woman “gives sex” but a man “scores.” But sex before marriage has its definite down side for men, although the idea of losing something doesn’t generally affect the man as much as the woman. Of course, he can be affected by a love affair gone bad, but believe it or not, it’s the spiritual dimension that eventually catches up with the man.

Remember Paul’s words to men about marriage: In Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” God’s agape love is a giving kind of love.

Yet, men when they are courting, play the taking, taking, taking game. When they finally commit to marriage, they don’t have what it takes to go the distance for real love. Their inner strength is spent.

I do not find it surprising that the growing divorce rate goes hand in glove with the sexually loose culture we live in.

Why are women torn up inside by loose sex. Why are men not wanting to make the long-term commitment?

D. IT’S THE POWER OF SEX

Just Love

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This is not the physical ability to thrill. It’s the BONDING POWER OF SEX that lasts. IT IS THIS BONDING POWER THAT LEAVES A TRAIL OF DEVASTATION WHEN IT IS USED OUT OF CONTEXT. GOD’S PURPOSE FOR SEX IS IN MARRIAGE, WITH TWO PEOPLE (MALE AND FEMALE) BONDED FOR LIFE and that involves the SEXUAL UNION.

You put sex into dating and you’ve got an explosive, destructive mixture. When you join with another person outside marriage, an intimate identity is developed as two blend into one. Then it ends; the fabric of the unity is ripped apart.

This is what the apostle Paul was talking about in I Corinthians 6:

“The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body… Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” (vv 13, 18-20).

Because of this spiritual, psychological, emotional and physical bonding that takes place, when you break off the relationship, the deepest part of your inner being is ripped apart. Spiritually and emotionally you are damaged.

And premarital sex can become compulsive/addictive. You think you are getting what you want–sexual freedom. But you are getting sexual bondage.

Jesus nailed it: “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). To try something once is one of the great deceptions. You try sex outside of marriage once and you will find it difficult to stop. The appetite grows into a hunger that must be satisfied.

In my counselling I come across people who have come from a wild sexual past and they find it almost impossible to build a lasting relationship. The bonding has been too strong. You may think you are indulging your sexual appetite with Mr Macho or Miss Sensational. But you will gain a master that will control you.

There is a deep spiritual factor involved in the sexual relationship–worship.

First Corinthians 6:16-17 says: “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit” (NIV).

Young people, you have got to see this: sex is a spiritual issue. It is impossible for you to commit sexual immorality and still be one with God. Sex has a strong spiritual dimension, as I Cor. 6: 13 says: “The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord; and the Lord is for the body.”

The infamous Jim Bakker of PTL television fame commented as his ministry lay in tatters: “It’s amazing how fifteen minutes can ruin your life.”[7] What he did not say was: Not just any fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes of immorality because of the spiritual bonding and identity.

While Paul speaks of becoming one with a prostitute in I Cor 6:16, he expands it to general immorality is I Cor 6:18, “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.”

DO YOU WANT SEX AT ITS BEST? You must surrender your rights to Jesus Christ. You must choose with your actions (not just words) to follow Jesus as Lord. This means refusing to yield to sexual temptation and fleeing sexual immorality. Does your walk match your talk? God says through Paul, “They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him” (Titus 1:16).

cloudclipart (public domain)

But, you ask:

E. ISN’T A FAITHFUL SEX RELATIONSHIP OUTSIDE MARRIAGE OK?

This is a puzzle many people grapple with – not just the young. Why should sex with a permanent partner outside of marriage (even in a defacto relationship) be any different than monogamous marriage? Many think the essential elements of both are identical. The difference is this: God designed marriage; human beings designed the live-in, look-alike, defacto relationship.

I am indebted to Al Haffner for this illustration:

“Consider this: ‘It is possible to analyze an apple and ascertain its chemical constituents; but all the chemists in the world cannot make an apple, nor anything that can substitute for it.’ Neither can the world make any relationship do what marriage does, not even a monogamous love affair.”[8]

In our way of thinking, there is a vast separation between a faithful lover and one who sleeps around. From God’s point of view, He lumps all sex outside of marriage into the same heap because sex makes a spiritual statement.

“Inside marriage it is the melodious beauty of spiritual serenity; outside of marriage, even in a monogamous relationship, sex cries out a cacophony of spiritual chaos.” [9]

When you indulge in “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed” this amounts to idolatry, according to Colossians 3:5-6, because it is self-serving selfishness, opposed to serving God and “because of these, the wrath of God is coming.”

F. SEX IN MARRIAGE

Ladybird Mating

Ladybird mating (Public Domain)

Sex has such a bonding effect that it rips the heart out of people premaritally involved, especially when they part.

Then take a look at what is happening with the devastation of sexually transmitted diseases. They are spreading like wild-fire. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 250 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases each year. It is largely those who have advocated a permissive approach to sex who have helped produce this epidemic–not those advocating abstinence.

In 1981 there were 20 different STDs, 1984 there were 28 different STDs, 1988 there were 51. In 1992 they were approaching 60 STDs, with a new one discovered every nine months. They can cause birth defects, infertility, life-long pain, cancer and other diseases. Most young people do not understand how serious STDs are. [10]

I don’t have the Australian figures, but “ten to twenty million American women are now sterile because of sexual infections from promiscuity; the figures may go as high as one-fourth of all women of childbearing age.” [11]

When you play around sexually before or after marriage, you aren’t just participating in an innocent private affair for consenting adults. Your so-called private acts may infect your spouse and children for as long as they live–some STDs are not curable (I’m not just talking about HIV). “One chance encounter can infect a person with as many as five different diseases.” [12]

When you have sex with somebody other than your faithful marriage partner, you are having contact with every sexually transmitted disease that person has had contact with. And don’t kid yourself that the other person will be honest about the sexually transmitted diseases he or she has or how many sex partners he or she has had.

Even on this physical level, God’s law makes utter common sense:

“You shall not commit adultery” (Ex 20:14).

“Flee from sexual immorality” (I Cor 6:18).

Christian values are being degraded in Australia, but the simple fact is: abiding by God’s values would have prevented the entire STD epidemic. Christian obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr. Joe McIllhaney puts it so well:

“If sex is avoided until marriage and then engaged in only in marriage, all these sexually transmitted diseases would be of no importance at all because they could not enter into a closed circle relationship between husband and wife. Such an approach is not only not naive, it is also not moralizing, but it is now necessary.”[13]

G. WHAT ARE GOD’S REASONS FOR INSTRUCTIONS ABOUT SEX?

We must begin by understanding the character of God.

not a killjoy wanting to ruin your fun,
he didn’t make us to enjoy sex and then frustrate us,
God made and designed us,
He knows everything.
Only God knows what is best for us.

i love you 2 Just Love All You Need Is Love Love You Forever

All-free-download.com

Deuteronomy 10:13, “Observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good.”

Those last four words are critical: for your own good. All of God’s commands to us, all of his requirements are not to break us and kill our joy, but they are for our own good.

Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.

James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

He knows how your total being works–body, mind and spirit. God knows how human relationships function most fully and joyfully. God is not trying to stop us from having a wonderful sex life. He is giving us the positive instruction to have the most wonderful sex life possible.

I have found many Christians ignorant of this perspective. I was ignorant of it for many years and it destroyed my approach to sex in my teens.

If you look on God’s commands–you shall not commit adultery, flee sexual immorality, etc., as negative and designed to frustrate your enjoyment, you will miss what God wants for your sexual enjoyment. Remember, these negatives are given for positive reasons.

When my children were young, I warned them: do not touch a hot stove plate. That was very negative and it looked like I might have been stopping them from having fun. But it was really a positive command. If my Paul had burned himself, it would have prevented him from enjoying life for a while–maybe permanently.

That’s how it is with God: Whenever he gives a command, there are at least two positive reasons behind it:

1. He’s trying to protect us from some harm, and2. He’s trying to provide something good for us.

(Rolled-up condom Wikipedia)

H. CONNED BY THE CONDOM

One of the greatest pressures for you today will come in this form.

1. IF IT’S NOT ON, IT’S NOT ON!

2.THAT FEELING … DOESN’T STOP HIV: SAFE SEX DOES

As young people, you are bombarded with the message: Sex is great whenever you can get it, and that waiting for marriage is for fuddy-duddy’s–incredibly old fashioned people like me.”

I remember the story back in 1993 about young Eve (who went from Australia to New Zealand), the 11-year-old who died of AIDS, [14] acquired from an infected blood transfusion. She had not experienced the message she was promoting. This dying child would recite from memory something she had been given to learn: “Always use a condom when you have sex with your lover.” [15] What a shame that an innocent young dying child should be used to promote the myth of safe sex.

One of your greatest threats is that you may be CONNED BY THE CONDOM message. This is one of my major concerns for youth. You are in danger of submitting to the propaganda that condom use will make “safe sex” possible.

What the government and media don’t trumpet loudly is this:

1. The “safe sex” message is a disaster in the making. Condoms have a failure rate of at least 15.7%. I have yet to see this as a significant emphasis in any of the government or advertising programs.

15.7% failure rate for condoms represents the percentage of married women using the condom as a contraceptive, who will become pregnant over the course of a year.

It seems that you also are not being told clearly this information: It is possible to become pregnant once a month–a woman can conceive only one-three days per month. But we can only guess how high the failure rate for condoms must be in preventing disease, which can be transmitted 31 days of every month–365 days a year. [16]

2. You also will not be told that the failure rate of condoms in the survey I have just mentioned was shockingly higher for certain groups of people: among young, unmarried, minority women (in the US this generally means black women) the failure rate was over one-in-three (36.3%). Among unmarried Hispanic (generally, Mexican) women in the US, it is as high as 44.5%–that’s approaching one-in-two condoms will fail.[17]3. You will not be told condoms cannot be accurately tested for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. So researchers have been studying surgical gloves made out of latex, the same material as condoms.

They found “channels” of 5 microns width penetrated the entire thickness of the glove. [18]

The HIV virus measures .1 of a micron. [19]

In other words, the latex of condoms has channels through it that are 50 times wider than the HIV virus, which makes it a possibility that the virus could seep through the rubber (latex) of the condom.

4. The Bible is very clear that God’s purpose for you is to save your sexual relationship until marriage. Sexual purity before marriage and sexual fidelity in marriage are God’s plan. However, I ask you: based on the information I have just shared with you about condoms, do you think youth should be taught to abstain from sex until marriage?

No other approach to the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases will work. Abstain from sex before marriage and be faithful in marriage. That’s exactly what God designed for the maximum sexual joy of human beings. The “safe sex” message you are getting from schools, universities, the government, the mass media, is a disaster in the making.

I believe it is criminal for me or anybody to tell you that that little latex device, called a condom, is “safe.” You are risking life-long pain and even death for a brief encounter of pleasure.

I. WHAT WOULD THE PROFESSIONALS SAY?

What do you think the “professionals” who advocate “safe sex” would say about the information I have just shared with you, if they were sitting in on my message today? Would they call me a scare-monger who is undermining what the government is doing to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases? Would they say I am out of touch?

I have been in the counselling field for 34 years, 17 years full time as a counsellor and counselling manager. I deal with real people with real diseases. I am seeing the sad consequences of people who thought they could get away with the ‘safe sex’ message and are living with the highly infectious, appallingly painful blisters of genital herpes.

I will not go into what gonorrhoea, syphilis, chlamydia (pelvic inflammatory disease), HIV, and other STDs can do. “Sleeping around has always been unhealthy, now it is becoming suicidal.” [20]

What would the “professionals” say about my warning? I’ll give just one example. Dr. Theresa Crenshaw, past president of the American Association of Sex Education, Counsellors and Therapists, and a member of the national AIDS Commission, had first-hand experience with the “professionals.” She says this:

On June 19, 1987, I gave a lecture on AIDS to 800 sexologists at the World Congress of Sexologie in Heidelberg [Germany]. Most of them recommended condoms to their clients and students. I asked them if they had available the partner of their dreams, and knew that person carried the virus, would they have sex, depending on a condom for protection? No one raised [his/her] hand. After a long delay, one timid hand surfaced from the back of the room. I told them that it was irresponsible to give advice to others that they would not follow themselves. The point is, putting a mere balloon between the healthy body and the deadly disease is not safe (emphasis added). [21], [22]

J. More recent statistics

The story of the condom tragedy hasn’t changed. What is more recent research saying? The following “Teen Sex and Pregnancy: Facts and Figures” provide statistics that are just as alarming as in the late 1980s [23].

In preventing pregnancy, condoms have a standardized failure rate of 15.7 percent over the course of a year. [EF Jones and JD Forrest, “Contraceptive Failure in the US: Revised Estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth” Family Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 3, May/June 1989, p.103.]

For persons under the age of 18, condoms were found to fail 18.4 percent of the time after one year of use. [MD Hayward and J Yogi, “Contraceptive Failure Rate in the US: Estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth,” Family Perspectives, Vol 18, No. 5, Sept/Oct 1986, p. 204.]

Among sexually active teenage girls aged 12 to 18, 30% contracted an STD over a six month period, including condom users. [LM Dinerman et al, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Med, 149(9):967-72, Sept 1995.]

For unmarried minorities, the condom failure rate is 36.3 percent, and for unmarried Hispanics, the failure rate is as high as 44.5 percent. [Jones and Forrest, 1989, p. 105.]

Among married couples where one partner was HIV-positive, 17 percent of the uninfected spouses contracted the disease, despite the use of condoms. [Contraceptive Technology, Hatcher et al, 1990, p. 173.] That is a rate greater than one in six. Statistically speaking, the uninfected partners would have been better off playing Russian Roulette.

Only 7 percent of HIV positive persons voluntarily notify their sexual partners. [New England Journal of Medicine, Jan 9, 1992.] For a more recent discussion of this HIV partner notification issue, see,

‘HIV Partner Notification: A Missed Opportunity?’ (May 2012).
‘The science of partner notification: A review of the available evidence’ (April 2003).

1. Update on Condoms & Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs)

a. Are condoms a safe protection against STDs?

“Latex or polyurethane (plastic) condoms are useful in helping to prevent certaindiseases, such as HIV and gonorrhea. However, they are less effective protecting against herpes, trichomoniasis, and chlamydia. Condoms provide almost no protection against HPV, the cause of genital warts and cervical cancer” [24]

b. In particular are condoms a save way to prevent contracting HIV/AIDS?

Although condoms will reduce your chance of infection, compared to having sex without any form of protection, one in three AIDS victims will contract the disease from an infected partner despite 100% use of condoms. One study found that among married couples where one partner was HIV-positive, 17% of the uninfected spouses contracted the disease, despite the use of condoms. The best way to prevent AIDS is abstinence. [24]

Another has emphasised: “There is only one way to protect ourselves from the deadly [sexual] diseases that lie in wait. It is abstinence before marriage, then marriage and mutual fidelity for life to an uninfected partner. Anything less is potentially suicidal” and definitely against God’s purpose for your sexual expression. [25]

Perhaps you’re saying, “That is not realistic today. It won’t work. Kids will not put it into practice.”

Some will. Some won’t. I want to be honest. But it is still the only ultimately successful answer, and I must warn you of the bad consequences of the “safe sex” message. If I knew my teenager was going to have intercourse, I would not recommend the use of the condom because it gives five dangerous messages. They are:

1. You can achieve “safe sex.” From what I’ve said so far, it should be evident that that is not possible.

2. It tells you that everybody is doing it–that’s not so.

3. It says that responsible adults expect you to do it. I never want to give any young person that information.

4. If I tell you to use a condom, it gives you the message that it’s a good thing. I hope I’ve shown you that it is not, and terribly dangerous.

5. Another danger of recommending condoms is that it has the potential to breed promiscuity–sleeping around with anybody.

These are five destructive messages I NEVER want to convey to any young people. “Safe sex” is a very dangerous message.

Our society does not want to give you the message: Say, “No,” to premarital sex. Of course, that would be imposing their views on you if they promoted abstinence–and that would be moralistic. However, what do you think the “safe sex” message is? Just that! Imposing the view that sex with anybody is okay, as long as the male wears a condom.

If you want to consider more reasons for saying “NO” to premarital sex, I suggest reading Why Wait? by Josh McDowell and Dick Day. [27]

Heb. 13:4, “Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”

In I Thess. 4:3-8, God says he will judge sexual immorality. God is holy and will judge those who break his commands.

King David’s sin with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11-12) is a perfect example of this. Out of adultery a child was born, and in judgment God took the son’s life. It was a painful judgment for David.

Remember this: the Lord doesn’t always judge immediately, but it is always sure. Stay pure for God. God doesn’t want you to suffer at the hands of his justice.

If you abstain from sex now, it is because God wants you to experience greater intimacy later–in marriage. But God is also calling you before marriage to greater intimacy with Himself.

K. CONCLUSION

Young people, there are many valid reasons for you to say “NO” to premarital sex. God really is acting in love when He commands that sex be enjoyed with in the bonds of marriage.

This is a message of prevention for those who are virgins. God loves you and wants to protect you from entering into the damaging consequences of illicit sex.

On the other hand, I know there may be some here today for whom this message is too late–you have lost your virginity, you are loaded down with guilt, you know what I have been saying is true. What can you do?

Run to Jesus. You cannot undo what you have done, but you can be forgiven. God will lay down all charges against you if you repent and ask his forgiveness. The biblical message for all Christians who sin is I John 1:9, “If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

You can be forgiven today. If the Lord has convicted you about sexual sin in your life, respond to him. I am not going to embarrass you by asking you to respond publicly, but I am asking you to go and speak with your leaders or a trusted Christian friend who will pray and counsel with you.

Please remember: what is shared with you in confidence, stays confidential.

Do you want sex at its best?

Wait for the sexual relationship until marriage.

If that is too late, confess your sin and remain chaste.

Be faithful in marriage.

The story is told of Alexander the Great who was reviewing his troops after a fierce battle. He encountered one of his captains disciplining a soldier for being a coward. Alexander approached.

“What is your name, soldier?” he asked.

“Alexander,” replied the soldier.

“What?” exclaimed Alexander the Great.

“Sir, my name is Alexander!” said the soldier.

Trembling with rage, Alexander the Great yelled, “Soldier, either change your ways, or you change your name.” [26]

As soldiers in Christ’s army, we must stop acting cowardly in the face of sexual temptation, or we should change our name–which will have eternal consequences. In this sexually perverted generation, the words of I Corinthians 4:20 come thundering through: “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.” Change your ways or change your name.

First Corinthians 7:2-5 (NLT) is a key passage in understanding God’s view of sex at its best.

Endnotes:

[1] I have since located it on the Internet as ‘Break Up Quote #177582’, Witty, available at: http://www.wittyprofiles.com/q/177582 (Accessed 30 November 2013).

[2] Al Haffner, The High Cost of Free Love. San Bernardino, California: Here’s Life Publishers, 1989, p. 11.

[3] Ibid., p. 15.

[4] Ibid., p. 19.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.,

[7] Ibid, p. 31

[8] Ibid, p. 34

[9] Ibid.

[10] In John Ankerberg & John Weldon, The Myth of Safe Sex. Chicago: Moody Press, 1993, chapter 5).

[11] Ibid., p. 54.

[12] Ibid., p. 57.

[13] In ibid., p. 63.

[14] The Canberra Times, 21 November 1993, p. 1.

[15] The Canberra Times letter-to-the-editor, November 27, 1993, p. 16.

[16] This statistic comes from Planned Parenthood, USA: Elise F. Jones and Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, “Contraceptive Failure in the United States: Revised estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth,” Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 21 No. 3, May/June 1989, p. 103.

[17] Ibid., p. 105.

[18] Susan G. Arnold, James E. Whitman Jr., Cecil H. Fox and Michele H. Cottier-Fox, “Latex Gloves Not Enough to Exclude Viruses,” Nature 335, (September 1, 1988), p. 19.

[19] Nancy E. Dirruba, “The Condom Barrier,” American Journal of Nursing, October 1987, p. 1306.

[20] Patrick Dixon, The Truth About AIDS. Eastbourne, E. Sussex, United Kingdom: Kingsway Publications, 1987, 29.

[21] Theresa Crenshaw. From remarks made at the National Conference on HIV, Washington DC, November 15-18, 1987.

[22] All of the above quotes on condoms are from: “Condom Roulette,” In Focus, Family Research Council, 700 Thirteenth St., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC, 20005.

[23] Westside Pregnancy Resource Center (2002a), 12247 Santa Monica Blvd., W. Los Angeles CA 90025, homepage at: http://www.wprc.org/. These statistics on “Teen Sex and Pregnancy: Facts and Figures” were retrieved on May 26, 2002 from: http://www.w-cpc.org/sexuality/teens.html. See also Drew, D. (1995). “Condom ‘safe sex’ theory full of holes,” retrieved on May 26, 2002 from http://dianedew.com/condom.htm (based on an article written for The Covington News, March 16, 1995).

[24] Westside Pregnancy Resource Center (2002b). “Birth Control Questions & Answers: Frequently Asked Questions,” retrieved on May 26, 2002, from: http://www.w-cpc.org/sexuality/faqcondoms.html#aids.

[25] James Dobson, Focus on the Family newsletter, February 13, 1992, p. 3.

[26] Haffner, p. 91.

[27] McDowell, J. & Day, D. (1987) Why Wait? What You Need to Know About the Teen Sexuality Crisis. San Bernardino, CA: Here’s Life Publishers.

God’s rules for living are always meant for our best and NEVER to hurt or restrict us.

Pornography fuels the fire

Men Against Pornography Clip Art

Cyndy Owens (clker.com)

By Spencer D Gear

The level of sexual abuse and assault in this nation is alarming! This is impacting adults. However, those who work with children and youth are also dealing with significant numbers of the abused. This horrific abuse causes me to ask: What on earth is going on in this country?

6pointblue I would not be so naive as to suggest only one cause of this dreadful situation. Alcohol and drug abuse and examples of violence in the culture would seem to have their influence.

However, one thing we do know is that there is an association between the use of pornography and sex crimes.

Australia: The Sexual Assault Capital

The International Crime Survey (1994) found that Australians face greater risk of sexual assault than people in any other developed country.[1] Canberra, the home of video porn in Australia, had the highest sexual assault rate in Australia. [2]

This should not be surprising when research shows how pornography desensitises men to rape.

Pornography & Sex Crimes: The Link

There could be other factors involved in the increase in sex crimes. Since young people tend to read more pornography, it was thought that age could be a contributing factor. One American study investigating the link between porn and sexual violenceconcluded that age was “irrelevant.” [3]

There is the possibility of other social or cultural factors influencing the link between pornography and rape.

The reputable scientific magazine, New Scientist (5 May, 1990), after reviewing the research literature concluded:

It would, however, be an equally serious mistake to dismiss research on pornography as inconclusive and so irrelevant. The weight of evidence is accumulating that intensive exposure to soft-core pornography desensitises men’s attitude to rape, increases sexual callousness and shifts their preferences towards hard-core pornography.Similarly, the evidence is now strong that exposure to violent pornography increases men’s acceptance of rape myths and of violence against women. It also increases men’s tendencies to be aggressive towards women and is correlated with the reported incidence of rape. Many sex offenders claim they used pornography to stimulate themselves before committing their crimes.” [4]

A Cairns policeman said in 1990 that after eight years of work with the Juvenile Aid Bureau every sexual offender he had charged had used pornography as a stimulant to the crime. He said that “pornography is the recurring factor in every major sexual investigation.” [5]

A number of Australian judges and leading legal people see the connection and are speaking out.

Victorian (Australian) Barrister, chairman of forensic psychology at Monash University and consultant to the Australian Law Reform Commission, Dr Don Thompson, says that “the conclusion I draw from the findings of the different lines of research is that pornography is causally related to sexually violent behaviour.” [6]

Northern Territory Supreme Court Justice, Sir William Kearney, says that “people who think there is no connection between pornography and the violent and bizarre crimes that come before the courts ought to do the case studies.” [7]

Yet defenders of pornography state their position very articulately. However, as long as Bundaberg listens to the no-harm view of pornography, our women and children will continue to be raped and abused.

Children in Australia are protected against gambling, nicotine and alcohol addiction. Why isn’t there better protection for them against the addiction of pornography? [8]

What a Contrast! South Australia vs Queensland

In a cover story on “The Power of Pornography,” the New Scientist, [9] revealed how Australia had unwittingly conducted an interesting experiment on the effects of pornography. “Queensland, [at that time] the most conservative state, has maintained the strictest controls on pornography and has a comparatively low rate of rape reports. By contrast, South Australia, the [then] most liberal state in relation to pornography, has seen escalating reports of rape in the early 1970s.”

The explosive growth in rape rates in South Australia coincided with the Dunstan Government’s laws that liberalised display of and availability of pornographic materials in the early 1970s. By 1985, South Australia had five times the rape rate of Queensland.

Some pornography users are inflicting inhuman crimes, mostly on our women and children. Millions of girls, boys and adults worldwide are maimed sexually, many of them for life, thanks to the pleasure and profit of pornographers.

Victims live with the horrific memories of their experiences, many of them having childhood denied them and having nightmares for years.

Those working in the counselling field, as I do, know how difficult it can be to help people move from sexual addiction to sexual wholeness. Mind pollution has lasting and often devastating consequences. Just ask the user of porn who abused his children and is working on change!

This in no way exempts the porn user from responsibility in committing his/her acts of abuse.

The No-Harm Porn Delusion

Pornographers want us to believe that their material (print and electronic) has no link to the rape and sexual abuse we are seeing in Bundaberg and around the world.

Advertisers pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year on mass media. Why? Common sense (maybe it’s not so common after all!) tells us that what we see influences what we do, even if only for a moment. Yet the porn that we read around the advertisements is not supposed to have negative effects.

What Can Be done?

Follow the example of the State of Victoria (Australia) and ensure that publications [and videos] that are unsuitable for children cannot be displayed in open areas to children. Porn magazines should no longer be placed in the same area of a newsagent or service station as Mickey Mouse comics. The cover-up of open display of pornography would be a significant step in addressing the problem.
As the influence of the international pornography industry is reduced by governments taking pro-active measures, all of us will no longer be forced to undergo psychological desensitisation through unwanted exposure to pornographic displays.
To stop this horror, it will take the combined efforts of all levels of government, the police, parents, the church, and all citizens concerned about the direction in which Australia is heading.

Until we have evidence beyond reasonable doubt that pornography is not addictive, that the passion of fantasy doesn’t destroy reality, that the obsessive use of obscene materials will not lead to perversions–we dare not give pornography respectability.

Protecting the rights of the individual must give way to protecting the vulnerable in Australia (mainly women and children).

Works consulted

1. International Crime Survey, the Home Office in London, April, 1994.
2. According to the Australian Federal Police Annual Report (1991-92); ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Annual Report 1992-1993.
3. New Scientist, “The Power of Pornography,” 5 May, 1990, p. 23.
4. Ibid.
5. The Cairns Post, 1 August, 1990.
6. In an address to the Victorian Criminal Justice Symposium, 16 March, 1991.
7. Northern Territory News, 1 June, 1989.
8. In Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children, Dr Victor Cline documents addiction as the first stage of the Four-Factor Syndrome common to nearly all sex offenders. Published by the National Obscenity Law Centre, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, USA, 1994, p. 3.
9. 5 May, 1990.

Conned by the Condom

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THINGS THREATENING TEENS

THE PREMARITAL SEX CHALLENGE

Suppose you were invited to join a parachute club for one year with 6 of your friends. If the pilot of the plane told you that one of the parachutes would fail that year, would you jump? You probably wouldn’t even get into the plane.

Suppose you are a cricketer (that gives away that I’m an Aussie). At the beginning of the season, the coach tells you that at least 3 out of the 22 young men on the two opposing teams would sustain fatal injuries during the year-long season. Would you sign the permission slip to play?

Young people today face many threats. They are under a lot of pressure — much more than when I was a teenager 40 years ago. I want to expose one particular threat that I am deeply concerned about. I’m concerned about it because of the damage I am seeing it do to so many of our youth–all with the permission and promotion of the government, and with the endorsement of the mass media. This concern I am talking about has a failure rate equivalent to the examples I gave of the parachutes: one-in-seven; 3 out of 22 in the two cricket teams.

One of the foci of this article is:

I. CONNED BY THE CONDOM?

One of the greatest pressures for you today will come in this form.

IF IT’S NOT ON, IT’S NOT ON!
THAT FEELING DOESN’T STOP HIV: SAFE SEX DOES

What is this sex education message saying? If you don’t wear a condom, you will become pregnant. And, if you want to prevent getting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), use a condom.

Have you noticed that we rarely hear the term, “venereal disease” today? When I was a youth, when we heard “venereal disease” we knew it was picked up by being sexually promiscuous sleeping around. But now, the trendy description is “sexually transmitted diseases.” That doesn’t have the same negative stigma as “venereal disease.” Sexually transmitted diseases are those that ordinary people get–they just happen to be sexually transmitted.

If that’s not enough, we go ahead and give the initials, STD–that even further diminishes the impact. Our society, which promotes sleeping around, is just trying to make these diseases another public health issue, without relating them to anything moral.

As young people, you are bombarded with the message: “sex is great whenever you can get it, and that waiting for marriage is for fuddy-duddy’s–incredibly old fashioned.”

I’ve had it said to me by youth: all kinds of pressures are put on me to have sex, and no-one has given me any good reasons for saying “No.” That young people are saying, “Nobody has told me the many good reasons to say, ‘No’ to premarital sex,” is a tragedy.

A. DANGER IN THE MAKING

What the government and media don’t trumpet loudly is this:

1. The “safe sex” message is a disaster in the making. Condoms have have been found to have a failure rate of at lease 15.7%. I have yet to see this as a significant emphasis in government or media campaigns.

A 15.7% failure rate for condoms represents the percentage of married women using the condom as a contraceptive, who will become pregnant over the course of a year.

It seems that you also are not told clearly this additional information: It is possible to become pregnant once a month–a woman can conceive only one or two days per month. But we can only guess how high the failure rate for condoms must be in preventing disease, which can be transmitted 31 days of every month–365 days a year. Any sexually transmitted disease can be transmitted at any time during a sexual relationship with an infected person. (This statistic is from Planned Parenthood, USA. See Jones & Forrest, 1989, p. 103)

You also will not be told that the failure rate of condoms in the survey I have just mentioned was shockingly higher for certain groups of people: among young, unmarried, minority women the failure rate was over one-in-three (36.3%). Among unmarried Hispanic women in the US, it is as high as 44.5%–that’s approaching one-in-two condoms will fail. (Jones & Forrest, 1989, p. 105).

You will not be told condoms cannot be accurately tested for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. So researchers have been studying surgical gloves made out of latex, the same material as condoms. They found “channels” of 5 microns width penetrated the entire thickness of the glove. (Arnold, Whitman Jr., Fox & Cottier-Fox, 1988, p. 19)

The HIV virus measures 0.1 of a micron. (Dirruba, 1987, p. 1306)

In other words, the latex of condoms has channels through it that are 50 times wider than the HIV virus, which makes it a possibility that the virus could seep through the rubber (latex) of the condom.

2. The Bible is very clear that God’s purpose for you is to save your sexual relationship until marriage. Sexual purity before marriage and sexual fidelity in marriage are God’s plan. However, I ask you: based on the information I have just shared with you about condoms, do you think youth should be taught to abstain from sex until marriage?

No other approach to the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases will work. Abstain from sex before marriage and be faithful in marriage. That’s exactly what God designed for the maximum sexual joy of human beings. The “safe sex” message you are getting from schools, universities, the government, the mass media, is a disaster in the making.

There is a word for people who rely on condoms as a method of birth control. We call them ‘parents.’

I believe it is criminal for me or anybody to tell you that that little latex device, called a condom, is “safe.” You are risking life-long pain and even death for a brief encounter of pleasure.

B. WHAT WOULD THE PROFESSIONALS SAY?

What do you think the “professionals” who advocate “safe sex” would say about the information I have just shared with you, if they were sitting in on my teaching today? Would they call me a scare-monger who is undermining what the government is doing to prevent the spread of AIDS? Would they say I am out of touch?

I have been counselling for the last 25 years (with a master’s degree in counselling psychology and doctoral studies in the same field). I am not a theorist. I deal with real people with real diseases. I am seeing the sad consequences of people who thought they could get away with the “safe sex” message and are living with the highly infectious, appallingly painful blisters of genital herpes.

I will not go into what gonorrhoea, syphilis, chlamydia (pelvic inflammatory disease), AIDS, and other STDs can do. Dr. Patrick Dixon says: “Sleeping around has always been unhealthy, now it is becoming suicidal” (1987, p. 29).

“On June 19, 1987, I gave a lecture on AIDS to 800 sexologists at the World Congress of Sexologie in Heidelberg. Most of them recommended condoms to their clients and students. I asked them if they had available the partner of their dreams, and knew that person carried the virus, would they have sex, depending on a condom for protection? No one raised their hand. After a long delay, one timid hand surfaced from the back of the room. I told them that it was irresponsible to give advice to others that they would not follow themselves

. The point is, putting a mere balloon between the healthy body and the deadly disease is not safe” (Crenshaw, 1987, emphasis added)[All of the above quotes, with the exception of Dixon, 1987, are from: “Condom Roulette” (n.d.)]

“There is only one way to protect ourselves from the deadly [sexual] diseases that lie in wait. It is abstinence before marriage, then marriage and mutual fidelity for life to an uninfected partner. Anything less is potentially suicidal” and definitely against God’s purpose for your sexual expression.” ( 1992, p. 3). See also, “Dobson Addresses Condom Effectiveness.” For results of “Scientific Evidence on Condom Effectiveness for Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Prevention,” see HERE.

Perhaps you’re saying, “That is not realistic today. It won’t work. Kids will not put it into practice.”

Some will. Some won’t. But it is still the only answer, and I must warn you of the bad consequences of the “safe sex” message. If I knew my teenager was going to have intercourse, I would not recommend the use of the condom because it gives five dangerous messages. They are:

1. You can achieve “safe sex.” From what I’ve said so far, it should be evident that that is not possible.2. It tells you that everybody is doing it–that’s not so.

3. It says that responsible adults expect you to do it. I never want to give any teenager that information. If I promote the so-called “safe sex” message, it is encouraging you to do what is dangerous and what God does not want you to do.

4. If I tell you to use a condom, it gives you the message that it’s a good thing. I hope I’ve shown you that it is not, and terribly dangerous.

5. The fifth danger of recommending condoms is that it breeds promiscuity–sleeping around with anybody.

They are five destructive messages I NEVER want to convey to any young people. “Safe sex” sounds so good, but it is pregnant with a dangerous message.

C. CRY FOUL: “THAT INFORMATION IS OUTDATED”

1. The story hasn’t changed

I can hear the objections: “That’s outdated information. Get with it! Be current!” Before you get over enthused, we need to ask and answer: “What is more recent research saying?” The following “Teen Sex and Pregnancy: Facts and Figures” provide statistics that are just as alarming in the twenty-first century as they were in the late 1980s (Westside Pregnancy Resource Center, 2002a):

In preventing pregnancy, condoms have a standardized failure rate of 15.7 percent over the course of a year. [Jones & Forrest, 1989, p.103.]
For persons under the age of 18 who have used condoms for at least a year, condoms were found to fail 18.4 percent of the time. [MD Hayward and J Yogi, “Contraceptive Failure Rate in the US: Estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth,” Family Perspectives, Vol 18, No. 5, Sept/Oct 1986, p. 204.]
Among sexually active teenage girls aged 12 to 18, 30% contracted an STD over a six month period, including condom users. [LM Dinerman et al, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Med, 149(9):967-72, Sept. 1995.]
For unmarried minorities, the condom failure rate is 36.3 percent, and for unmarried Hispanics, the failure rate is as high as 44.5 percent. [Jones and Forrest, 1989, p. 105.]
Among married couples where one partner was HIV-positive, 17 percent of the uninfected spouses contracted the disease, despite the use of condoms. [Contraceptive Technology, Hatcher et al, 1990, p. 173.] That is a rate greater than one in six. Statistically speaking, the uninfected partners would have been better off playing Russian Roulette.
Only 7 percent of HIV positive persons voluntarily notify their sexual partners. [New England Journal of Medicine, Jan 9, 1992.]

2. Update on Condoms & Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs)

a. Are condoms a safe protection against STDs?

“Latex or polyurethane (plastic) condoms are useful in helping to prevent certain diseases, such as HIV and gonorrhea. However, they are less effective protecting against herpes, trichomoniasis, and chlamydia. Condoms provide almost no protection against HPV, the cause of genital warts and cervical cancer” (Westside Pregnancy Resource Center, 2002b)

b. In particular, are condoms a safe way to prevent contracting HIV & AIDS?

“Although condoms will reduce your chance of infection, compared to having sex without any form of protection, one in three AIDS victims will contract the disease from an infected partner despite 100% use of condoms. One study found that among married couples where one partner was HIV-positive, 17% of the uninfected spouses contracted the disease, despite the use of condoms. The best way to prevent AIDS is abstinence” (Westside Pregnancy Resource Center, 2002b; see also Drew, 1995). c. Testing condoms in Europe

“In Europe, about 2.5 million condoms are bought daily. Until recently, no standard European test for holes existed. Manufacturers and testing laboratories in different countries used different tests, leading to questionable safety of condoms being traded across borders. National testing laboratories from seven European countries, an AIDS charity and a condom manufacturer decided to see which of five tests is best. After extensive testing of nearly 200,000 condoms, they found two accurate and reliable tests which are now included in the European standard for testing condoms for holes.”

In a test of condoms over a 30-month project, the partners went through about 180,000 condoms. The results concluded that “the two test methods in the European standard are in fact the best ones to use.” These are:

(1) A condom filled with water and folled on absorbent paper to pick up wet patches on the paper. This has been used in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.

(2) The second is ” the European electric test. This involves filling the condom with a salt solution that can carry an electric current. The tester dips the filled condom into a bath of salt solution and measures the electrical resistance. If the condom has a hole, the resistance is low as the current is not halted by the insulating condom material. A perfect “hole-free” condom, on the other hand, will show a high resistance as the current cannot be carried through the condom.”

What were the conclusions? “The extensive testing and results confirmed that the two test methods in the European standard are in fact the best ones to use. They are the most effective and reliable” (“Assessment of methods for finding holes in condoms,” 2002).

d. A challenge to the “holes in condoms” data

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in 1992 that:

“While holes large enough for HIV to pass through have been found in natural membrane condoms, latex condoms do not allow the HIV to pass through the condom unless the condom has been damaged or torn. Used properly, latex condoms are effective in reducing the risk of HIV infection” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1992). [as of 6 May 2007, see http://www.righto.com/theories/condoms1.html]

II. REASONS FOR SAYING “NO” TO PREMARITAL SEX

Our society does not want to give you the message: Say, “No,” to premarital sex. Of course, that would be imposing their views on you if they promoted abstinence–and that would be moralistic–that’s what they would say. However, what do you think the “safe sex” message is? Just that! Imposing the view that sex with anybody is okay, as long as the male wears a condom.

I am indebted to Josh McDowell & Dick Day for helping me to understand the many good reasons why you should say “No” to premarital sex. His two books are outstanding: Why Wait?(McDowell & Day, 1987) and How to Help Your Child Say “NO” to Sexual Pressure (McDowell, 1987).

Before I share with you these reasons to abstain from sex until marriage, I must begin by focussing on God’s reasons for the instructions about sex:

A. God’s reasons for the instructions about sex.

We must begin by understanding the character of God.

He is not a killjoy wanting to ruin your fun,
He didn’t make us to enjoy sex and then frustrate us,
God made and designed us,
He knows everything–he is all-knowing,
He loves us so much he sent his Son to die for us. He always has our best interests in mind.
Only god knows what is best for us,
Everything he requires of us is meant only for our best good.

Deuteronomy 10:13, “Observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good.”

Those last four words are critical: for your own good. All of God’s commands to us, all of his requirements for us are not to break us and kill our joy, but they are for our own good. How come? Because he created us, knows what is best for us, and gives us instructions that are for lasting joy and satisfaction.

Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.

James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

God knows and wants the best for us. He knows how your total being works–body, mind and spirit. God knows how human relationships function most fully and joyfully. So when he says that sex belongs in marriage, he is not restricting your fun. He’s showing us the way to enjoy it best. God is not trying to stop us from having a wonderful sex life. He is giving us the positive instruction to have the most wonderful sex life possible.

I have found many Christians ignorant of this perspective. I was ignorant of it for many years and it destroyed my approach to sex in my teens.

If you look on God’s commands–you shall not commit adultery; you will flee sexual immorality, etc. If you view these commands as negative and designed to frustrate your enjoyment, you will miss what God wants for your sexual enjoyment. Remember, these negatives are given for positive reasons.

When my children were young, I warned them: do not touch a hot stove. That was very negative and it looked like I might have been stopping them from having fun. But it is really a positive command. If my Paul had burned himself, it would prevent him from enjoying life for a while.

That’s how it is with God: Whenever he gives a command, there are at least two positive reasons behind it:

(1). He’s trying to protect us from some harm, and

(2). He’s trying to provide something good for us.

Suppose that a hurdler trained hard and sacrificially for four years to prepare for the Olympics. But when he showed up for the race in Barcelona, he found that there were no lanes marked to keep the runners from crashing into each other. What if the hurdles were scattered all over the track and there was no finish line to show the end of the race?

The race would be a dangerous chaos, with runners bumping into each other, cutting one another with their spikes, tripping over each other and the hurdles, and running around in confusion as they figured out how and where the race was to end.

That Olympic race needs to be set up and managed by somebody who knows what he is doing. In the same way, we need someone–the Lord–who knows what he is doing and how this life is to be lived. We need someone to set the boundaries for us. Fortunately, God has done this even before we asked–the instructions are in his Word–the Bible.

Now to some more reasons why you should wait until marriage for the sexual relationship. These are solid reasons why you should say “No” to premarital sex. There are four major areas: physical, spiritual, emotional and relational.

B. Physical reasons

God wants:

1. To protect us from addiction to premarital sex.

Sex is an extremely pleasurable activity–God made it that way. But you can get hooked on it. Illicit sex can become a real addiction causing all kinds of grief and our loving Lord wants to protect us from that.

2. God wants to protect you from the way premarital sex can damage the view you have of yourself.

Premarital sex puts you on a performance basis. That brings insecurity into any relationship. You will become anxious about how you are performing. You know that as soon as your ability to pleasure the other person diminishes, your relationship is in deep trouble.

Debora Phillips, author of Sexual Confidence and the director of the Princeton Center for Behaviour Therapy wrote:

“Due to the instant sex of the sexual revolution, people perform rather than make love

. Many women can’t achieve a sense of intimacy, and their anxiety about how well they perform blocks their chances for honest arousal. Without genuine involvement

, they haven’t much chance of courtship, romance or love. They’re left feeling cheated and burned out” (in McDowell, 1987, p. 129).There’s another physical reason to wait until marriage. We’ve spent a good amount of time on it:

3. God wants to protect you from the threat of sexually transmitted diseases.

In one sexual encounter it is possible to pick up as many as five separate diseases.

If you have sex outside marriage you are at risk. As one researcher put it: “Unless you’re monogamous (married to one person) for a lifetime, with a monogamous partner, you’re at risk. And the more partners you have, the greater the risk” (McDowell, 1987, p. 129).

A fourth physical reason to wait:

4. God wants to protect you from unwanted pregnancy and abortion.

To protect you from the physical reasons it involves, God says: don’t engage in premarital sex. On the positive side, God wants to provide you with the full beauty of sexual oneness in marriage. You will experience the beauty of sex most fully in the security, love and commitment of marriage.

The Lord want you to enter marriage free from the scars of your past life. God knows that the only way for you to experience maximum sex is in marriage. There are many good reasons to wait.

Let’s look at:

C. The spiritual reasons to say “NO” to premarital sex.

1. First, to protect you from sinning against your own body and losing respect for yourself and your body.

I Corinthians 6:18, “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.”

When you engage in premarital sex, there is often a deep loss of respect for your own body and for the body of your partner.

2. God wants to protect you from his righteous judgment.

Hebrews 13:4, “Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”

In I Thess. 4:3-8, God says he will judge sexual immorality. God is holy and will judge those who break his commands.

King David’s sin with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11-12) is a perfect example of this. Out of adultery a child was born, and in judgment God took the son’s life. It was a painful judgment for David.

Remember this: the Lord doesn’t always judge immediately, but it is always sure. Stay pure for God. God doesn’t want you to suffer at the hands of his justice.

There’s a third spiritual reason:

3. God want s to protect you from anything that will tend to break fellowship with him.

There is guilt associated with premarital sex. God is uncomfortable to be around, so you withdraw from your relationship with God.

4. A final spiritual reason to wait: God wants to protect you from being a poor witness to non-Christians because of your sinful sexual activity.

Christian values are different from the world’s. There should be a noticeable difference in our lifestyles. If the Christian young person is sexually active, how will that attract the unsaved to Christ? What will make them see that their lives need to be changed, if you are into illicit sex?

If you abstain from sex now, it is because God wants you to experience greater intimacy later–in marriage. But God is also calling you before marriage to greater intimacy with Himself.

There are emotional reasons why you should say “No” to premarital sex:

D. Emotional reasons to wait

Premarital sex can cause you great emotional stress. God wants to protect you from this. Perhaps the greatest problem is:

1. Guilt

This comes from knowing you have violated God’s standards. As one young person put it: “One of the worst feelings many sexually active people experience is to get up the next morning and realise the person lying next to you is a total stranger. This robs you of the ability to experience the honesty of an intimate relationship. Then there are the flashbacks from past sexual encounters.”

Guilt is real. God doesn’t want your minds and consciences plagued by that kind of guilt.

Another emotional reason to wait is:

2. God wants to protect you from misleading feelings.

Young people who get involved sexually often confuse sex and love. When you confuse sex and love, you will confuse the concepts of giving and taking. Real love always gives and seeks the best interests of the person you love. But in premarital sex, each person is taking for his/her own selfish reasons. The confusion is this: taking can sometimes look like giving.

The third emotional reason:

3. God wants to protect you from the way premarital sex can create in you negative feelings about sex.

emotions of guilt,
resentment over being used,
fear of getting caught,
an unwanted pregnancy,
catching a sexually transmitted disease.

As one young woman put it, “I feel physically used and therefore undesirable. My past mistakes are evident on my body. Who would ever want to marry me? Can I ever freely give my body to a man? Would another man even want my body? Can I have children? Do I have some undetected STD? The past never goes away.” (McDowell, 1987, p. 134)

Immoral sex can make the sexual experience seem dirty and tainted to a young person, causing not only hurt feelings now, but tremendous difficulty later in the sexual part of marriage.

4. God wants to protect you from the difficulty of breaking off a bad relationship when sex is involved.

Sex either does one of two things to a dating relationship. It either ends a good relationship, or it sustains a bad relationship. The bonding that takes place through sexual intercourse, or even heavy petting, causes a person to look unrealistically on the relationship.

It may cause you to . . .

see relationship deeper than it really is,
think you know the other person better than you do.

On the positive side, if you wait for marriage, it . . .

allows maturity to develop,
allows self-control, character and the ability to focus on the relationship to grow.
waiting also shows love for your future mate.
When you say “NO” you are saying: “I value the feelings and respect of my future mate more than the pleasure of the moment.”

E. Relational reasons to wait

1. God wants to protect you from a breakdown in communication.

Spending time in sex takes away from the time that could be spent in getting to know each other more.

2. Sex makes a good courtship difficult because, in addition to reducing communication, it usually comes to dominate a premarital relationship.

So, in the time when the man and woman should be getting to know each other well and developing the social, intellectual and emotional aspects of the relationship, that process is cut short by the lack of communication and focus on the physical.

3. God wants to protect you from the comparison of past sexual partners.

This always plagues those who engage in premarital sex. In my 25 years of counselling youth and families, I have never met a person who has been able to forget former lovers entirely. This plagues them in marriage. Even in the marriage bed, they may be comparing the spouse with a previous partner. This is wrong in and of itself, but it also is cheating your spouse.

The other side of the coin is that if a person knows his or her spouse was sexually active before marriage, he or she also knows comparisons are also going on in the spouse’s mind.

This is unhealthy for marriage. God wants to protect you from it.

Take a read about how the “AIDS/HIV rate was slashed in Uganda after 10 years of True Love Waits .”

III. CONCLUSION

There are many valid reasons for you to say “NO” to premarital sex. God really is acting in love when He commands that sex be enjoyed with in the bonds of marriage.

This is a message of prevention for those who are virgins. God loves you and wants to protect you from entering into the damaging consequences of illicit sex.

On the other hand,I know there may be some here today for whom this message is too late–you have lost your virginity, you are loaded down with guilt, you know what I have been saying is true. What can you do?

This is exactly what I had to do. Run to the cross. You cannot undo what you have done, but you can be forgiven. God will lay down all charges against you if you repent and ask his forgiveness. The biblical message for all Christians who sin is I John 1:9, “If we confess our sin, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

You can be forgiven today. If the Lord has convicted you about sexual sin in your life, respond to him today. But let me remind you of the Scriptures, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his own heart” (Matthew 5:27-28).

Ladies, if you have lusted after a man or had impure sexual thoughts about him, you have sinned against God and need to seek God’s forgiveness and cleansing.

Gentlemen, if you have lusted after a woman, you have committed adultery or sexual immorality in your heart and need to seek God’s forgiveness.

Do it today. Come and seek God, ask for his forgiveness, and he is sure to cleanse every sin (1 John 1:9).

It is wise to have somebody to whom you will be accountable so that he (for males) or she (for females) can ask you at any time for absolutely honest answers to these questions: “Have you been tempted to engage in sex outside of marriage this last week/month?” and “Have you committed acts of sexual immorality this last week/month for which you need to seek God’s forgiveness?”

References:

Arnold, S. G.; Whitman Jr., J. E.; Fox, C. H. & Cottier-Fox, M. H., “Latex Gloves Not Enough to Exclude Viruses,” Nature 335, (September 1, 1988).

“Assessment of methods for finding holes in condoms” (2002). Retrieved on June 3, 2002 from: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/success/en/med/0309e.html.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1992). HIV/AIDS Prevention Training Bulletin, July 1, 1992, retrieved on June 3, 2002, from http://www.safersex.org/condoms/work/ss6.4.html.

“Condom Roulette” (n.d.). In Focus, Family Research Council, 700 Thirteenth St., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC, 20005.

Crenshaw, T. (1987). From remarks made at the National Conference on HIV, Washington DC, November 15-18, 1987.

Dirruba, N. E. (1987), “The Condom Barrier,” American Journal of Nursing, October 1987.

Dixon, P. (1987). The Truth About AIDS. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications.

Dobson, J. (1992). Focus on the Family newsletter, February 13, 1992.

Drew, D. (1995). “Condom ‘safe sex’ theory full of holes,” retrieved on May 26, 2002 from http://dianedew.com/condom.htm (based on an article written for The Covington News, March 16, 1995).

Jones, E. F. and Forrest, J. D. (1989). “Contraceptive Failure in the United States: Revised estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth,” Planned Parenthood, USA: Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 21 No. 3, May/June 1989.

McDowell, J. (1987). How to Help Your Child Say “NO” to Sexual Pressure. Milton Keynes, England: Word Publishing.

McDowell, J. & Day, D. (1987) Why Wait? What You Need to Know About the Teen Sexuality Crisis. San Bernardino, CA:Here’s Life Publishers.

Westside Pregnancy Resource Center (2002a), 12247 Santa Monica Blvd., W. Los Angeles CA 90025, HomePage at: http://www.wprc.org/index.phtml. These statistics on “Teen Sex and Pregnancy: Facts and Figures” were retrieved on May 26, 2002 from: http://www.w-cpc.org/sexuality/teens.html.

Westside Pregnancy Resource Center (2002b). “Birth Control Questions & Answers: Frequently Asked Questions,” retrieved on May 26, 2002, from: http://www.w-cpc.org/sexuality/faqcondoms.html#aids.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Spencer D. Gear. This document is free content. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) version 1.0, or (at your option) any later version. This document last updated at 6 May 2007.

Legendary Jesus’ rot refuted

By Spencer D Gear

October 3, 2007

This is my review for Amazon.com: The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition

I have spent hundreds of hours reading skeptics of the Gospels, particularly John D. Crossan, as I write my doctoral dissertation. Crossan claims that “the last chapters of the gospels and the first chapters of Acts taken literally, factually, and historically trivialize Christianity and brutalize Judaism.”

Others promote that we need to distinguish “the ‘mythical’ (anything legendary or supernatural) in the gospels from the historical.” Speaking of Crossan’s, The Historical Jesus, British scholar, N. T. Wright, claims “the book is almost entirely wrong.”

Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews and G. A. Wells argue that the Jesus tradition is perhaps entirely fictional in nature.

To these and other doubters of Gospel content, Paul Eddy & Greg Boyd, in The Jesus Legend, challenge the Jesus-legend thesis and defend the historical reliability of the Synoptic Jesus tradition – based on evidence.

This is a book for those who want the challenges of the skeptical left addressed in a substantive, scholarly way. The authors examine (1) The historical method & the Jesus tradition in first-century Palestine, (2) Other witnesses, including ancient historians & the apostle Paul, (3) The early oral tradition between Jesus and the Gospels, and (4) The Synoptic Gospels as historical sources for reliable evidence for Jesus.

They reach the researched decision that “our broad cumulative case for the historicity of the essential portrait(s) of Jesus found in the Synoptic Gospels” refutes the legendary-Jesus thesis, based on the Gospels an examination of “the general religious environment Jewish Palestine” (p. 452).

They are in agreement with James Dunn that “if we are unsatisfied with the Jesus of the Synoptic tradition, then we will simply have to lump it; there is no other truly historical or historic Jesus” (cited in p. 453).

This is one of the most refreshing books I have read in my scholarly escapades. It is not for those who want a nice bed-time story, but for those who seek answers to the scholarly rot of recent years that has infected the church and the Christian faith.

Spencer Gear,
Hervey Bay, Qld., Australia [my location has since changed]
This document last updated at Date: 28 October 2015.

A. After death – zip!

1. Is death the dead end?

2. Which way?

3. A more certain word on life beyond the grave

B. Christianity the crutch

1. The Crutch Defined

2. Only the sick need a crutch

3. But the sin-sick need more than a crutch

4. It doesn’t sound or look like a crutch

C. Beat up on the church

Playing by the wrong rules

D. I don’t believe anything any more

1. Civil religion has no power

2. An apologetic against: “Just believe and don’t question”

a. Some reasons to believe

E. The happy wanderer

F. Now what?

G. From the cardiac ward

Endnotes

I read the article, “An Evening with John Shelby Spong,” in the Uniting Church of Queensland’s, Journey magazine, online (28 September 2007). Then, I read the positive letter towards Spong’s Christianity by Noel Preston.

1. Dear editor

2. The pro-Spong letter

3. The edited letter

a. Please note what was edited from my letter

4. A theologian’s critique of Spong

5. Spong’s shoddy Greek knowledge

Wphthe vs. apokalupsa

6. Further objections to the edited letter

7. Conclusion

Works consulted

A. The nature of Spongian religion

1. How is the faith redefined?

2. The characteristics of Spong’s new brand of Christianity

3. The church of tomorrow

B. Spong and evangelicals

C. Emptying or growing churches? Spongian religion has a killer instinct.

Church growth around the world

D. Is Spongian religion the future of the church?

1. Theology does matter

2. Spong’s theology and the Churches of Christ

E. Conclusion

Pray for the Churches of Christ, Victoria, to return to biblical Christianity!

Endnotes:

Notes:

Spong’s version of God

Beginning at the conclusion

Jesus redefined

The church of tomorrow

Is theism dead?

Spong’s dislike of evangelicals

Spong’s religion linked to death

What can we learn from Spong?

Endnotes:

Works consulted

1. Freedom

2. Purpose

3. Genesis 2:24 and sexual bonding

3. My observations as a counsellor

Works consulted

In the early 1990s, I was travelling through Wellington, NSW, Australia (between Orange and Dubbo) on my way from Canberra to Queensland. In the men’s public toilet I read this graffiti:

A. MYTHS AND HALF TRUTHS

B. SEX AND THE WOMAN

C. SEX AND THE MAN

D. IT’S THE POWER OF SEX

E. ISN’T A FAITHFUL SEX RELATIONSHIP OUTSIDE MARRIAGE OK?

F. SEX IN MARRIAGE

G. WHAT ARE GOD’S REASONS FOR INSTRUCTIONS ABOUT SEX?

H. CONNED BY THE CONDOM

I. WHAT WOULD THE PROFESSIONALS SAY?

J. More recent statistics

1. Update on Condoms & Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs)

a. Are condoms a safe protection against STDs?

b. In particular are condoms a save way to prevent contracting HIV/AIDS?

K. CONCLUSION

Do you want sex at its best?

Endnotes:

Australia: The Sexual Assault Capital

Pornography & Sex Crimes: The Link

What a Contrast! South Australia vs Queensland

The No-Harm Porn Delusion

***Wphthe* vs. *apokalupsa***