Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Spong'ed – The Revised Non-Standard Version of Noah & The Ark

Most of last week I paused in reading Why Christianity Must Change or Die to write the blogs I posted Saturday and Sunday. I really thought nothing could beat the, “Where did he find that in the Bible?” straw man argument that was the topic of Saturday's post. Little did I expect what awaited me in the very next paragraph!

Noah's Ark” has to be one of the all-time iconic Sunday School stories! It combines Noah's years-long obedience to God, God's command over nature and God's judgment against wickedness – much more than just cutesie pictures of animals walking into a gigantic boat! John Shelby Spong's version of the story (chapter 3, “In Search of God”, page 50) is, to say the least, bizarrely fanciful. And though he represents it as how the Bible tells the story, I doubt many Sunday-Schoolers will recognize it as he tells it. Without further ado:

God was a great warrior, it was said, and occasionally the wrath of this warrior deity turned against human life. The great flood was interpreted as one such incidence of God's warfare against sinful creation. When the rains ceased and the floodwaters began to recede, the scriptures suggested that what had actually occurred was that God had laid aside his weapon of war. In that era where the bow, together with its projectiles called arrows, was the primary weapon with which to attack an enemy at some distance, God, the distant heavenly warrior, was said to have laid the divine bow aside. Since God was conceived of as a Being of enormous size, this divine bow had to be large enough to cover the heavens. Since God was magnificent in splendor beyond human imagining, this bow had to include all of the brilliant colors of the spectrum. So when God laid down the divine weapon and ended the warfare designed to punish the sinfulness of humankind, the sign was the divine bow, called the rainbow, that covered the sky. It was an ingenious interpretation, and it lasted until scientists figured out how rain reflects and refracts the rays of the sun into the colors present in a beam of light.

I urge anyone even slightly so inclined to read Genesis chapters 6-9, the entire story of Noah and the flood. Spongs' fanciful version of the story – which he attributes to scripture – is almost at complete variance with the account in scripture! Genesis has: no warrior god; no warfare against “sinful creation”; no divine bow and arrows. The arrows strangely disappear from Spong's fantasy of the divine bow being laid down and becoming the rainbow … maybe Spong's god ran out of arrows?

I'm left wondering … where in the world did Spong get this nonsense version of the Noah story? As weird as his version of it is – it, at most, slightly resembles the account of scripture – more important is the reason he cites it. He claims the Noah story, his version of it, is evidence that man created god in man's own image. His “evidence” is bogus. I cannot imagine Spong not ever having read Genesis 6-9 and thereby knowing his version is bogus. So again, Spong has … LIED. Any 10-year-old who has attended a theologically conservative church for more than a couple of years would instantly recognize Spong's version of the Noah story as utterly false! So it again appears that Spong's intended readers are people who have little knowledge of the scriptures. And he is taking advantage of such persons' lack of knowledge and their trust that he would not knowingly deceive them!

Deceptions like this have me wondering what point there is in my continuing to read Why Christianity Must Change or Die!

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