This weekend I had occasion to browse the theolgy section of a bookstore, and picked up Spong’s The Sins of Scripture. The funnest part of that experience was reading the blurb for it on the back cover from Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News fame, which seemed to me to be just about right.
Inside, Spong reveals to us that the apostle Paul was a deeply repressed homosexual, causing him to lash out in self-loathing the way he was wont to do. This method of reading authors can be quite useful, for I have discovered, upon employing it, that Bishop Spong is a closeted member of Westboro Baptist Church or, at a minimum, wishes he could be carrying one of those “God Hates Fags” signs outside military funerals.
This is what happens when the cancer of liberalism has metastisized. This is what it is like when the surgeon opens the patient up in order to get at the cancer, looks for a moments, and then just sews him back up again.
But cancers can be caught early, if you are willing to say something about that unsightly splotch. Here is one such sploth on the body of N.T. Wright’s work, in which he is talking about the devil and Jesus.
“How the twentieth century may choose to analyze, psychologize, explain, reduce, or otherwise translate such accounts [of Satan tempting Jesus] is no great matter. It may be that, if the mainstream post-Enlightenment worldview is correct, all such language must be seen as evidence of religious neurosis. One might equally well, however, wish to suggest that anyone who conceives of themselves as having a vocation — a common enough human experience — might undergo inner struggles which in many cultures would be readily described in terms of a battle with a hostile power. What we cannot do, in the twentieth or any other century, is to deny that such self-perceptions did, and still do, characterize people of the sort, broadly speaking, that we are discovering Jesus to have been. It should be no surprise to find a description, however stylized and schematized, of such a battle. It might actually be surprising if we did not” (Jesus and the Victory of God, pp. 457-458).
One of the first lessons that a Christian disciple ought to learn is that we don’t get to pat Jesus on the head. The problem is that one of the first lessons they teach you in academically-respectable places is how to be supercilious and patronizing in just this way. This creates tensions for believing scholars. Not to mention unsightly splotches.