Debate: Is Homosexuality Compatible with Christianity? (White vs Spong)

the following presentation is a production of Alpha and Omega Ministries Incorporated and is protected by copyright laws of the United States and its International treaties copying or distribution of this production without the expressed written permission of Alpha and Omega Ministries Incorporated is prohibited here tonight this of course is the seventh debate that we've actually done in this area and in Seattle last year it's a pleasure to have you here this year let me explain to you what our objective is and has been for the last few years our objective is to have theological scholarly debate and that between the two best participants or representatives from opposing or polemic sides we hope that when we while we engage in this though that of course everything will be done from that manner with that we understand that there are a number of people here that are both from a reformed Christian perspective as well as a progressive Christian perspective all at the same time we still ask that you behave as Christians during this debate you have come in and you have paid to hear both Dr White debate and Dr Spong or Bishop Spong to debate and I would hope you would allow them to do the debating tonight so with that being said it is my pleasure to thank you uh to to welcome you here tonight and to enjoy the next three hours with you let me introduce first of all our participants on my left and your right I have the director of Alpha Omega Ministries it's a Christian apologetics Ministry based in Phoenix Arizona professor having taught Greek Systematic Theology various topics in a field of apologetics he was the um he is the author and he is authored and contributed to more than 20 books including the King James only controversy the Forgotten Trinity The Potter's Freedom The God Who justifies in the same-sex controversy would you please welcome with me Dr James White on my right and your left I have the retired Bishop The Episcopal Diocese of Newark as the author of 14 books he's the most published member of the House of Bishops of the Episcopalian Church of the United States his bestsellers include rescuing rescuing the Bible Bible from fundamentalism why Christianity must change or die and his latest release the sins of scripture would you please welcome with me Bishop John Shelby spawn I would also like to take the time to State my thanks as many of you know there was supposed to be a debate a couple weeks ago both Bishop Spong and his lovely wife Christine have been more than enjoyable and friendly and Christian in their attitude to work with in order to arrange this debate so I do thank them for doing that and being so easy to work with wouldn't it be great if all Christians could act and behave that way well let's talk about the format of this evening's debate first of all tonight we will have 25-minute opening statements from either side we will then take a very brief break okay then we will come back we will have 20 minute rebuttals to either size sides another quick five minute break then we will have a series and I'm going to make this 15 minute affirmative cross-examination negative cross-examination going back and forth there's four of those okay so that's a total of one hour okay and then at the end we will have 15-minute closing statements now at that time folks we will open it up for some audience questions let me explain to you about how this will work for audience questions first of all uh when you do ask a question please ask your question directly to the person uh that you need to ask the question to just just don't make it a roundabout question so if it is for Dr White please state that it is uh for him it's for Bishop Spong please state it as that being the case if you would like to ask a question for Bishop Spong there is a large flower right over here on the floor and I'd like you to stand right in the middle of the diamond and make a line back if you have a question for for Bishop Spong if you have a question for Dr White on this side over here and trailing back and I will be in the middle and call each of you this way now once again you are to ask a question please do not engage in debate these gentlemen are here to debate your your objective is just to ask the question and ask and want or expect them to answer it for you okay but after you ask that first question please go back to your seat and allow them to answer the question if also please no long rhetorical questions keep it brief if possible under 30 seconds if you're going on too long or if you want to tell us about your life story I will cut you off just to let you know that may also state that there will be a special Blessing by both of the men up here at the at the um at the Forefront of the stage if anyone would like to get me some Starbucks Coffee by the end of the night uh and so with that folks if we could just observe a moment of silence amen and thank you well let me first introduce uh tonight in the the subject and the thesis of tonight's debate is is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical Christianity and representing the affirmative side Bishop John Shelby spawn thank you very much and thank you for being here I know that I'm delighted to be here and I'd like to say that I appreciate very much the amazing Hospitality that The Sovereign cruises group has supplied I must have delighted they want to debate this issue because by and large in Christian circles this issue is either shouted about or ignored it's never just debated I'm also pleased to share the stage this evening with Dr White I'd like to begin by finding out something about my audience how many of you from Florida raise your hands how many of you are not from Florida 30 60. so maybe 30 70 I guess got to add up to be a hundred and how many of you came here tonight because you were sure that you would agree with everything I said raise your hands and how many of you are here tonight because you're sure you would disagree with almost everything I said raise your hands I always wanted to know how Daniel felt before he went into the lion's den My Hope tonight is a very simple one and I believe Dr White shares that hope namely that only the truth will be spoken and only the truth will be served I want to begin with an autobiographical word I was raised in a Bible quoting fundamentalist Evangelical Episcopal Church in Charlotte North Carolina my mother died a Fundamentalist I was taught to honor and respect the Sacred Scriptures from the earliest moment of my existence I still do but I was also taught to read those scriptures to read them regularly carefully and fervently I suspect I've been through the entire Bible word for word at least 25 times I was taught to interact with those scriptures so that they might inform my life with its expanding knowledge and engage my world as it constantly changed that's really not easy many Believers are told that they should not view the Bible critically or with scholarly insight there's actually a time before the Protestant Reformation when people were not even allowed to read the Bible for themselves indeed there was a time when it was a crime to translate the Bible into a language that people could actually understand in the 15th century an Englishman named William Tyndall was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English the fascinating fact of history is that about 80 percent of William tyndall's translation was incorporated into the version of the Bible that you and I know as the King James version but if you read study and know the Bible and also live in a changing world the way you read and understand the Bible will also change let me illustrate that in my Evangelical Church in Charlotte North Carolina I was taught that segregation was the will of God and the Bible was regularly quoted to justify that prejudice my church also taught me that women were inferior to men that was God's design and the Bible was regularly quoted to justify it my church taught me that it was okay to look down on and even to hate other religious traditions since in North Carolina we didn't know a great deal about the religions of the world we'd never met a Buddhist or a Hindu we mostly spend our energy hating Jews we call them Christ killers they were rather conveniently present I can remember that most of my prejudice against Jews was taught to me in Sunday school not always overtly but covertly for example I never met a good Jew in my Sunday school material every time the phrase the Jews was used it was a majority of hostile phrase the people who bore Jewish names were Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and Judas Iscariot and no good words whoever said about them whenever I saw pictures of these Pharisees or Judas iscaria they were always portrayed as dark and sultry ominous figures the fascinating thing is that in my Sunday school no one ever told me that Jesus was a Jew and when I looked at pictures of Jesus he didn't look like a Jew to me I thought he was a Swede he was blonde and blue-eyed and fair-skinned it's interesting that even our prejudice covered the image we had of this Jesus figure so that we could not see him as he really was in history now strangely enough my church did not teach me much about homosexuality indeed it didn't teach me anything about it I cannot even recall hearing the word homosexual mentioned until I was 18 years old we just didn't have homosexuals in the south or at least we didn't allow them to be visible and when I did learn that there was such a thing as homosexuality I without any criticism accepted my church's definition and my culture's definition and that was twofold if you were a sort of liberal kind-spirited person you thought of homosexuality as a sickness something which one could not really help so they could should be cured if possible and if it were not possible they should be pitied it was at least kind but if you were a conservative or a more hard-line person homosexuality was regarded as an expression of moral depravity we even called it a lifestyle deliberately chosen by evil or morally depraved people and conversion was the prescription for this diagnosis and if conversion did not work then attempts at repression even persecution were Justified sometimes persecution reached the point of murder as Matthew Shepard from Wyoming can attest and of course the Bible was quoted to justify this prejudice the texts are all far too familiar to me today the Sodom and Gomorrah story in Genesis the two texts in The Book of Leviticus Romans 1 and some other scattered verses in the Pauline and pseudo Pauline Corpus and finally a couple of weird references one in Jude and one in second Peter it makes nine in all As I Grew and as my knowledge demanded that I engage these prejudices and we're also that were so deeply planted in My Heart by my church undergirded by my Bible that I had to challenge the way the Bible was read in order to rid myself of these debilitating prejudices not only how the Bible was read but how the Bible was interpreted sometimes I even had to challenge the accuracy of the Bible itself let me take you through that if I can for just a moment my church in North Carolina there is a sense in which my life was a struggle to rid itself of these debilitating negativities Prejudice hurts your victim Prejudice also hurts the prejudiced one because it diminishes your Humanity no human being can ever treat another human being as less than fully human without diminishing their own Humanity it was my black friends and the civil rights movement that enabled me to challenge my racism and I am pleased about two things at one point in my life in Tarboro North Carolina I had the distinct honor of being named Public Enemy Number One by the Ku Klux Klan I'd like it on my tombstone the other thing that pleases me so much today is that in my church the Episcopal Church in North Carolina we have only one Bishop today elected by our people and that Bishop happens to be an African-American taught us that forced me to deal with my sexism daughters will do that to you I remember telling one of the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church that the only way the Roman Catholic Church will ever address the problem it has with women is for its priests to have daughters the Cardinal told me that it would be a long time or a cold day you know where before that might happen the daughters have a way of calling you to look at Humanity quite differently and they challenged my sexism my four daughters are today a managing director of a company called invest Trustco which is the holy on subsidiary of an Orlando Bank named SunTrust my second daughter is a lawyer who teaches in the law school at the University of Virginia of Richmond my third daughter has a PhD in physics from Stanford University and is in the high tech industry my fourth daughter is a captain in the United States Marine Corps she's a helicopter pilot and she has completed three tours of Duty in the Iraq War now folks you don't raise daughters like this and quote the Bible where Paul says I forbid a woman to have authority over a man and expect to get away with it today I am pleased that 40 percent of my church's clergy are female and I am particularly pleased that my church just this past summer elected a woman Bishop to be the head of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America my prejudice is against other religions died when I had the privilege of doing dialogues first with a rabbi in Richmond then with a Buddhist Mark in China and then with three Hindu scholars in katyam in India and also when I invited an leading Islamic scholar in 1991 to lead my clergy conference so that he could teach our clergy about Islam something they knew almost nothing about out of each of these Faith traditions I found my own deeply Christian faith strengthened enormously expanded I even found that Judaism my study of Judaism changed the way that I study and understand the Bible for it is a deeply deeply Jewish book now my prejudice against homosexuality was challenged first by meeting whole loving people who were gay or lesbian who didn't fit my stereotype they weren't mentally sick they weren't morally depraved and it was the relationship that I had with them that finally forced me to challenge my deeply held homophobia and when I finally made sure that that's what something I needed to do I contacted some doctors in the Cornell School of Medicine in New York City and I worked with them for about six months reading every report that they had for me to read and talking with them constantly and was in that process that I became convinced that homosexuality is not a choice it is not evil I don't even think it is unnatural since it certainly is present in the world of nature I think of homosexuality as only one more minority in the vast Spectrum of our human experience but so are red-headed people so are freckle-faced people so indeed are obese people they're only a minority and that each of those minorities at some point begins to be made to feel different I learned at Cornell that the overwhelming number of scientists and doctors are now convinced that people do not choose their sexual orientation they only awaken to it that was certainly true of me I didn't choose to be heterosexual I just woke up one day when I was 12 or 13. and suddenly girls did not seem obnoxious to me any longer and so I began to do weird things like take baths more frequently dress better comb my hair even use deodorant never done that before I was 12 or 13. I wanted to do anything to make girls feel more comfortable around me I didn't make a decision and I don't believe that there's any gay lad whoever woke up one day and sat on the side of his bed and said oh I'll decide to be gay I really like to be disowned by my family and beat up by my friends condemned by my church and run out of town fired from my job and all the other things we've done to gay and lesbian people you don't choose your sexual orientation you awaken to it so it's in the same category with gender with being left-handed or right-handed I also learned that homosexuals can in the minds of these doctors and scientists neither be created by any external event nor can they be cured by religious Hysteria and that only suggests that most of us don't know what we're dealing with when people act as if they can cure homosexual people they're either badly misinformed in my opinion or they are seeking to practice medicine without a license for which they ought to be charged with criminal Behavior another thing I learned is the percentage of homosexual people tends to be the same in every part of the human population at every place at every time in every culture among all people it can neither be created by having the culture accept it nor can it be diminished by having the culture oppress it it might appear so because in an accepting culture they will come out of the closet in a repressive culture they will stay deeply deeply hidden I also learned in these Cornell doctors were actually doing experiments with white mice to demonstrate it that homosexuality is a fact in the world of mammals in the world of nature where no one seems to think they have the ability to choose I Rejoice that when I retired as Bishop of Newark in the year 2000. that I had 35 open Out of the Closet gay and lesbian clergy serving congregations in New Jersey 31 of them lived openly with their partners I never had a complaint about the sexual behavior of any of my gay or lesbian clergy I cannot say that about my heterosexual clergy I also am pleased that three years after my retirement my church elected confirmed and ordained an openly homosexual man living in a partnered relationship of at least 14 years duration when he was elected Bishop to be the bishop of New Hampshire to me that was one more sign that we had moved past another barrier I also had to accept the fact that the Bible is no more competent to make judgments about homosexuality than it was when it declared that menstruation in women was something that demanded Rejection it made them unclean that epileptic people were really demon-possessed the deaf mutes were those who had had their tongues Tied by the devil those were attitudes in a world that we know better about today but they are deeply part of the Bible's understanding what the Bible does teach me however and by this I have to live and that is that all people are holy that all people are made in God's image whether they are like me or not is relatively unimportant that all people are loved that to me is the essence of the Christ story that's what Jesus means no matter who you are no matter what you do you are loved by this gracious loving savior and the Bible teaches me that all people are called to be not what I want them to me or my Society ask them to be but all that they most deeply are in the full Integrity of their own very specific Humanity what it means to me to live in the life of the spirit is that you have the courage to become all that God intended you to be and so the battle about homosexuality in the life of the church is for me finally a battle between the love of God and human prejudice nothing nothing other and I have no doubt as to which of those will win in the long run thank you very much Dr White now has 25 minutes for his opening statements well thank you very much for being here this evening it is an honor to get to address you on a very important subject a subject that causes us this evening to look at the most basic levels of what we believe about what is right and what is wrong and how we can know what is right and what is wrong the thesis statement this evening asks us is homosexuality compatible with authentic biblical Christianity that of course asks us to answer the question what is biblical Christianity words have meanings Christianity has the right over its history to self-definition there are certain fundamental aspects concerning the Christian faith that simply cannot be sacrificed they cannot be compromised and it still be the Christian faith if I were to dress as a Islamic Imam and I were to say I am Progressive Islam and yet deny that there is only one true God Allah deny that Muhammad was his prophet and deny that Quran is the word of God I could not honestly expect any Muslim to accept my profession to be a Muslim there are certain definitional aspects of what it means to be a Muslim involved in that type of terminology and language in the same way Christianity has certain basic fundamentals that Define what Christianity is and set it apart from any other religious faith without the ability to make that kind of definition then we all just have one religion faith that really doesn't have any way of communicating anything special about itself so for Christianity we begin with the fact that Christianity is monotheistic there is only one true God but the confession of Christians has always been that God is personal God is a person he is the creator of all things and because he is personal and the creator of all things he is capable of communicating with his creation we believe that God is Triune Father Son and Holy Spirit and as a result of this when we talk about man we can say that man is his creature created in the image of God there is something about man that corresponds to God in his ability to worship God and in fact to communicate with God man's ability to be communicative between ourselves between ourselves and God is reflective of the Imago Dei that is the image of God itself now God but as the creator has a purpose in creating all of creation the scriptures tell us exists to glorify him Christianity then is theocentric it is centered upon God and His purposes it is not anthropocentric and centered upon the creature man man is very important of course man is the one being redeemed through the Savior Jesus Christ but the the the world misses the whole point of scripture when it focuses solely upon man as the central element rather upon God himself the scriptures tell us that God has revealed himself in creation he has written his law upon the hearts of men and women so that their conscience is not merely some cultural construct but is a part of God's own witness to himself it is a part of that image that he has indelibly stamped upon us the more we learn of science as long as we do not suppress the knowledge of God reveals Evermore the glory of God in college I was Department fellow anatomy and physiology in my senior year my emphasis was a study of genetics and I was just amazed at the beauty for example of the DNA molecule the transcriptional complex mRNA and TRNA and the ribosomal complex that is involved in reading and transcribing this tremendously complex mechanism that simply defies the idea that this simply came about by some random Chance some developments from some primordial soup but God has not created us to be communicative with each other while remaining silent himself Christians have always believed in God's word in God's revelation inscripturated in the scriptures themselves his ultimate revelation of course is the Incarnation where the Eternal second person of the Trinity the Divine son entered into his own Creation in the person of Jesus Christ as radical as that claim is there is no Christianity without a claim that God has entered into his own Creation in the person of Jesus Christ now there is no question in my mind and I don't think there can be any question in this debate really that every writer of the gospels was United in recording for us Jesus's High view of scripture itself if believing the Bible is God's word is wrong then there is no question of this Jesus believed it and if we follow him we will believe it as well while the scriptures the Old and New Testaments were written over long periods of time in different languages and different contexts surely no one will argue that a god with such power as to create this glorious creation cannot do as Peter said referring to scripture as men spoke from God as they were carried Along by the holy spirit this is the universal testimony of the writers of scripture and of Christians down to the centuries the idea that God revealed himself in scripture is not new and it is simply definitional of the Christian faith so the question tonight is fairly easily answered there is no question to any unbiased reader of the scriptures who does not come to the text with a presupposition of rejecting their consistency rejecting their author and rejecting their authority of what they teach regarding the proper expression of god-given sexual desire but before I look at the negative text let me start with something positive in Matthew chapter 19 we read some Pharisees came to Jesus testing him and asking is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all and he answered and said have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh so they are no longer two but one flesh what therefore God has joined together let no man separate they said to him why then did Moses give to her a certificate of divorce and send her away he said to them because the hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives but from the beginning it has not been this way now please note that according to the Lord Jesus the male and female roles are creational they are purposeful on God's part they are not simply random results of an evolutionary process notice as well the family unit from which the man comes and the woman comes is a mother and a father you have the god-ordained union of male and female becoming one flesh there is a mutuality there is a re reciprocity that exists between the male and the female that does not exist between a male and a male and a female and a female a male and a male and a female and female is a mirror image not a mutuality that Union then is impossible between male and male and female and female those together are never one flesh but always two likewise the Apostle Paul exalted marriage by likening it to the love Christ has for his church the bridegroom for the bride and commanded men in a radical way in the culture in which he was in commanded men to love their wives and give their lives for them when writing to the church at Ephesus from the beginning God protected marriage in his law the departure is even seen in men like David and Solomon were a step down from God's ideal reveal revealed in his law as Jesus himself explained and so often the discussion of this particular subject focuses only upon a few passages such as some of those that Bishop Spong mentioned but in reality there is a tremendous positive body of teaching in the scriptures regarding the nature of marriage that cannot be applied to any other kind of sexual relationship and so it is not just a couple of texts it is the United testimony of the entirety of the written word of God now in the Old Testament Leviticus chapters 18 19 20 presents What's called the Holiness code where in both ceremonial and moral laws are given to God's people to protect them from the practices of the inhabitants of the land into which God was bringing them this is the same section by the way from which Jesus quotes you shall love your neighbor as yourself and it likewise contains the prohibition of such evils as bestiality incest and rape the fact that it contains abiding moral law is unquestionable and clearly the Lord Jesus inciting from this text repeatedly in light of his own teaching that not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law until all things are fulfilled believed it's moral imperatives had remained intact until his day and would remain normative for anyone who would seriously consider being his disciple in this context we read these words Leviticus 18 22 you shall not lie with a male as one lie is the female it is an Abomination I want to give you just a section of the Greek translation of that why the Greek Septuagint was the translation of the Hebrew scripture is used in the New Testament and in that text in Leviticus 18 22 we have Chi meta arsenas ukoi Mei they say quaitan gunai hear those two terms arsenas male and koiteng bed to lie with keep that in mind just just remember those as we look at Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13. if there is a male who lies the male as those who lie with a woman both of them have committed a detestable act they shall surely be put to death their blood gildiness is upon them once again note the Greek translation meta arsenas coitain arsenas koiteng keep those in mind because there's a reason for that you see the New Testament in two places uses a term that is really quite easily understood if one realizes that the one using the term in this case the Apostle Paul taught the Gentile Christians using the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures they couldn't read Hebrew and so when he's writing the Ephesians of the Corinthians or whatever they're going to be reading Greek and so he's going to use the Greek Septuagint he even quotes from the Greek substant where it differs from the Hebrew at times and in First Corinthians chapter 6 verses 9 through 11 we read these words or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God do not be seed be deceived neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor effeminate nor homosexuals nor thieves nor the Covetous nor drunkards nor revilers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God such were some of you but you were washed but you were Sanctified but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of our God now in that list you have effeminate and homosexuals in Greek Utah now that term arsenicoita and the plural there arsenicoites in the singular is the term that entire chapters of books have been dedicated to all to try to promote the idea that we don't know what it means John Boswell wrote a huge work on the subject of homosexuality everybody else just basically quotes him these days and puts their own spin on things and amazingly enough in in in scholarly Works where in every other situation you would automatically go back to the Greek Septuagint to look at the background of Paul's writings and look at what the sources are especially since this is a term that is not used before Paul in this one instance all of a sudden their scholarship falters and they don't bother to look at the fact that they're in Leviticus 20 you have arsenas you have quotaine and here Paul has put them together in one word meaning homosexual men who lie with men no end of effort has been made to try to obscure the meanings of these words but it is here where honest non-political scholarship is seen in distinction from dishonest politically motivated scholarship the two terms effeminate and homosexual refer to the active and passive Partners in homosexual sex aristana koitai comes from Paul's teaching from the Septuagint in Leviticus 18 especially Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13 and he says such were were past tense some of you now this is consistent with Paul's argument in opening the book of Romans where we read these words for the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness please note they have the truth but they are suppressing it because that which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them for since the creation of the world his invisible attributes his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood to what has been made so that they are without excuse without an apologetic from the original tongue for even though they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of The Incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptable man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be Dishonored among them for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever amen now let me stop right there we have a coherent argument we have an argument that says that God has revealed himself in creation internally and externally and that men when they sin against his Revelation do so willfully without an excuse and without an apologetic they are suppressing katakan tone holding down the truth of God that is within them and as a result there is a twistedness that enters into the creation they exchange the truth of God for a lie they exchange what should be a gift and an honorable possession for a lie there is a twistedness in the creation the argument is very clear you may agree or disagree with it but there is no reason to avoid what the elements of the argument are up to this point it's very clear but he continues verse 26 for this reason God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burn in their desire toward one another men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error and just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper being filled with all unrighteousness wickedness greed evil full of Envy murder Strife deceit and Malice they are gossips slanderers haters of God insolent arrogant boastful and vendors of evil disobedient to Parents Without understanding untrustworthy unloving and unmerciful and note the last verse and although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things what are such things everything that came before everything that came before and although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death they not only do the same but also give hearty approval to those who practice them now clearly to isolate the condemnation of both male and female homosexuality contained in this section and dismiss it as the rantings of repressed homosexual is to completely and totally miss the entirety of the point of the passage suppression of Truth brings a twisting of the Creator creation distinction homosexuality is a judgment wherein God gives over those who have already shown a rejection of his right to Define their behavior and existence to the expression of their Rebellion that is clearly Paul's teaching may I note something to you this is the beginning of what we might call the bad news when Paul writes to the church at Rome he presents to us the entirety of his gospel and he starts with two and a half chapters of bad news before he ever gets to the good news and when we skip the bad news the good news becomes an empty cure because we don't understand why it is that God has to go to such lengths to make people right with him Romans Chapter 2 more bad news Romans chapter 3 through verse 19 and only then only after he's established the need of man for Redemption and salvation forgiveness of sin for all of those sins including gossips people who are dishonest disobedient to parents what a laughable thing in our society today everybody's Disobedience to their parents right in that in that the case no it's not a laughable thing not in God's sight especially when those parents represent God's Authority within one's life it's not a laughable thing no matter what our society decays the point of calling it that bad news must be understood and God's Wrath against that bad news must be understood before what he has done in Jesus Christ can be understood from the Christian scriptures but there's also other good news I had to pass over it fairly quickly but I would like to emphasize what was said by the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians remember he went through a list he said do not be deceived that means there was a danger that people could be deceived they could they could actually be taught that you can be right with God but have no concern about how he's revealed his law as to how you are to live you could be deceived into thinking that all you have to do is tip your hat toward God and and he's just going to accept anyone which of course would mean that the cross and the entirety of the Incarnation in fact the entire message of the Bible would have no meaning whatsoever and he said don't be deceived these individuals will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven is that because God's a big mean ogre no it's because God is doing something in this world according to Titus Chapter 2 God is redeeming A peculiar people in Christ Jesus he is redeeming them from their sins and they are zealous for Good Deeds he's making a people who like the Lord Jesus honor his law and honor his truth God is doing something he changes people's hearts he takes out a Heart of Stone and gives us a heart of Flesh why would he have to do that if there truly isn't any depravity within man and so he tells the Corinthians don't be deceived if you continue in these Lifestyles and there was a number of things listed there not just homosexuality but it is there there's no question of that there's all sorts of other areas there mentioned if you continue in these things you will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven but then what does he say to them verse 13 of chapter 6. such were some of you but you were washed but you were Sanctified but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God such were some of you every single one of those sins mentioned by the Apostle Paul every single one of them was represented within the congregation the church at Corinth but those who heard the gospel message turned from those things and turned to Christ they did not remain in those things and demand that Christ adopt their attitude they did not say I refuse to accept God's standard but I want God's blessing no they did not do that in Repentance they turned from their old ways and they were washed they were Sanctified they were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the spirit of our God the reason that we need to have this discussion this evening the reason we need to have this debate this evening is because there is a movement in our land that tells us that people have the right to redefine Christianity people have the right to say I will not accept the universal Judgment of all of scripture and of the history of the church in regards to what is and what is not an Abomination before God and I will remain in this Behavior and I will demand to have the rights of a Christian that would be like having a a a movement for Covetous Christians I'm a Covetous Christian I was just made this way I just love everything that everybody else has and if I don't have it I want it and that's just the way God Made Me and you just need to accept me the way I am or fornicating Christians adulterous Christians hateful Christians whatever it might be I refuse to accept what the word of God says defining what is Holiness and what is not we need to understand something if we accept this kind of perspective we are saying that Jesus Christ died for nothing if there is no sin if there is no penalty for sin if there is no Redemption if there is no substitutionary atonement then Christ died needlessly there is a beautiful call of Grace the gospel of grace is to be preached to every man and every woman no matter what their experience but Grace is for those who are repentant Grace is for those who agree with God Grace is for those who are willing to allow God to be God and me to be his creature under his authority for the one who is repentant Grace is all sufficient and beautiful and every believer who sits in this place this evening can testify to God's Amazing Grace and how it has changed our lives thank you very much thank you Dr White we will now take we will now take a quick three-minute break you have three minutes okay we are going to be starting with Bishop for his 20-minute rebuttal period thank you very much I'm really not interested in rebutting I don't believe rebutting another person's opinion makes a lot of sense my understanding is that all of us are creatures of our time of our upbringing of our inherited values we move out of our inherited values and out of our time only when we can no longer interpret life adequately within that frame of reference and most people's opinions are part of their security system so when you challenge an opinion you challenge the very being of that person's life however I do need to take note of a comment made by Senator Daniel Moynihan of New York before he died everyone he said is welcome to their own opinions no one however is welcome to their own facts now when facts are in dispute there is a way to determine what is true and what is not and that is to submit those facts to a body of experts and to have them go into them that's the way it is in every academic subject challenge debate go into the facts and finally determine what the facts are this means that you have to submit your ideas to reputable authorities in the subject in a public dialogue it's almost impossible to do and so discussion sometimes turn into shouting matches in various authorities are cited to uphold one or another opinion and in that process I do not believe any minds are enlightened or any hearts are warmed an audience does not know how to evaluate the quoted authorities they do not even know how to evaluate the credentials of the authorities that are quoted I'd like to tell you that doctoral degrees are a dime a dozen I have six of them I don't know that I earned any of them they just is not a criteria for being a master in the subject there are people who are quite authoritative with learned degrees who still support the Flat Earth theory they're people who still think that the battle over Evolution has not been fought and won it's over so let me just file by title the places where my perception of the facts will differ from Dr White's perception of the facts I venerate the Bible I study it every day of my life but I do not understand the Bible as somehow the inerrant revelation of God perhaps I know too much about the Bible for that the Bible was quoted in 1215 to defend the divine right of kings and to oppose the Magna Carta the Bible lost if I was quoted in the 17th century to condemn Galileo and to prove that the Earth was the center of a three-tiered universe the Bible lost the Bible is quoted to justify slavery and when slavery died to justify segregation and apartheid and the Bible lost the Bible is Justified to was quoted to justify the second-class citizenship of women we didn't allow women to vote in this country until 1920. we didn't allow women to serve in the cabinet of the United president United States until 1932 no woman served on the Supreme Court until Ronald Reagan appointed someone during his term of office no woman has yet been elected president or vice president of the United States though they have run for both offices so to treat the Bible as if it is a a book that can govern behavior for all time is to treat the Bible in an improper way and that parts of the Bible that a glory I don't believe in genocide I don't think you believe in genocide but the prophet Samuel says to King Saul in the name of the in the name of God you ought to go out and kill every man woman child suckling oxen asks among the amalekites is that not what genocide is I'm not drawn to the picture of a God who is so angry with the world that he drowns everybody in the great flood if I were an Egyptian I would not be drawn to the God who puts plague after plague after plague upon the Egyptians even drowning them in the Red Sea and being portrayed as as rejoicing on the other side surely the Egyptians are also the children of God so there's a very big difference in the way we read the scriptures I would also disagree with the opinion of Dr White the Christianity is set in some sort of firm way the doctrine of the Trinity is a fourth Century Doctrine I don't think Paul understood anything about that the Christian faith is an evolving faith not because God is evolving but because our understanding of God is evolving the Bible I know was written over a period of about a thousand years the earliest part of the Old Testament is dated around a thousand BC the latest part of the New Testament is dated around 135 A.D that's two to three thousand years ago now those authors were relating oral tradition that had gone on for much longer most Scholars today think that Abraham lived about 1850 before the Common Era but the stories about Abraham are not written until the 10th Century before the Common Era so everything we know about Abraham filtered through Word of Mouth oral transmission for 900 years you suppose it was not changed I suppose it didn't reflect different attitudes prejudices lacks of understanding Moses lived around 1250 before the Common Era it was about 300 years later that the books that we call the Books of Moses were actually written and even when you come to our Lord most Scholars would agree that he came to the end of his Nursery life around 30 of this Common Era but the gospels about him were written between 70 and 100 of this Common Era 40 to 70 years later written in a language that Jesus didn't speak we don't have any of the original copies and remember they were all hand copied until you get about the fourth Century we have some fragments that are earlier than that but no full books so every book of the Bible was was hand copied any number of times you suppose the scribes always got it right I don't know but there's some even the translations differ very very widely even the heart of the story God deeply affirm that how in some way in the life of Jesus of Nazareth we confronted the presence of the holy God that's the heart of the Christian faith but if you go back and look at the Bible the Gospels the Pauline Corpus you'll discover that the way they explained how that holy God got into Jesus differs in a wide variety of ways what we call the Christian Creeds weren't written until the fourth Century most people didn't know that until they read The Da Vinci Code they learned a lot of things in The Da Vinci Code half of them wrong but they learned them anyway perhaps the most important thing that I think we need to look at is that our understanding of the origins of human life is dramatically different today from the view of the biblical myth the biblical story says that God created human life perfect in God's image and then human life corrupted the Perfection of God's world by disobedience and we broke the Wonder and beauty of God's creation we were destined to live in Eden but because of our sinfulness we now have to live East of Eden yearning always to get back but unable to get back because that myth says an angel with a with a sword guards the door you cannot go home and so we've explained human Evil by the Fall and we've said that human life is so desperately lost wretched abominable without Redeeming Grace that only God could finally rescue us and we tell the story of Jesus in terms of God's rescue operation but what do you do with that when you live on the other side of Charles Darwin and Charles Darwin says there never was a time we were created perfect and you can hardly fall into sin if you don't start out perfect that what we have been doing is evolving into higher and higher consciousness that mean there's no sin of course not human beings are capable of the grossest sins this is sin because there's something corrupt about our nature or is the sin because we are evolving creatures dedicated to our own Survival and therefore radically self-centered and so we're always trying to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down and it's the cure for that to be rescued or is the cure for that to be loved into the power of being so deeply and fully human that you can give your life away in love for another person is Jesus The Rescuer of the Fallen or is Jesus the call of God and the empowerment of God to love us into being all that God meant for us to be I submit that those are very different ways to look at the Christ story and I'm quite happy to have those ways compete with one another and finally I would say that if authentic Christianity demands believing that the Bible is somehow inerrant or infallible then the great Mass of the Christians of the world aren't there anymore it's not true of the great Roman Catholic Scholars like Raymond Brown who taught for years at the union Theological Seminary or Edward skillebecs or Carl Young and certainly not true a Protestant scholarship I've studied at Cambridge I've studied at Oxford I've studied at Edinburgh I've taught at Harvard I've studied and lectured at Union and that point of view is not even on the table in those places now those people could all be wrong but is it likely that the world of Christian scholarship has been static and that we can still use this Bible that I treasure but it's been used in very destructive ways throughout the centuries to me there's a deeper way to read the Bible and that's to see Jesus is always an expression of the love of God and always on the side of the marginalized the weak the inept the rejected I see him as loving the Gentiles who were rejected by the Jews I see him as reaching out to the Samaritans I see him as allowing the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual discharge that the world called unclean I see him standing between the woman taken the act of adultery and her accusers I see him embracing the Rotting Flesh of the leper the Jesus I know is always on the side of the weak and the marginalized and the victim and somehow there's so much of religion it is always still even after the great Redemptive Act of God in Christ always still seeking to build ourselves up and we do it by having a victim sometimes our victim is a person of color sometimes our victim is a person of another religious tradition sometimes our victim is a woman sometimes our victim is a gay or lesbian person whose only sin in my opinion is that they were born with a sexual orientation different from the majority thank you thank you Bishop spawn Dr White now has 20 minutes for his rebuttal statements thank you very much this evening we have a clash of World Views we have very different understandings of what's called epistemology how we know what we know or whether we can know anything at all I think this was just Illustrated in what was said concerning the Bible we had a number of instances where the Bible was quoted in defense of X Y or Z the rights of Kings or whatever and we were told the Bible lost well I don't think that the Bible has anything to do with the people who quoted I do not understand how it is that misusing a written source is the same as demonstrating that at written sources in error well that written source is unclear or that written Source somehow lacks authority I have Bishop's books here on my desk if I were to quote them out of context if I were to quote them out of their historical context if I were to quote them in such a way that did not represent his original meaning we would that have anything whatsoever to do with Bishop spong's thesis would have anything to do with the correctness or incorrectness of his writings well of course not so why is it that we we say well the Bible was quoted to support this or the Bible has been quoted to support this kind of of outrageous behavior how does that have anything to do with what the Bible is in fact the word of God and whether it is in fact inspired in an errant as Jesus clearly believed that it was what does that have to do with any of that it's misciting an authoritative source does not have any reflection logically or rationally upon that Source itself now I don't think that this evening is just a matter of opinions I believe that God has spoken he has spoken with Clarity and therefore even in matters of religion you can actually know right and wrong I reject the idea that we are stuck in a subjective morass where everything is just simply a matter of your opinion versus my opinion we live in a society today where when it comes to Scientific things we can say with certainty that such and such has been decided I would I for example we were just told that even if you've read all the intelligent design literature even if you've read all the genetic literature about the absolute impossibility of Life developing from non-life that that that's no longer on the table that issue has already been settled it certainly hasn't been settled for me and it probably hasn't been settled for a number of you as well but we're told that in that area we can have absolute certainty but when it comes to one area and that is religion every opinion is equal to every other opinion and that assumes one thing God has remained silent and there is no Christian that I can think of for the first at least 1800 years and we can go back before that to the Jews before them who actually believed God had ever been silent God has revealed his truth and therefore we can know what is right and what is wrong in these particular areas now just a few things in the brief amount of time that we have uh together uh Bishop Spong said that in his upbringing we called Jews Christ Killers I also was raised in a very fundamentalist conservative background myself I never heard anyone called a Christ killer I was never taught to hate Jews my first best friend the first person I can remember at the age about three and a half who was my best friend was named Kevin and Kevin's dad was the biggest blackest man I have ever seen in my life if he closed his eyes and didn't grin you wouldn't see him at midnight he was as black as pitch and he was a policeman too so he scared me to death he had a gun and he was about six foot five and massive and his mom was albino and that made Kevin somewhere in between and from that point on I couldn't be a racist I didn't I couldn't understand how anybody could be because my first best friend Kevin wasn't the same color as me and so who cares so I wasn't raised in this context of where allegedly the Bible is used to to uh abuse people in this way and that way and when I hear it being said well the Bible was quoted suppress women you know sometimes sometimes when the Bible recognizes there's a difference between men and women people think that that's somehow suppressing them there's a difference between men and women okay and I am very very glad for example there's a difference between me and my lovely wife my lovely wife is lovely I am not okay my lovely wife loves shoes if we both had the same number of shoes we would have no place to live in our house I am glad there's a difference and my lovely wife would not be up here debating tonight she leaves that to me differences and recognizing those god-given differences is not the same as suppression there is no basis in God's scripture for any kind of hatred based upon these things Bishop spoke of a deeply held homophobia I don't know what that is I think that is one of the worst terms that's ever been defined and used as a bludgeon in this debate if you believe that God has spoken with Clarity in scripture and you believe that with a clear conscience and you believe that out of conviction and you really do believe that homosexuality reduces Christian Life that it reduces human life not just Christian Life human life what does that make you homophobic that's a that's an unfair word that is that simply should be dismissed from the vocabulary if a person comes these conclusions from honest examination of the facts don't call them homophobic that's not fair and I don't know where that deeply held homophobia came from and I'm sorry that that was a a part of something in the South I was raised in Minneapolis for for crying out loud where it's nice and cold but I didn't experience that in any way shape or form now we were told that homosexuality can never be cured by religious Hysteria but what was Paul referring to in First Corinthians chapter six he says such were some of you Paul is referring to the fact that there were some people who had been homosexuals in the church at Corinth and they were no longer what had changed if this was a god-ordained activity what had changed I would submit to you that we're told right there in verse 11 they were washed they were regenerated the Heart of Stone had been taken out a heart of Flesh and been given and healing had taken place now we're also told well you know the Bible is no more competent to judge homosexuality than all these other things but the list that was given to us really wasn't a list of moral activities for example we had epilepsy and deaf mutes that were listed there is a category error there there's no clear parallel between even if you rejected the idea that a demonic Force could make someone a deaf mute I'm not we haven't been given any evidence that a demonic Force could do that and certainly we're not assuming are we that because a demonic Force could create a deaf mute that every deaf mute is because of demonism are we I mean we need to think logically and clearly here or we may end up rejecting a divine revelation on the basis of our own ignorance of what it's actually saying and our prejudice is being read into the text itself we are told that all people are holy well all people are the creation of God all people indeed are created by God but that does not mean all people are holy in point of fact because the Fallen atom we are told that all people are Unholy and need to be born into the family of God they are not a natural part of the family of God until they have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ now you can reject that you can say there's no personal God that's ever said that you can reject the word of God however you want but we need to at least accept that that in fact is what the scriptures teach and they do so consistently not merely inconsistently we are told that the debate is really between the love of God versus human Prejudice I reject those categories I do not believe that that is the case at all in fact I would submit to you that if what the scriptures say are true then the only way to show the love of God is to speak his truth if you do not speak his truth you are not showing love for anyone but yourself because you're afraid to speak the truth you want to be so accepted by others that you are willing in fact to dishonor God by changing his truths this isn't a matter of the love of God versus human Prejudice I am not prejudiced against homosexuals any more than I'm prejudiced against Covetous people my scriptures tell me and they do so consistently and when I look at the world and I look at the world and I examine it scientifically and I examine the scientists and I see that my goodness scientists have prejudices and biases too isn't that amazing look at Richard Dawkins today Richard Dawkins a great geneticist we can both look at the exact same genetic information and come to completely different conclusions that man hates religion he thinks religion is the source of every Evil under under the sun he's not unprejudiced and yet the world would say well Richard Dawkins there is a great evolutionary scientist And yet when a non-evolutionary scientist says well let's talk about where life came from and the DNA molecule wow you're you're obviously biased because of religion you know what non-religion is just much of a bias as religion can be in these areas we are told We're All Creatures of our time yes we're all impacted by our time no one denies that but it does not follow that God cannot give a revelation that speaks across all generations and all languages in all cultures you see if we will allow for the word of God to be consistent with itself if we will engage in proper exegesis if we will examine the original context we'll examine the original languages then we will reduce the danger of our inserting our biases and prejudices as if they are in fact God speaking that's why we have to handle the word of God with accuracy certainly it is true that we can let our Traditions override our prejudices and our biases override but the fact that you can abuse the scriptures is not an argument against the clarity and inspiration of those scriptures we are told that when facts are a dispute what you do is you subject them to the experts God's truth has never been a matter of majority opinion when you subject truth to The Experts and the experts have a reason for saying X Y or Z doesn't history tell us that the truth is going to be abused very often the truth is in the minority not in the majority and when it comes to the issue of what the scriptures teach so far to be honest with you I've not heard any rebuttal of the fact that that is what Leviticus says and I've read Bishop's books he recognizes that is what Leviticus says Leviticus is wrong and that is what Romans 1 says but Paul was repressed gay man and so we should reject what he had to say well I think we need in this debate to show respect for the truth and not worry about my feelings his feelings like that let's put the truth out there and let's let you the audience you here are the only judge panel you'll notice there's no panel of Judges here you're the only ones who are listening to what we're saying it is up to you to decide the facts of this particular issue now we had a number of things were just stated for example uh Bishop Spong said that he is not drawn to such a God who for example would commit genocide the flood story The amalekites well you know what a lot of people are not drawn to the picture of a God who punishes sin there's no question about that many people reject the idea that God would ever punish sin but let's be very clear about one thing you cannot read the Bible and could not come to conclusion that from Genesis to revelation God is just and holy and what makes the story of Christ so tremendously amazing is the backdrop of the reality of God's Wrath knowing that that wrath is mine and deserved and yet knowing that he has shown me mercy knowing what I deserve knowing in my heart what I deserve because I have trampled underfoot his law and I've done so knowingly my conscience has testified to me I knew lying was wrong I knew sexual sin was wrong I knew hatred was wrong I knew mistreating another person who's creating the image of God was wrong but I did it anyway high-handed sins and yet God shows Mercy to me we all are in need of that Mercy I am drawn to that God only because God has changed my heart we were told well the Egyptians must not like The Exodus story the only problem is there were some Egyptians that went with the Israelites and they experienced Redemption you see the issue was who's God are you going to be worshiping idolatry is a serious thing with God it's not just simply a matter of doing the proper worship things idolatry is whether the teacup made by God is going to reject the made by sticker on his bottom and say I'm not going to do that I'm not I'm not made by anyone or I was made by someone else it's Rebellion it's Rebellion against our creator that's what idolatry is and God takes it very seriously some of you know I'm not sure if we have any here but uh yes I see it over there I wrote a book called The Forgotten Trinity and the entire book is on how if you believe all of scripture and only scripture you're forced to be a Biblical trinitarian it's not just a fourth Century Doctrine in fact if you want to go to Ignatius who writes in the very first generation after the apostles we can discuss the fact that he affirms all those basic things too it wasn't just something that developed at that period of time they say Christianity is a developing religion well developing in what way developing ever greater understand understandings of the rich Treasure of Revelation has been given to us sure but developing the sense of once being a monotheistic religion where God is personally reveals himself to becoming an impersonal God where where the Trinity is now Life Is Life Is Good Life is loved be all you can be that's not development that's mutation and that's not coming from the same Foundation of what real development would be we need to be very clear about our language when we use this kind of kind of statement we were asked you got to realize there was this time of oral tradition before the first writing of the Old Testament documents do you suppose that it could have been changed well I ask you do you suppose that God's big enough that when Paul says all scripture is it is God breathed that it's the actual scriptures that are written that our God breathed you think God's big enough to use his own creation creation which he himself made to give us the word of God as a guidance for his people if that's his entire purpose in this creation only if we approach this from a naturalistic materialistic perspective do we come to those conclusions that well maybe it might have been changed we were told the gospels were written seven to a hundred A.D 70 to 100 A.D that just I'm sorry that doesn't fit with the fact that the temple is clearly still standing in the Gospels it's it's you have to assume again a naturalistic materialistic worldview to look at that there's a there's a book called The rediscovering Jesus I'm not sure if we have any on any of the tables around here but excellent discussion of these particular things there is no reason to put them that late we're told we have no Originals that's quite true and that the fourth century is the earliest that is not true while we have fragments before that we also have for example uh the bodmar papyri p46 p66 p75 that are as early as the third century and they are of complete books textual critical study is one of my favorite areas of scholarly Pursuit and then we said well there's textual variants are we to believe the scribes always got it right well there's a also a book over there called the King James only controversy it discusses the whole area of how we can know in light of the richness of the manuscript tradition that has been provided to us that God has preserved his word and there is no other work of antiquity that even comes close to the New Testament in the amount of information is provided to us and the confidence that we can have in the text provided to us in our modern translations today truly we come down to whether God has spoken and if you do not believe in a personal God and during the cross-examination I'm going to read to Bishop's vong and ask him do you believe in a personal God because you've said in your writings I believe in a non-theistic god a non-personal God the god of the theistic god of Christian ethics is dead if you do not believe that God speaks and has spoken then there's no way that you can affirm anything about biblical Christianity because there can't be such a thing as biblical Christianity if you don't believe that God has spoken then you cannot believe that there is any type of objective morality to which you're gonna you can refer you can have your opinions somebody else can have their opinions but there can be no objective morality whatsoever that is a dark Chasm to make a leap into we've seen what has happened what has happened in the past when cultures have dropped into that Abyss we are told that man was not created perfect we're evolving creatures and that we are advancing in our enlightenment when I look at the world around me that's not what I see I don't see that I see man willing to abandon all sorts of clear Revelation from God when I look at the scientific evidence I see a very strong political movement that controls certain things that says well we won't even discuss that type of thing when you have debates about that type of thing but we are viewing a fundamentally different way of looking at man either man is the creation of God and therefore God has the right to Define human behavior or a man is simply a highly evolved mammal and therefore there is no standard of human behavior the only standard of human behavior that can be created there becomes maybe a majority rule there would be many atheistic philosophers naturalistic materialistic philosophers who would say that homosexuality is wrong because from the naturalistic atheistic worldview the best thing you can do for you is get as many of your genes in the Next Generation as possible that's how you spread your genotype so homosexuality would would be a bad thing from their perspective why isn't that wrong once you have no clear word from God it's all a matter of subjective opinion at that point well I feel this I feel that is that what God has left us to can we even talk about God in that context it's a question we have to ask ourselves this evening thank you very much thank you kudos to Chris well our next series will be starting with Bishop Spong will be asking Dr White 15 minutes of questions uh it is within that time that uh uh that Dr White will need to answer thank you 15 minutes of questions there's a lot of time I must say that was the longest 20-minute rebuttal I've ever listened to about 40 minutes wasn't it and uh and I felt you only just getting warmed up at that moment one of the things that languages is a great big barrier and you constantly juxtapose some things like he doesn't believe in a personal God or at least that's the implication that's absolutely wrong there's an enormous difference between what I call a non-theistic understanding of God and not believing in a person of God you seem to have confused those two things I guess I guess what I really would like to ask you to try to clarify for me is how do you know who God is I know what I believe my experience of God is and it's intensely personal but I don't believe that that leads me to a place where I can say who God is I don't believe that an insect could ever describe what it means to be a bird I don't believe a horse could ever describe what it means to be a human being and I think it's almost idolatrous when human beings act as if they can describe who God is I think you can only describe what your experience of God is and then you have to be humble enough to admit that you might even be delusional for example on the trinity I have no trouble pronouncing myself a trinitarian I absolutely believe that I experience God as holy other depth within and incarnate in the life of this world and most particularly incarnate in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and that's what the Trinity means to me but while I can call myself with great ease a trinitarian I don't think that I can then say therefore God is a trinity that is God has now been defined in the categories of my experience God might have 16 sides and I've only experienced three of them so I find that that God language gets very very destructive so I guess I'd like to start first by asking you how do you know who God is that you can dismiss anybody that sort of uses different words as as no longer believing in the same God that you believe in well there were a number of statements made there far beyond a single question uh first of all how do I know who God is I believe that God has spoken with Clarity because it is his purpose to reveal himself to his people the whole purpose of God is that we grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and if that is in fact his purpose then it would follow that he has provided a revelation that is clear enough to accomplish the purpose that he has established for us and so if God has spoken then we can know only as much as he has revealed I do not claim to know more than what God has revealed of himself but I believe that his Revelation is sufficient for me to be able to say God has revealed himself as the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob he has not revealed himself as shivna or Vishnu or any of these other gods because the scriptures specifically state that the gods of the peoples are idols and contrasts the true God that is the whole message of the prophets is it the true God can be identified by certain things if his Revelation isn't clear enough to know those things there is no way to make heads or tails out of what the prophets were talking about and I want to be very accurate Bishop Spong you you began by basically saying that I've misrepresented you I was referring to um uh Christianity must change or die Pages 166-167 you said you didn't bring your good survival and me uh there you go with text but uh if you want to check the validity of what I'm about to quote what I understand you is saying is if we can grasp these possibilities or at least be willing to explore these tiny cracks leading to a different way of thinking about God and if the holy God can be understood not as a person but as the depth and ground of life itself then the ethical task of the church becomes quite different and you also said the theistic god whose will constituted the ethics of the past is dead so my search for the basis of Ethics to guide me beyond the Exile drives me back to the same area where a non-theistic God was found and where Christ was redefined and so I was using your own language there so well let me suggest you're using it improperly it's one thing to say God is not a person and another to say God is not personal a person is a that's a person is a human category you know the Greek philosophers and oftenes said that if horses had gods they would look like horses so all human beings Gods inevitably look like human beings and so we Define them after the analogy of human life all I'm trying to say is that's our experience of God that is not what God is and for us to claim that we can announce the nature of God is to be idolatrous you begin your statement by saying his when you refer to God yes not I want to argue as a language barrier but but inevitably we have defined God as male over our history and and I think that's a very inadequate assumption about God I don't think God is male or female I think God is beyond the categories of human sexuality so that uh you know even even that language becomes the language of of a kind of religious imperialism that says I understand God and anybody that doesn't understand God the way I understand God is wrong I do not spit upon the gods of other people I want to walk hand in hand with Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists not that I could become a a Buddhist or a Hindu or any of those things that would not even be within the scope of my possibility but I would say that God is working in those systems calling those people into a new Humanity the same way I think God is calling me and someday I would hope that we might arrive at the place where you and I having plumbed the depths of our own Christian tradition would sit down and meet with Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists who had plumbed the depths of their tradition and each of us would say to the other this is the gift that I have to bring you that I cut that I have received through my Christian faith and I want to share it with you is that a question um that is well it's almost as long as your rebuttal yeah you know the idea that I can stand in judgment I stand firmly within my faith tradition I do not stand in judgment on anybody else's Faith tradition and so I find that uh I find that difficult and I wonder where where it comes to you that you have the ability to judge others that disagree with your point of view is somehow incompetent or inadequate well once again if God has spoken and he has given us a revelation that Revelation tells us that this God exists and that God does not your own religious tradition the 39 articles the Anglican Church do judge other perspectives I don't know if you believe those already got rid of those a long time ago well and so I don't know what you mean by your religious tradition if you if you reject what was only a few hundred years ago and I'm standing in a tradition that goes back to Moses and that tradition says that God has revealed himself as a god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob and not as Baal and not as ashtaroth and I really wonder if in the days of uh of uh Joshua or in the days of Samuel if you would of likewise said to them you can't judge the Bales you can't judge the asteroth that is clearly the tradition the the judeo uh the Judea Christian tradition has said God has revealed himself in a definitive fashion that allows us to know who he is and allows us to know how we would live our lives if we were to be pleasing to him I don't know what tradition you're referring to within Christianity that would say otherwise well let me suggest that that there's an enormous difference between a God who will send plague after plague after plague upon the Egyptians and you may say that God is punishing sin but that assumes that all the Egyptians were Sinners and that God would condemn to death the firstborn in every Egyptian household on the night of the Passover which assumes that the firstborn must have been particularly sinful that you can assume those things and and and then you follow this God who stops the Sun in the sky so that Joshua can kill more of the amorites and then orders the death of the amalekites then how do you square that with the Jesus who said you've got to love your enemies and you've got to bless those who persecute you can I answer that sure okay I I appreciate the opportunity of answering that I I put those two together by allowing all of scripture to speak and the same Jesus who said to love your enemies uh also spoke more about hell and God's Wrath and Punishment of coming upon Sinners than he did about about heaven and he said he affirmed his belief repeatedly in the law and the prophets and said that anyone who taught otherwise would be least in the kingdom of heaven and so what I understand is what you said you said unless you assumed that all Egyptians are sinners yes sir I I believe as the Apostle Paul taught that we all fell in Adam and that as such we are as David said born in sin and under the condemnation wrath of God and therefore every day that he gives to any individual without his wrath breaking forth upon them is an act of mercy and Grace common grace extended to them and that he uses that to call his people into himself and so I I believe that I have a very consistent understanding of the prophets and apostles at that point and I do believe that the amalekites were engaged in Gross idolatry and sexual sin and if God had destroyed them with an earthquake not many people would be arguing about that but since he used Israel as his instrumentality somehow that means that he's a terrible horrible nasty God I I don't agree with that partial reading of the of the text let me press that then a hurricane struck the City of New Orleans with enormous wraths Devastation and a lot of pain a lot of death to a lot of people a tsunami struck the Indian Ocean perhaps 350 000 people killed did God direct that could our prayers have stopped that hurricane because our prayers have stopped that tsunami what kind of God is it that you would attribute the power to do these things and also have to accept the Judgment that God must have wanted all his people to die because they were evil I'm perfectly aware that everybody's evil but the Jews didn't seem to incur the wrath of God in the same way the Egyptians did actually I think God is the god of the Egyptians yeah I think actually the people of Israel did if you read Isaiah chapter 10 they did bring the wrath of God and the God who controls hurricanes and tsunamis is the god described in scripture who is said to accomplish his will and his purpose in the heavens and upon Earth the one who rules over the winds and the waves and the one who brings his wrath to bear and he uses that to awaken people to their sin and to their rebellion and he did so throughout the history of Israel he did so in the plagues upon Egypt and we have a fundamental disagreement we do on the basis of the scriptures uh but is it not the case that the very scriptures that we're talking about for example in The Exodus make reference to the idolatry of the Egyptians yeah but see you know I'm almost that's almost at the place where we're two ships passing in the night uh you're you're suggesting that a book written between two and three thousand years ago contains all the truth that we need I don't know where that comes I didn't say that I've never said that I S I'm I'm if I'm wrong I apologize but I my sense is that you're assuming there's no truth outside that book no no sir I would never ever even suggest such a thing the DNA molecule is not revealed don't stand corrected let me go to another thing you said that that if we don't have all these rules you're that we're loosed into some sort of morass of Relativity is that fair yes sir if God has not spoken then we cannot have certainty on what his will is for our lives in any aspect of Our Lives yes sir well you know for years we seem to think that women were of such insignificance that a man could have as many of them as he could afford and that's deep in the biblical story the idea of God seeing man and man and woman together as a unit reflecting God isn't biblical in a lot of places uh that just you know I I think you need to see the story and a lot I happen to be deeply committed to monogamous and faithful relationships I think there's a higher Humanity revealed when a man and a woman or in I would also argue that two partners of the same sex could commit themselves so totally to one another that they would live into the full Humanity of the other and expand the full Humanity of the other and that that's what that's what we are called to do and to be and my standard for judgment and it is a quite objective standard is that any act that diminishes the humanity of another child of God is wrong and any act that enhances the life of another child of God is right and that's a fairly objective standard well if that was a question then my my response would be once again only God can Define what enhancing life is uh John chapter 10 Jesus said I am come they might have life they might have it more abundantly and that's within the context in John chapter 10 of his bringing people into a relationship with him inclusive of obedience to his word and that word includes God's revelation about how we are to behave with one another you had just said that you you see in scripture uh this this idea of of monogamy and that there were places where that was violated yes and look what happened look what happened to David because of his multiple wives look at what happened to uh about Absalom and Solomon the fact of the matter is Jesus himself interpreted the Genesis account for us in the text that I read from my presentation and he did say male and female he did not say male and male and female and female he specifically excluded that he said male and female together become one flesh and that in point of fact was his interpretation of Genesis and and the earliest accounts of Genesis so we'd have to believe that Jesus Christ was either ignorant of just how uh these texts should no longer be believed two thousand years later Mr Swang I just believe that 2000 years isn't a long time for God it's not and if if we know what we know about our evolutionary history this world has been here between 4.6 and 4.7 billion years human-like creatures if not fully human have been here for about two million years and yet we're suggesting that a book that human beings wrote between two and three thousand years ago contains the ultimate and and only saving truth of God I think God is bigger than that book I think God is bigger than any religion I don't think God's a Christian I don't know God's a Jew I don't think God's a Muslim but in Christianity is a pathway through which I am privileged to walk into the mystery and wonder of God and I think I meet God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and I don't know how to say it any differently than that and I'm happy just to State the fact that you and I will we start with different premises we wind up with different conclusions I would never suggest that that does that places you outside the Christian faith and I would also claim that that my disagreement with you does not Place me outside the Christian faith and I would call for a little less judgment uh Dr White it's your 15-minute question period I would ask from henceforth if we could during each uh gentleman's time that you do ask questions of uh of the other person and try not to make statements during that time I'll be glad to give Dr white as much time as he wants to make whatever statement he wants for sure my concern is not that we win or lose my concern is that we understand each other and seek the truth sure deferred anything you want to do need to have a little bit of format though okay great um Bishop Spong you uh specifically I read to you the theistic god whose will constitute the ethics of the past is dead and you spoke of a non-theistic God could you define briefly for us what a sense the word theistic means God what a non-god God is is he personal in the sense that he can speak well I wouldn't ever say he to refer to God in the first place and and I would say I'd have to put that into my my tents I experience God as personal now the highest thing that I think I can achieve is is full personhood and so I can't imagine that God does not participate in that but for me therefore to say God is like me and as a person I think is a Step Beyond which I cannot take uh the Theologian who most shaped my early life was Paul tillich he was a German Lutheran reformed Theologian that the Nazis executed in in nineteen you know that spawned her for he died in 1963 he escaped the Nazis Dietrich bonher for did not but Paul tilik was looking for a way to stop having people think about God as the man upstairs who who you can pray to like writing a letter to Santa Claus and that he will do what you want him to do if you're a good boy or a good girl he considered that a very juvenile a very child-like understanding of God that sort of pales before the mystery and wonder of God and so tilik tried to find language that was big enough to capture his God experience but didn't lend itself to this sort of personalistic idolatry and so he coined a freeze he borrowed it from a philosopher named plutonus and began to refer to God as the ground of being I uh that's not enough for me because I don't know how to translate that so when I began to think about God and I'm only thinking about my experience of God I can say I experience God as a source of Life calling me to live in the more deeply I live the more I believe I make God visible I experience God as love calling me to love in the more deeply I love across every barrier and Boundary the more I believe I make God visible and I experience God as the ground of being calling me to be all that I can be in the infinite variety of our Humanity in the more deeply and fully I can be myself I make God visible and my charge as a follower of this Jesus is to do everything I can to build a world where everybody in that world can live to the height of their ability love to the maximum of their capacity and be whatever it is God created them to be in the variety of our Humanity Bishop is it fair to say that you're that this non-theistic God can it reveal propositional truth to mankind I would only worry about your word propositional truth because I don't think any any propositional truth has got to be received by a person who is bound in time and space and immediately when you use language if I use language in the 21st century it's bound by my understanding of the shape of the world in the 21st century and I don't believe that's Eternal I don't want to identify god with that eternity I accept Albert Einstein's understanding that we live in a world of Relativity and I don't object to that because I live in time and space I am a time-bound and time warped creature so was Matthew Mark Luke and John they believe that the world was a three-tiered universe that much of the Bible didn't make sense if you don't think the world's a three-tiered universe but we stop believing in that in the 14th 15th 16th century 17th centuries under the work of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo we understand how big space is the story of Jesus Ascension makes no sense literally in a space age if Jesus ascended into heaven the way people interpret that you know rising up off the Earth to go to heaven well he didn't get to heaven he got into orbit and if he didn't if he escaped orbit he sank into the Infinity of space we don't live in a three-tiered universe you can't build a Tower of Babel from the Earth to be so tall you can get to heaven so every propositional statements always are bound by your time your space your level of knowledge and the world in which you experience life so but I think God reveals God's truth but not in propositional form and you are the decider of what that truth is because it's a personal revelation no one of the things that I think is terribly important is that there be a community of Believers that works together and that you're always challenging one another so that no individual can be just sort of a law unto himself or herself well then what was going on when the community of Believers was unanimous for over a millennium that your position you're holding tonight was wrong were they right then well but see that Community was also holding that slavery was legitimate the second class status of women epilepsy was caused by demon possession I think that we've grown in a lot of understandings and I think to limit God to the mentality of the biblical period of history is to limit God to the place where God becomes increasingly unbelievable to a great number of people that live in the 21st century but Bishop you just said that it's not an individual thing that the the community and yet what that would mean is the truth has never been known until the 21st century No I don't mean that at all I mean truth is always unfolding I think we know truth but we don't know ultimate truth truth is something into which we journey it's not something we ever possess in my experience particularly with religious people is that when they think they possess the truth that's when they begin to persecute anybody disagrees with them and I think that's where we get in trouble uh Bishop spawn can you name any biblical author who held your view of God oh many you believe the Bible authors held a non-person I'd start with Paul tillich no not I said biblical author sir oh biblical oh no I don't think they probably did but that's because they were creatures of their time in space they believed that God literally lived above the sky so that God could hang out a star in the sky when Jesus was born and God could put a star on a roller that could go through the sky the heavens so slowly that the wise men could keep up with it I don't know any Star like that that lives in my world see we don't even recognize that the light we see from a star was emitted millions of years ago you know the idea that you can hang a star up there to announce the birth of Jesus that's that you know if you know anything about the Hebrew tradition you'll know that in the folklore of the Jewish people a star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Abraham and the star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Isaac the star was hung in the sky to announce the birth of Moses and that that was the one of the ways the Jews talked about welcoming into the life of the world a figure that changes the way they understand God Bishop spun can you name anyone who identified themselves as a Christian the first 1800 years of Christian history who held to a view of a non-theistic god I would say that that the way most people have thought of God has been after the analogy of themselves and that's what I mean by theistic that is you see of God and you think oh God we think of God most of us throughout history have thought of God as someone who is very much like us except not bounded every word that we human beings use for God is a human word magnified I am finite God is infinite I am mortal God is Immortal I am Limited in knowledge God is omniscient they're all analogies after human life that's the only language we've got to speak that's not what concerns me what concerns me is when we take our human expanded knowledge and act as if we have captured the truth of God all we have done is try to make sense out of our Transcendent God experience I believe God is very real and I believe I confront God in the depths of my personhood and so you know I don't have any trouble saying God manifest God's self to me personally but I don't take the next step and say therefore God is what I have created God to be because I think God is infinitely more than I can ever imagine God to be Bishop if one believed in uh propositional divine revelation theoretical would it be possible for a personal God who created all things to reveal his will as to man's proper behavior in human language would such be theoretically beyond the capacity of a Creator God are you saying in essence with what you've been saying so far that that's beyond God's capacity to give us that kind of divine revelation I don't ever say what's beyond God's capacity nor do I tell God what is in God's capacity I think that's the distinction I think God is infinitely more than you and I will ever know the fact that the Christian church is not a very Divine not a very unified institution indicates that human beings have been debating these realities for a long long time I think it's time we stopped excommunicating one another because we don't agree and say the perceptions of God among human beings very widely and we're all faithful in our journey deep down I would I would actually Define myself more as a Mystic today than anything else Bishop Spong would you agree that if someone uses your writings to express hatred toward Christians that you are not responsible for the misuse of your own publish statements that's uh that's an interesting way to phrase it I'm not aware that people do that but if you're aware of that I would be very sorry that my my writing to use I have a very deep appreciation for what it means to be human I have a very deep sense that most of our humanity is twisted and warped and I don't think it's just didn't work because we have fallen into something called Original Sin I think it's twisted and warped because we have emerged out of an evolutionary soup when when and we have made our own Survival our highest value and I think that's where the problems of this world come from so we surround ourselves with tribal identity which justifies the fact that we can hate other people's tribes we're we're all in America today aware of how many American soldiers have given their lives in the Iraqi War but we're because we keep a count of that we're not aware of how many Iraqis have died that's a vague the president suggests it might be forty thousand on one occasion it's a vague concept because basically we don't value Iraqis but I think they too are created in God's image Redeemed by God in Jesus Christ and called to be all that they can be so I would regard the death of Iraqi as as equally as disastrous as the death of any other citizen sir could we get back to my my question here um your question is asked in such a way that it can't be answered without torturing yourself all right well would it not likewise follow sir that your repeated references in your books to what I would call wide-eyed cultists like Fred Phelps and his tiny little cultic band of followers from Kansas really has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sober yet believing exegesis is the text of scripture I mean aren't they an extreme example that by utilizing them and not responding to sober exegesis of the text that that there's a there's a Prejudice involved there I haven't had sober exegetes uh hanging placards out and demanding my execution like I have had Fred Phelps and that's uh that's an enormous difference now I I would not be here today to have this discussion with you and with this so audience if I didn't want to respect your opinion and the opinions of this audience I'm bearing witness to the fact that I have a different perspective I'm claiming that that perspective is within the bounds of the Christian faith and I'm urging a wider tolerance and a deeper knowledge of what it means to be male female black white left-handed right-handed gay straight transgender and bisexual and when we begin to understand those differences I think we can respond with more compassion and more love and frankly be more christ-like sir yes uh you wrote quote their special hatred is reserved for those who claim to be themselves Believers and yet who reject what they are sure is the quote clear teaching of scripture end quote in regard to the evil of homosexuality that's what you wrote and yes I think that's an accurate description of my feelings is it your position that every person who believes the Bible is the word of God and who believes it identify as homosexuality as a sexual sin must as a result hate those who disagree oh I don't think so I hope I don't my mother died a fundamentalist and I loved her dearly you know my job is not to convert fundamentalists I have no desire to change you I have a desire to make it impossible for you or me to Define Christianity for all people and I think that's what religious people tend to do okay I appreciate they tend to Define Christianity in such a way that only people like them are happy within that definition I think Christianity is a much broader bigger thing than that okay I'm not I'm not proud of all of Christian history I don't see anybody that could be proud of all of Christian history and we've done terrible terrible things to each other but I still think it's a pilgrimage that we walk into the fullness and wonder of God and simultaneously I think we walk into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human uh sir given your own ethical Foundation derived from John 10 10 regarding enhancement or diminishment of Life defining what is good and what is evil which you've stated just a few moments ago how can you affirm homosexuality when statistical studies the death rates of homosexuals drawn from their own published literature indicate a 22-year average diminishment of lifespan and the fact that while 80 percent of married heterosexual males live to old age only nine percent of homosexual males live to old age and that's not including deaths from AIDS how does that fit with your own stayed standard of enrichment of life as the standard of what is good wouldn't that require you to oppose homosexuality if it diminished life on a physical level in that way no but let me say that that question reminds me of one that was debated in the Middle Ages as to whether celibate clergy live longer than married energy and after a long debate they decided no but it just seemed longer and I suspect that there are so many there are so many factors that heterosexual people don't understand that homosexual people have to put up with the suicide rate for example among homosexual people is far higher than it is any other way but how do you live with an with a cultural hatred that says what you are is not worthy to live and that's what we've said over and over again and way after way after way we've said that I think that once we get into a society that is fully open and fully accepting and and I am in completely optimistic that that's the way we're going in fact I would say that there has never in the history of the human race been a Prejudice that when it was debated publicly wasn't on its death bed because you don't debate it publicly until your definitions of what it means to be that person have have been challenged successfully okay uh Bishop Spong 15 minutes for your question for Dr White sure and what are we doing that's different from what we've been doing well at this at this point you'd be just asking questions critical questions I thought well just yeah I thought we were doing pretty well with critical questions already well just ask him questions and then he'll have the time to respond and then he'll have one more period where he's asking the questions and then you respond uh I'd rather just go ahead and get into the discussion if you've got something else you want to press on because I don't have any well you might notice I don't think it's very helpful to to well debate I've been trying to to be very specific in asking specific questions and ask for a brief answer so that the audience can follow that specific give and take I think when we when we just talk for a long period of time we end up covering five or six things we can't go back there's been many things that I want to cover but I I wasn't able to in that in that situation so uh if if you don't want to take them all in your rebuttal if you well my rebuttal was exactly within the time frame that was uh that was uh agreed upon if if you don't want your 15 minutes I'll I'll take my 15 minutes or ask questions do you want to let's do uh let's do this let's go to just 20 minutes open conversation time if you've got some specific questions that I need to ask specifically I don't want to do that specific questions and uh we'll go for just 20 minutes then and then call it at that time um if that's what agreeable to both sides I don't want to set okay go out of any anything well just be safe if you want me to ask him additional questions I'll be glad to but let him go ahead oh okay so let's give him then his 15 minutes and then uh actually it's uh it's your 15. you're 15 minutes right now yeah go ahead with your with you if you have some questions for me and let's let's try to make them questions so so we can um it's hard to do because the presuppositions of our conversation are so different that uh you almost have to unload the presuppositions before you can ask the questions the uh I suggested earlier that the Bible reflects the mentality of people who lived in the period of history that wrote it that's inevitable yeah you can't do it any other way I don't live in a world where there's a three-tiered universe and God is a person who lives above the sky manipulating the effects of History uh I don't know how anybody that lives in the 21st century can can be there so I simply ask how do you deal with that those parts of the Bible and the Creeds that assume a three-tiered universe that I presume you don't accept it's it's tremendously ironic because in in my Seminary education I went to a seminary that's considerably more liberal than my own perspectives and so I had to study the works of Gerhard Von Roth and those who were far to my left and so we we learned exactly where their worldview was as well as my understanding my own worldview but it's been my experience that when people come from the other direction they're not familiar with the vast body we have book tables around here the vast body of conservative scholarship that can believe in an inspired and inerrant scripture in the 21st century and have no problem with it and can do so by executing the text within its original context in its original language when you talk about a three-tiered universe evidently again this is why I asked you a question earlier I believe that my God can reveal his truth in human language in such a way that it remains valid and communicative throughout the entirety of human history and I believe that because I do not believe that the limited technological knowledge of the Israelites somehow limits the ability of God being able to communicate to me today there is nothing in Scripture that demands that I somehow reject the the findings of science to be able to follow what it is being said when for example you have in the Old Testament law when the the people of Israel were told about the Purity laws they were they were told that a certain animal chewed the cud now we know today through biological sciences that that particular animal does not have the Dual stomach that is required for chewing the cut and people said see these people were they didn't know what they were talking about but the reality is that animal when it eats makes the very mouth movements of chewing the cud and so it communicated to those individuals at their technological level in a way that they could understand now I can understand that that doesn't mean that some how not the word of God it doesn't mean that I somehow have to interpret it outside of its own context and so there is no there is no reason for me to go well since I know so much more about space travel somehow what Jesus Christ said about the only way of Salvation is no longer valid for me today I I do not embrace the naturalistic materialism that is required of that kind of a scholarly perspective and there are many many many people uh and in fact I would submit the the the great Anglican Bishops like uh like Bishop Ryle and others who likewise did not have to embrace that even at the level of technology that they had what year did he live I don't know him you don't know Bishop Ryle one of the greatest of oh okay that was in the 1800s um books back there a brother by Bishop Bishop Royal I think we've got some some back there but I pointed other Anglican vicious but that's okay okay uh well we could talk about Lightfoot and some others but the point is that uh there is absolutely no reason why a recognition of their of their technological level means that what they spoke does not not come from God that is of the fundamental difference between us is I believe that God can communicate through his creatures in such a way that his communication remains valid to this day and the history of the Christian church is of interpretation of that scripture in such a way that allows for my position I don't believe that abuses as I've said of reading text of scripture means that that was what was forced by exegesis most the time it is ignoring the exegesis of the text of scripture that led to those abuses of scripture I think you'd have to agree with me no that that solid exegesis that solid exegesis in context would have led to a different understanding if tradition had not gotten in the way I think that as a presupposition that you're making that would make that almost impossible and it's not just technological you know I find in the biblical story that slavery is thought of as an acceptable institution it's not to me I can quote Old Testament and New Testament may I respond to that you may respond to me if any is asking the question I find it I find the behavior of so much of the biblical story in treating women as second-class Citizens which continued to manifest yourself in this country until relatively recently probably still does in 1874 a woman was denied the right to practice law in the state of Illinois because according to the chief to the majority opinion God had created the woman for the more domestic role and that's the Heritage that I think we've had and I find that that is behavior and I think it diminishes 50 of the human race and I'm embarrassed that I've been a part of a movement that has diminished women including my daughters and my wife and my mother the way Christianity has diminished women and I'd say the same thing about people of color and today I think the battle is simply about people who are different in their sexual orientation so I don't I don't accept even the premise of what you're suggesting that that within the biblical story is some objective reality that does seem to be the difference between us but there is logically no connection between the condemnation of homosexuality the reality that slavery existed in the ancient world and the scriptures recognizing that did not overthrow the entirety of the economic system of the day throwing everybody into chaos but regulated it and did so in a Humane fashion that has nothing I'm I've I've I've allowed for questions that are 10 minutes in length please allow me to at least have a few moments to respond to them okay um there is likewise when we look at what the scriptures State about women in comparison to the context in which it was stated it is amazing the Genesis account made in the image of God and that's why I said if the entirety of the text of scripture had been taken into account Ephesians 5 has been taken into account husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church if true acts of Jesus has taken place the Bible could never be used to to attack women but only to elevate them but as I said in one of my previous statements being thrown in here is the idea of some sort of egalitarianism that is unbiblical that does not recognize the difference between men and women and that's not the same thing as quote unquote oppression or suppression so if we would use language accurately then I submit to you there is no reason for any modern person today to reject what the scriptures say as having relevance to us today because if we would apply sound rules of exegesis to them they would not be able to be used in this abusive fashion that was just cited that's not the history of the Christian tradition however and let me suggest that I grew up in the South I'm glad you grew up in Minnesota is that where it was I grew up in the South so I know the scourge of slavery and segregation and what it's done to people of color and we used to argue that we could have separate but equal my friends it was always separate it was never equal women have been defined in the scriptures even in the Ten Commandments as inferior to men as even the property of men the tenth commandment says you should not covet your neighbor's wife nor his Ox it's clear that your neighbor is a male and that the wife is part of the property along with the ox and the ass and the other male possessions I think that's abominable and I think that that there has been an increasing Consciousness you have said earlier that uh that it's technological I think there's an expanding Consciousness I don't think it'd be possible for 21st century people to enslave people of color again I don't think it's possible for men to force women into second-class positions again and it will not be very long before it will not be possible for the heterosexual majority to oppress the homosexual majority by their own Prejudice definitions well sir I would a number of things first of all you mentioned the Ten Commandments it's the Ten Commandments it says you shall not commit adultery it's the Ten Commandments that that protects the relationship of man and woman in marriage and it is that even comes after this at the point in time that Jesus cites in Matthew chapter 19 that talks about them becoming one flesh we again have to take scripture and tear it into little pieces and interpret it in where world view utterly foreign to its writers to be able to come up with that conclusion you just talked about slavery again even though that's not our issue today and yet you continue to parallel that with homosexuality there is no parallel between these two things the slavery issue goes to today how employers should treat their employees there is no parallel to the concept of homosexuality unless you assume a perspective that seems to me to be going out of style in the homosexual community and it seems to me that you hold a view of homosexuality that's it's about 20 years out of date now that makes it completely a matter of genetics and yet the homosexual Community itself is never suggested that that is that it's natural that it's You're simply well if it's left-handed and red-haired and freckled if that's not genetic what is it it's not genetic the doctors I worked with at the Cornell Medical Center would reject the genetic possibility they'd also reject the environmental possibility they just think that's the way life is that's the way it is a brute fact that's the way it is and they would justify that with all of their history but let me respond to your commandment thing yes the seventh commandment does say you shall not commit adultery but what we don't realize is that when that commandment was given polygamy was the style of marriage it was some 300 years after Moses was supposed to receive the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai that Solomon had a thousand wives now help me to understand what adultery means when one man owns a thousand women if you have a thousand wives and still have some need to commit adultery I think you've got a problem I think you've got a huge problem I don't even think it's a moral problem I think it's a problem of your being so I I think to use the scriptures this way is simply an inappropriate way to address contemporary issues but sir if you allow the scriptures to speak for themselves that commandment comes before Solomon and explains why Solomon's heart is turned away from God does it not there is no that that again gets you back into a dating problem we think most Scholars think I guess that's where we can begin to quote authorities and I don't think that's very helpful but the bulk of Old Testament Scholars would say that that the Moses story is written or you know sometime well after Moses death so that it's probably written during the reign of King Solomon now the the actual writing of the Ten Commandments probably came around 9 40 9 50 in the reign of King Solomon with his thousand wives and I just think you've got to be careful about how you don't isolate scripture from from the reality of the time in which it was produced wasn't there just an isolation of scripture from itself however by saying well uh certain Scholars that I happen to accept date it within the time of of King Solomon that would be pretty dangerous thing to write the Ten Commandments come up with the Ten Commandments the time of Solomon how did David for example have such knowledge of God's law if God's law had not been written down in the time of data well you've got an oral tradition but you've also you're talking about a written Tradition at this point I don't know when the oral tradition began the oral tradition didn't include the 10 the 10 words all right it may well have that's not something I can know that's just that's just the reality all I know is that Moses died around 1250 in the in the first part of the Old Testament certain about 300 years later now that's you know I don't I trust oral tradition but I think you've got to you've got to leave leeway in it for we've got oral tradition for hundreds of years we've got translations I've never met a translation that was perfect the idea that we can wrap the Bible in these these envelopes of inerrancy and in an infallibility I don't believe the Pope's infallible I don't believe the Bible is inerrant and I think we are called to live without ultimate Authority in the Glorious Liberty of the children of God to me that's dangerous how do you know who the children of God are without a word from God how do I know what how do you know who the children of God are without a word from God well I think that by your fruits you demonstrate the sense of your own sacredness okay okay Dr White you now have 15 minutes you have written quote yes I am convinced that Paul of Tarsus was a gay man deeply repressed self-loathing rigid and denial Bound by the law that he hoped could keep this thing that he judged to be so unacceptable totally under control a control so profound that even Paul did not have to face this fact about himself end quote would that be a proper rendering you're reading that out of the sins of scripture yes you know when I first wrote that I wrote it as a speculative Theory I've become more convinced of its reality but it's still my belief and there's a difference between stating your belief and stating that you know what is but that's I believe yes you are convinced of that I am personally convinced of that yes am I correct to to believe that you view his words in Romans 1 as nothing more than the words of repressed homosexual Romans 1 is a fascinating passage of scripture and it was actually the clue to my understanding of Paul when I finally unpacked because what Paul really says there is that if you don't worship God properly God will confuse your sexual identity first place I don't believe in a God who would do that in second place that led me into looking at Paul autobiographically and Paul gives us a lot about biographical material in the Epistles and in there I began to I took I took this from a I can't even remember his name Darby I believe a man I've found in the Yale library in a book written about 1935 that suggested Paul might have been a repressed gay man and I decided I would read all of the Pauline Corpus as if that's true and see if it illumined the Corpus in any way and you run into passages where Paul talks about this inner struggle going on between his mind and his body his mind follows one law his body follows another law he talks about Sin dwelling in my members so that my members don't obey the law of my mind and the Greek word for members m-e-l-o-s May loss and it means a bodily appendage I don't know anybody's arms or legs that don't obey the law of their mind but then but males have another appendage that is a gland that isn't always obedient to the law of their mind that's why we have impotency in human life that's why Viagra has business because it does not obey the law of the mind you know I find this self-hatred in Paul o Wretched Man that I am who shall deliver me from this body of death Paul as a God-fearing Jew was well aware of the prescriptions in Leviticus that said that if you're homosexual you're under the condemnation of death and then I think you don't understand Paul until you understand that whatever his conversion experience was and I don't trust the book of Acts description of that on the Damascus Road as history because Paul never refers to it never refers to his to ananias or any of that so I don't know what happened but I do know Paul went through a cataclysmic conversion experience and in that conversion experience I think he came to the realization that God loved him just as he is as we indeed sing Just As I Am Without One Plea that's how God loved him and he came out of that convinced in what I think is a very revealing statement that nothing could finally separate him from the love of God not even he says my own nakedness can separate me from the love of God now I don't know that Paul was gay and I have no sense that even if he were gay he ever acted it out uh my sense is he lived Bound by the law in such a way that it was killing him inside but his conversion experience was this sense that whatever it is that God is God loved him as he was and so he breaks into this great uh epiphany of of wonder that height not depth Not Angels not principalities not things present not things to come nothing can separate me from the love of God now let me just finally say I don't know that Paul was gay that's a supposition I'm personally convinced of it I'll ask him when I get to the kingdom of heaven it'll be a very revealing conversation but but I'm con I'm content to at least make that public possibility as a way of saying that it's the dark side of a man who lived in the first century that Drew us into an understanding of what the grace of God is all about and I suspect If we're honest with ourselves it's when we are able to accept whatever the dark side is of each of us that we become whole people and that's certainly what Carl Jung had to say and I think that's I think that's worth thinking about as a gospel message Bishop Swan why should anyone on a scholar level examining Paul's writings conclude that his words about homosexuality in Romans 1 and First Corinthians 6 are the result of repressed homosexuality rather than a consistent application of the law and the prophets as is seen throughout his writings on a wide variety of topics and issues well I think you have to learn to play with the scriptures in a little bit more flexible manner than you seem able to do uh I know that if you read Maccabees for example it's not in the scriptures but it's in the Apocrypha and it's very popular literature in the first century and Paul certainly was familiar with Maccabees and Maccabees says that if you if you can repress all desire then then you don't have any trouble and he Paul really tried to do that the the person that helped me to see that for the first time was a gay man who said Paul it's just like I am I couldn't accept the fact that I was gay either and I fought against it with all my heart I tried to repress it I did all sorts of things I sometimes hid in a marriage making even more people uh complicitous in your in your own inner struggle but once you accept the fact that that being gay is not evil or you can act evil out of being gay there's no doubt about that but maybe you have noticed you can be pretty evil if you're heterosexual too you know you can be a prostitute you can be a pimp you can abuse children those are all heterosexual proclivities overwhelmingly sexuality itself in my opinion is absolutely morally neuter you can act out homosexuality with Holiness you can act out heterosexuality with Holiness you can also act out both of them with great corruption and great destruction Mr Spong you wrote concerning Paul's statements about homosexuality in Romans 1 quote is there any reason why anyone should believe that this convoluted and bizarre understanding of the tortured Pauline mind could ever be called the quote word of God end quote yeah could you explain sir why you isolated Paul's statement from the context before and after ignoring its consistency in that argumentation and ignored the balance of the entirety of the text which addresses the entire spectrum of human sin you see I don't I don't see the Bible as the word of God I see the word of God as that which I hear through the words of the Bible and there's a very big difference I don't want to blame God for a lot of things in the Bible I think some of the things in the Bible are Dreadful I think they reflect our tribal upbringing they reflect the adolescence or even the childhood of our Humanity I think the Bible is a growing book it's an enormous difference between when you get into the prophets for example and you get Malachi who says from the rising of the sun to which set in God's name shall be great among the Gentiles that would be something that that the god in the book of Exodus would not have understood in every nation says Malachi incense shall be offered unto my name that's the dawning of a sense that God is a universal presence drawing all human beings to God's self so to to act as if this book written between a thousand BC and 135 A.D somehow captures in some inerrant or infallible form the literal word of God is to me to become an idol and make the Bible into an idol it becomes bibliology it's not it's not finding and engaging the word of God in Scripture that constantly challenges our own prejudices and calls us into a deeper and deeper sense of our own Humanity so you wrote furthermore no text from the Bible can never be used appropriately to validate the prejudiced behavior of homophobia which is clearly evil that kind of outcome can never be derived from the quote word of God end quote yes I think that's correct since I in almost every Evangelical scholar I know are not afraid of our own sex nor are we afraid of the sin of homosexuality will you now address the wide and deep stream of scholarship and theology that approaches the text of scripture in the same fashion that the Lord Jesus did and that concludes that Paul's words is an apostle of Christ are indeed representative of God's will you continue to say that Jesus sort of has a view of scripture that agrees with yours the New Testament wasn't written when Jesus was here and all of that was added the we didn't agree on what books would constitute scripture in a final sense until about 367 of this Common Era and that was in a letter from a man named athanasius who sent out a teaching epistle once a year and one year he decided to list the books that were in the Bible that were legitimate canonical books before that time it was a great debate there was still a debate even when you get to Luther in the 16th century Luther didn't think the Epistle of James should have gotten into the Canon and tried to get it out there's been a lot of debates one of the great things that Dan Brown has done for our world is to open many people who read murder mysteries up to some of the early theological debates about which books go in and which books go out there's enormous study in that area going on today so I don't I don't start with the premise you start with and so I don't know even how to respond to it except to say that's not the way I would approach the Bible okay Bishop wouldn't you agree that in the canonical gospels The View presented to us of Jesus Christ is that he had the highest view of scripture and in fact had a view of the scripture as the word of God constantly saying it has been written would you at least not say that that at that point no I wouldn't say that because because he clearly thinks that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible as David wrote the Psalms and I think that's both of those you'd flunk if you put those on us in a test at any Theological Seminary that I'm familiar with not in my class sir okay well that's some you see that's where the that's where the issue is yes it is that's where the that's where the barrier is now if you want to excommunicate all of the other Christians who disagree with that very narrow very Protestant point of view and very historical Point see that's part of your claim that you have the truth that is historical it's canonical it's right all I'm telling you is that Roman Catholic Scholars wouldn't agree with you and most of what I would call the great Protestant tradition of the 19th and 20th Century would not agree with you and my plea is for you to recognize that they too are part of the body of Christ and are wandering walking forthrightly into the mystery of God and I hope we walk together I have no desire to put the wagons in a circle and shoot anybody that disagrees with me I'm also not willing to have somebody Define Christianity within a very narrow confine and say if you don't believe the way I believe you're no longer a Christian that's not a world I think is going to survive Bishop if what you're saying is true then the illustration I used if I dress like an Imam and I say I'm a Muslim and I reject that Allah exists I reject that Muhammad was a prophet I reject the Quran am I am I a Muslim uh the question you're asking is is not one that I can give a yes or no because the presuppositions around it need to be exposed are you suggesting that I don't believe that Jesus is the center of the Christian faith that I don't believe he's the son of God do you do you do not believe in the creedal doctrine of the Trinity right I didn't say that I've tried to say over and over again I'm a trinitarian I don't believe that I can therefore say what God is I can say how I experience God do you believe that Jesus Christ eternally existed as the Divine Son of God who became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ that he died upon a cross and rose again the Third Day from the grave bodily you have just strung together in the first 500 years of Christian history with enormous energy and vitality 1500 years ago yes sir that still is our tradition is it not well I'd say that that's the Orthodoxy in my opinion is not what to write Orthodox is what won the debate and then they repressed everybody disagreed with them and the history of Christianity is that the repressed voices keep rising up and challenging again and I think that's going on over and over again now I could take you through I think whether you would accept this or not I could take you through the New Testament and show you that the the affirmation is always that in Jesus of Nazareth God has been met and engaged in a unique form but how that took place I think is if you line up the books of the New Testament the order they're written you'll find the debate rages Paul says in the first four verses of Romans that God declared Jesus to be the Son of God by the action of the spirit at the time of the Resurrection Mark says that God was that that God poured God's spirit into into Jesus at the time of his baptism neither of them knew anything about a virgin birth virgin birth doesn't come into the Christian tradition until the ninth decade that's a tremendous leap of logic Bishops that's not something but they suggest you go back this is the very argument I had with John Dominic cross in last year well I'm glad John Dominic and I agree uh and I'm I'm quite certain and the problem is that it it you have a tradition here that has no basis in your own in your own historical tradition this is totally modernism being read into the text and disassembling the text and saying well we can look at this text over here and this text over here and we can put them at odds with one another rather than allowing for the harmonization of these texts see the harmonization of the text was a trick that Christians developed to try to take care of all the problems that are in the text because how about how about that's what comes when you believe that God has actually spoken in his word well I ain't got that's where you and I would agree it would disagree and the idea that fundamentally yes the idea that God dictated the scriptures is to me an idea that that I could not ever Embrace I don't want to blame God for some of the things but let me go back to what I was trying to say if you line up the New Testament in the order in which it is written you find that our understanding keeps growing virgin birth comes into the text in the ninth decade in Matthew's writing it's repeated in Mark and Luke's writing can you document this can you actually demonstrate that the order that you're assuming is actually the order that you see that's where we got to the place where we're disagreeing not on opinions but we're disagreeing on facts yes but let me let me go back to Paul for example Paul says that Jesus was descended from the House of David according to the flesh Mark doesn't have any virgin birth story in it but Mark portrays the mother of Jesus in chapters 3 and 6 as thinking Jesus is out of his mind and she's going to put him away well that doesn't ring very true with a woman for her to whom the angel Gabriel appeared and said you're going to have this child he's going to be the Son of God and when he's grown up you think he's out of his mind so I think it's fairly clear that Mark had never heard the story of the Virgin birth and when you get to John which I believe and I would say most Scholars agree with this is the last of the canonical Gospels John doesn't have any virgin birth in him at all John refers to Jesus on two occasions one in chapter one I think the others in chapter six is the son of Joseph but all of them agree on what I think is the Christian affirmation says God has been met and engaged in a way that has transformed all human life and our knowledge of God forever so that you know to to play the fundamentalist game about the Bible does not lead me into that Wonder of mystery and that and that is our time folks and we thank you Bishop Spong and Dr James White and we have closing statements yes okay absolutely we are going to take a five minute break as we bring the podium back uh I want to thank you for for remaining quiet and allowing the allowing these gentlemen to speak during this time and I hope you will as well afford them that here when we get into our closing statements and then into our audience questions I am going to limit audience questions to 20 minutes and how you're going to help me there is if you please keep your question under 30 seconds also please do not start with your life story okay either how you became a Christian or how you left Christianity or whatever the case may be please ask the question directly allow them to answer I will hold the microphone okay please we had an instance last year where someone was bound and determined to convert uh Dr cross in last uh last year and he was wrestling that thing away from me and uh so uh basically basically we need you to ask your question do so politely and allow these gentlemen to answer after each gentleman answers they will have about a minute and a half to answer is basically where we want to keep it then the other gentleman here or whatever the case may be will have about 30 seconds to respond and keep it brief I want to make sure we all get uh back into our beds at a proper time and make sure food gets into their stomachs here but then at the end those of you that are Cruisers I do have some announcements for you so you're gonna have to stay up late so all right folks we will start right now and actually uh Bishop Spong is going to be taking his mic and won't be approaching the podium it's up to him to take the stage wherever he'd like to go a little bit just so I can see the people I've never really liked to stand behind podiums because I think it's A Mighty Fortress that protects you from people and I don't ever want to act like I'm afraid of an audience because I think what we're doing is seeking the truth my concluding statement is is much more of a witness than it is anything else because I don't think that I think we've identified the fact today that that we start with two different presuppositions and that they pass in the night if you accept his presupposition you come to a conclusion if you accept mine you come to a different conclusion and I'm quite content to leave it to God to decide who's right and who's wrong because I think human beings of times are quite arrogant in the way that they say I have the truth so I'd like to sort of share with you how I as a or some experiences I've had that have enabled me as a person born in a Southern fundamentalist Evangelical tradition came to the place where I suspect that I am the point guard in my church's struggle to accept fully gay and lesbian people it was in 1988 that I wrote a book called living in sin with a question mark the subtitle was a bishop rethinks human sexuality it was a very important book in my life I had no idea what it would do but it suddenly lifted me out of being a private citizen and and my publisher Harper Collins put me into a book tour and I was on the Oprah show in the Phil Donahue show and Bill Buckley's Firing Line a debated Pat Buchanan and did all sorts of interesting exciting things and I received it was the first book in which a person from a Mainline Christian church had advocated a rethinking of the way that we relate to homosexual people and even call for the blessing of the Sacred commitments of gay and lesbian people and it created a great great a bit of storm Time Magazine Newsweek the media all over the country debated this book and I received an enormous amount of hate mail usually from Christians the fascinating thing about this was that about two months after this book came out when I'd been on this Whirlwind tour my wife who had been ill with cancer for six and a half years died a sudden death even though we knew about the diagnosis and so in the midst of this storm of public activity I was also caught up in the deep emotional grief of having lost a wife of 37 years and the mother of my children we had her funeral service in the Diocese of Newark where my clergy family and my constituents could be gathered around and then because we had lived in Richmond and owned a burial plot in Richmond we went back to Richmond to have the funeral the burial service and because I have daughters that live in Richmond and we had a lot of friends when I served that church in Richmond we had another service in the church before we went out to the burial it was at 2 30 on a Tuesday afternoon in August 1988. and I was sitting beside my wife's casket with my daughters and their husbands or their fiances as it was at that point in the row with me to listen to the music that we had picked because it had been my wife's favorite about five minutes before the service began the door of this church opened and a woman whom I do not know walked down the aisle pushed my wife's casket aside took her umbrella and cracked me over the back with it and said in a voice that you could hear all over that congregation quote you son of a [ __ ] unquote and then she walked past the front of the church where we were sitting and out through the side door where all of my pallbearers were gathered and all of them were priests from the Diocese of Newark and as she walked through my pallbearer she said and I quote I've been wanting to tell that bastard what I think of him for years and I finally got the opportunity and she disappeared and I have no idea who she was or what she is about I can only guess that because of the massive amount of publicity that her response was elicited by my stance in favor of opening our society to gay and lesbian people but that's not the end of the story and that's where the witness comes when the service finally began much to my surprise the doors of that great church opened and in came in very Episcopal style a crucifer carrying the cross and about a 30 Voice Choir all adults I'd served as director of that church for several years before this time I'd been elected Bishop from that church and I looked at the choir members and I didn't recognize one of them and choirs don't turn over that rapidly in Christian churches you know the people sing in choirs forever so I had this I hadn't asked for a choir I didn't understand that one would be there but they added enormously to the service and I was grateful they helped carry us through a very difficult time but when the service was over I went to find somebody in that choir so that I could thank them and I finally found the young man in his early 30s who had carried the cross and I went up to him and I said I'm Jack Spong I'd like to thank you for being here it meant a great deal to me and my family to have the choir and the music at this service and he looked at me and he said Bishop he said you don't know me but I know you you might be interested in knowing that every member of that choia today was a member of the Richmond chapter of integrity if you don't know integrity that's the organization for Gay and Lesbian episcopalians founded by a man named Dr Louis crew and then he said we would do anything for you because of what you have done for us and I thought about those two experiences in that moment of grief and I had to place them side by side I am well aware that by standing at the side of the marginalized that you're also going to elicit enormous hostility I accept that as part of my my uh just being I was thoroughly flattered when Fred Phelps came to the general Convention of the Episcopal church and carried a placard that said spawn and tutu are [ __ ] lovers I am delighted to be identified with Desmond Tutu under any set of circumstances so but I had to put these two things together here was a woman whom I had clearly Disturbed who was really angry and he was a young man and members of a choir that I had clearly been an agent for opening the body of Christ so that they could come in and feel like they were members not judged not rejected but accepted and loved just as they are and when you put those two things together you have to make a decision and the decision for me is clear I will always run the risk of angering people I will always do that and I'll take a thousand umbrellas from angry people who have had their understanding of God disturbed by something I've said or something I've done if in the process I can open the doors of the church to those people who have felt the church's rejection the church's hostility the church's judgment find a way to allow them to come in and celebrate the fact that they too are the children of God the Beloved of Jesus Christ and called by the Holy Spirit to be all that they can be that's a witness that's all I can do and I will continue to stand there I hope I will stand there lovingly I hope I will stand there respectful of people who disagree but I will never compromise I'll never Bend because I'm absolutely convinced that the grace and love of God Embraces us just as we are black and white male and female gay and straight left-handed right-handed in all of the diversity of our Humanity and I cannot imagine a church that calls itself the body of Christ whose doors are not open to all that God has made and to all that God loves so thank you for letting me be with you to Bear my witness and even if you disagree I hope you recognize that the position has Integrity thank you very much the doors of the Christian church are in fact the doors of the Christian church are in fact open to all who will repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ that is the most ancient message of the church the church does not exist when repentance is removed in God's law is rejected repent and believe is the most primitive Christian message there is but to repent one must know what one is repenting from and therefore the fundamental disagreement of our debate this evening is I would assert that if God has not spoken if God has not revealed his truth repentance is an empty word it is a word that Christians have not been able to use properly for all the years of the church Bishop Spong says I am content to leave it to God who is right and wrong but how is God going to judge is there a right and wrong if God has not in fact spoken Mr Spong said that some can become arrogant when they believe that they have the word of God but I submit to you that it is not arrogant to humbly accept God's revelation in fact if God has in fact spoken then to dismiss what he has said is the very height of hubris and we as creatures cannot engage in that our subject this evening is extremely important and it is extremely not only important but weighty for everyone here I would like to point out a little bit more about a study I mentioned earlier to illustrate this obituaries numbering 6516 from 16 U.S homosexual journals over 12 years were compared to a large sample of obituaries from regular newspapers the obituaries from the regular newspapers were similar to U.S averages for longevity the medium age of death of married men was 75 80 percent of them died old 65 or older for unmarried or divorced men the median age of death was 57. and 32 percent of them died old us men don't help the women out as much married women averaged age 79 at death 85 percent died old and unmarried and divorced women averaged age 71 and 60 percent of them died old so in other words guys it's fair to be married and ladies while you're stuck with us however the median age of death for homosexuals was virtually the same Nationwide and overall less than two percent survived old age if AIDS was the cause of death the median age 39 for the 829 gays who died of something other than AIDS the median age of death was 42. and nine percent died old the 163 lesbians had a median age of death of 44 and 20 percent died old two and eight tenths percent of gays died violently there were 116 times they were 116 times more apt to be murdered 24 times more apt to commit suicide and had a traffic accident death rate 18 times the rate of comparably aged white males twenty percent of lesbians died of murder suicide or accident a rate 487 Times Higher than that of white females aged 25 to 44. life itself is the issue this evening this is not just an academic debate though we have tried to engage the academic issues we've done so unfortunately in such a way that we have had to come to recognize a fundamental contradiction of world view between the two sides the reason I tried to ask questions about who in Christian history has ever believed in non-theistic Gods who are the ground of life but whether they can reveal Divine truth is because I don't believe that there really is any way to argue against the fact that that's what Christians had always believed up until last century and if we cannot Define what Christianity is remember what the thesis the debate tonight is homosexuality is compatible with authentic biblical Christianity well only one side believes that you can Define authentic biblical Christianity in the first place otherwise it changes from generation to generation place to place language language and time to time and there's really no way to end up debating that particular thesis I am sorry to hear and I had heard other stories I took the time prior to this debate to listen to many hours of Bishop spong's lectures obtain his books it was never my intention and I I don't believe that I did misrepresent Bishop Spong but I am sorry the bishop Spong has experienced hatred so have I but for some reason in his writings he seems to project that on to anyone who believes in the quote and I keep using quote because that's what he does in his books puts in quotes word of God and project onto them hatred Prejudice bias and it is my assertion to you that you can believe that the Bible is the word of God you can accept it as the word of God and you can live consistently within its parameters without mistreating anyone I do not believe it is mistreatment in any way shape or form to disagree and in fact I do not believe it is mistreatment to say to Bishop's Fong that I do not believe that the definition of the Trinity as Life Is Good Life Is Love be all you can be a ground of being Paul tillich and so on and so forth no I believe that there would be many Anglican Bishops of the past who would agree with me that's not Christianity that does not fall within the parameters call it what you will but we have to have the right to Define our own faith and if we cannot even Define it at the level of who God is rational discourses come to an end we cannot discuss anything at all at that point this debate is not about personal experience it's not about whether homosexuality is something that can be accepted within a naturalistic worldview it is about whether homosexuality is compatible with authentic biblical Christianity and if one side cannot even affirm that we can Define that meaningfully then I think the debate is clear Bishop spoke about being accepted and loved what does that mean all of us want to be accepted and loved by God what does that mean do we have the right to demand of God what his standards will be the Christian faith tells us that God has revealed his standards and that he has gone so far as to provide in the person of his son a sacrifice for sin that is the heart of Christianity as the cross and the cross is not merely the idea that we crucified the one who showed us God's love that's not even what Jesus said in any way shape or form and you'll notice when we tried to get to what Jesus words were well you know we've got Canon issues and you've got athanasius 39th Festival letter and and we don't even know what the New Testament was there is an agnosticism about the words of Jesus but I submit to you that just as Jesus knew what the Old Testament was the Canon the Old Testament having developed over the same period of time as a can of the New Testament that since God has spoken God knows how to reveal to his people what is and what is not his word God has that capacity and he did so and when we look at what Jesus himself said he defined his own mission as coming to seek and to save that which was lost and he did so by laying down his life for his sheep now why would he have to do that if there is no law that has been broken if there is no law that has been broken my friends there's no reason for a sacrifice Christianity does not exist without a divine Savior who gives his life as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin and who rises again the third day and calls us to follow him to follow him in his life to follow him in his obedience to the father he gives us an example of how we are to live and he honored God's law he honored that law that this evening has been relegated to the mere speculations of ancient men who were ignorant about modern scientific discoveries that homosexuality just is I believe that we're creating the image of God so nothing we do just is we may be born with a propensity for example to overeat a propensity to be overly zealous in pursuing the other sex but God's will calls us to be obedient to his law in those areas and to exercise discipline and to seek his spirit's assistance in those ways Bishop Spong spoke of homosexuals being judged by the church well if the church has any moral standard in regards to what God's law is then the church judges fornicators and adulterers and liars and people who are hateful and murderers and thieves if the church is going to Proclaim God's will as to how we are to live then there has to be judgment but it is that very judgment that brings an understanding of who Christ is and why he died a church without the ability to judge is a church with no message it becomes a religious Social Club judgment is not wrong when that judgment is then used by the holy spirit of God to bring conviction of sin I take you back to the words of the Apostle Paul who was not a repressed homosexual his words are far more easily seen and have been down through history as being a consistent application of what he believed the law of God was in all aspects of human life after talking about homosexuals and fornicators and thieves and adulterers he said to the Corinthians and such were some of you that's a message of Hope to everyone here to stay because when you start going through those lists and I start looking through the faces In This Crowd we don't have to just talk about homosexuality we can talk about lust we can talk about impatience we can talk about disobedience and every single person sitting in this room needs to hear a word of Hope the difference is I think for the majority in this room you haven't started a movement that says God must accept me the way I am rather than saying I want God to change me to be the best that I can be to conform me to the image of Christ I will not demand that he accept my standards I as his creature want to know what his are and can we know what his are I submit to you that the United voice of the Christian people down to the ages the United voice of every single one of the writers of Holy scripture is that yes God has spoken that's what Jesus said when the Sadducees came and tested him about the woman who had married Seven Brothers Jesus's response to them was have you not read what God spoke to you saying have you not read what God spoke to you have you not he did not say have you not read what God wrote to you he did not say have you not heard what God spoke to you he said have you not read what God spoke to you he considered the word of God to speak to those individuals to whom he was speaking at that time that means God's word speaks to every generation and he holds us accountable there too yes his view of scripture in all of the gospels and there are no other gospels we can look at that would even begin to be relevant to this particular point in time all of Jesus's views about scripture are very clear it's God's speaking what about you today do you need to hear a word of Hope that word of Hope remains just as true today as it was when Paul wrote to that church and he said such were some of you but you were washed you were cleansed you were Justified you were sanctified not by anything you did not by any actions you did but the repentance and Faith the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ thank you very much thank you Dr White okay we have made this very simple for you we have actually okay here we go this is directed towards I can't even believe what I say Dr White could you please explain to me what is the gospel of salvation what does the gospel of Salvation well I I tried to summarize it just a moment ago but fundamentally the gospel of Salvation is summed up by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians chapter 15 when he says that Jesus Christ died for sinners that he was buried and he rose again and that we are called to repent and believe in him Jesus Christ is the way that God has provided for any person who is willing to repent and believe to receive full remission of their sins and to be as Paul puts in Romans 5 1 at peace with God that's that's the Greek term irenae behind it is the Hebrew term shalom Shalom is not does not exist in Israel today anyone who's running around with weapons on them even if there's not a bombing going on or a war going on that means peace does not exist shalom is Wellness of relationship and if a person wants to have peace with God Wellness of relationship with him no reason for fearing the wrath of God there is only one way of having that and that is in and through Jesus Christ to say there is another way is to say as Paul said we are making the Cross of Christ void or empty of its effect now we may need to schedule a debate on pluralism or inclusivism or something like that but that is the message that the Apostle Paul delivered repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved what sounds like guilt talk how can you repent of who you are how can you repent of being male or female how can you repent of being left-handed or right-handed how can you repent of being gay or straight as I say you can live it out very disastrously either way but you can't repent of who you are so there's a basic problem here I don't believe that people are helped by being told how wretched they are I think the church often engages in our character assassination under the guise of worship I think the way salvation comes is that God's love Embraces you just as you are and then sanctification to use those wonderful old words is the process of growing into all that you can be that you don't start by being told how wretched and miserable you are because I think it only gets you deep into guilt and deep into an increasing sense of human inadequacy and it's out of that that we kill each other okay and a question can we please close the doors that we have there we have some wonderful Jazz coming in yes what I would like to know is how you can read the Bible 25 times the word of God and not understand what he's saying to you well that's a good question it's highly a prejudicial question I read the Bible because I love it I've read it every day of my life since I was 12 years old I don't read it as a fundamentalist and I don't think that that God can be captured by the writings of any human being at any time and in any place there's an enormous difference in the Bible between you know even in the Jesus story where Mark says the only word Jesus spoke from the cross was my God my God why have you for second forsaken me but that disappears by the time you get to John's gospel and you hear Jesus then saying it is finished or in Luke saying father into thy hands I commend my spirit that means between the time that Mark wrote in the time that Luke and John wrote some tremendous new thought had ended in the Christian story I think you've got to read the Bible as an open-ended book and you've got to get inside it and you've got to walk in it and you've got to walk very very deeply I worry about those people that see the Bible as only a controlling process and see God only as a punishing parent I think the church has done guilt better than it's done anything else in the world and I don't think people are helped by being filled with guilt in a sense of inadequacy I would direct anyone to the exact discussion of exactly what Dr Spong said in regards to Mark and John in my debate with John Dominic crosson last year in this series of debates because we demonstrated that that was I think a grave misreading of the text and it does not allow for of course uh the honest reading of each author to speak the truth within his context in other words harmonization and as far as guilt goes a person who is not guilty will not be looking for a guilt-bearer in the Savior Jesus Christ and a question for Dr White I would like to know what your definition of unconditional love is definition of unconditional love well there's no particular biblical passage that uses that language so I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that God's love is unconditional for his people in the sense that it provides everything that they need to have peace with him it is not a love that denies his own nature it's not a love that gets rid of his own Holiness his own law it's not a love that Winks at sin but it is a law that provides everything in and of himself in Jesus Christ for any person who would repent and believe in him and so it really is one of the reasons that I'm a Biblical monarchist I believe that God Saves and God Saves alone is because in his his love he has provided a perfect means of Salvation in Jesus Christ that I cannot add anything to and because I can't add anything to it I have to do nothing more than just simply fall at the feet of God and my boasting can only be in him I don't believe there is anything in the Bible about an unconditional love that allows for a violation of God's holy nature and that's I'm just trying to apply it to the topic of our debate this evening if that's what the question is about and that is that there could be an unconditional love that actually causes God to deny his own nature which he has revealed in his word uh there's there wouldn't be anything in Scripture it would substantiate that I still hear nothing except judgment in those comments and I think judgment belongs to God it doesn't belong to you it doesn't belong to me I don't think of the Cross as a sacrifice I think of the of the Cross as a place where the love of God was demonstrably revealed in the fact that no matter what people did to Jesus he responded by loving them they denied him he loved the denier they betrayed him he loved the betrayer they forsook him he loved the forsakers they persecuted him he loved the persecutors they killed him and the cross is the place where I think he demonstrates what the love of God is all about and it is quite unconditional there is nothing you can do and nothing you can be that separates you from the love of God that's the message I see in the Cross of Christ I don't see a sacrifice demanded by an Angry God to take care of guilt-ridden people and I think that's nothing except the religion of control which is finally not life-giving to most people Dr song or Bishop's Fong either way six-time Dr Spong excuse me is the Muslim or Hindu experience with God and their Revelation experience with God as valid as yours if so why are you a Christian if not who will Jesus judge when he returns that's a good question I don't think it's up to me to make that judgment I can tell you that Jesus is essential for me if I ever say that Jesus is therefore essential for everybody else I've spoken in a way that I think only God can speak I leave God to judge other people it's not my business to judge them Jesus is essential for me I walk the Christ path I believe that if I walk the Christ path and arrive into the mystery and wonder of God and that other people who walk a different path if they also arrive into the mystery and wonder of God then we can be brothers and sisters and I will not spit on the path that they walk and I hope they will not spit on the path I walk I have to walk my paths Jesus is a necessary to Salvation for me but I cannot say that Jesus is necessary for everybody else without presuming that I have the right to judge everybody else as if I'm God and I'm not God please know that vicious Fong just said when I speak like that I have spoken in a way only God can speak if you speak of Christianity is Superior or other than Islam and Buddhism that's exactly the point that's what God has done in his word and that's the fundamental difference between us this evening God has spoken in his word in that way it's not arrogant for me to accept what he said the point is if that's what he said then I have to accept it and he has said that in Jesus Christ I am the way the truth and the life no man comes the father but by me a question for Dr White Dr White um Paul discusses those who sin sexually as sinning against their own body given that text and perhaps any other specifically as it relates to homosexuality would you lump homosexuality along with say fornication and adultery into a like a special category of Greater sins well greater sins uh not in the sense of receiving uh from from God anything other than the Wrath that all sin is due and the separation from God that comes from that and that's why you have to have the sacrifice and that's why the New Testament writers speak of sacrifice and Define the cross within that way but they are possibly more personal and the Wrath is more immediate because it's a sin against our own body there are certain sins you can commit that there you can basically get away with it in this life but sins against your own body tend to sort of catch up with you in this life and as a result can be a little bit easier to see shall we say or illustrate but as far as there being a special category of sins that are somehow worse I think there are levels of judgment the Apostle Paul spoke of crazin and bethsaida it would be more tolerable in the day of judgment for Sodom and Gomorrah than crazy but that was based upon the level of revelation that they had received these people are rejecting the very incarnate Son of God whereas Sodom and more did not have that kind of Revelation given to them uh and so I think if we keep those categories straight we'll be able to understand uh how it is referring to there I still hear words like judgment a punishing parent deity demanding a sacrifice I wonder what kind of God it is that Demands a Sacrifice a human offering rather than a God who can say I love you like you are and I accept you for what you are I haven't got time to develop it tonight but let me tell you that the idea of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb comes out of the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur where a lamb was picked from the flocks who was sinless in the fact that Lambs lived below the level of human freedom and could not sin the lamb had to be physically perfect no broken bones and then the lamb was symbolic of what human beings yearned to be and then they slaughtered the lamb and they took the blood of the lamb and they sprinkle it all over The Mercy Seat of God in the holy of holies so that people could say now through the blood of this innocent lamb we have come into the presence of God and then the high priest would take some of the blood of the lamb and sprinkle it on the people so that they could be washed in the blood of the Lamb this was a sacrificial observance of Yom Kippur there's no question but that Jesus was interpreted by those Jewish people in the first century in terms of that liturgy there's also no no doubt that that liturgy stood for the human aspirations and yearnings to be at one with God and should not have been literalized into making God an ogre in the sky who demands a human sacrifice in making Jesus the victim and causing the rest of us to be guilt-ridden because we are responsible for the death of Jesus I don't believe that's good news and I don't believe that's a gospel message thank you Bishop nice to talk to a fellow in New Jersey tonight it seems like the sovereignty of God has come into question the Bible says faith in Hebrews enough faith is the substance of things hoped for in the evidence of Things Not Seen I'm wondering what where your faith is in well I think that's exactly right and to me that that's a great passage from Hebrews because Faith there doesn't mean believing a set of propositions faith means trusting God to be present in the world no matter what happens what faith means to me is the ability to walk into the unknown and to know that God is present it doesn't mean to be able to have God locked up in a little book that I can take with me and always be assured I think you need to embrace some uncertainty and some insecurity I don't believe that Christianity makes you secure I think Christianity gives you the courage to live in a radically insecure world and not fall apart because you trust that God is always present in the midst of that insecurity and that's a very different approach and by and large when I find people that find security in their religion I think their humanity is diminished and I think their religion becomes something that that alienates them from other people because they immediately become judgmental I have the truth you don't I'm okay you're not okay I don't believe the gospel is proclaimed by being hostile to other people the biblical doctrine of Faith always has an object and that object is God's revelation God has revealed his truth and that we can accept his promises and his truth the definition that Bishop spawn gave just simply isn't the definition of the writer of Hebrews gave so it becomes an issue where well what's the Authority for defining faith that way if you reject the inspiration of the text that you're dealing with then how can we possibly actually Define this in any other another way and I do not believe that God is locked up in a little book what I do believe is that God has given his Revelation and that I cannot begin to ignore it it does not give me authority to read his word he has not locked himself up into the book but what he wants us to know he has made sure that we can know so that we can grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ okay well powers that are Beyond me at this point have just stated that our debate has ended and our question time has ended so folks would you please thank these two gentlemen

Channel: Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Id: HxHYJykx4nQ

Length: 186min 49sec (11209 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 14 2014