"God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew"

"The Bible is a subject of interpretation: there is no doctrine, no prophet, no priest, no power, which has not claimed biblical sanctions for itself.”— Paul Tillich

"In the history of the Western world, however, this Bible has also left a trail of pain, horror, blood and death that is undeniable. Yet this fact is not often allowed to rise to consciousness. Biblical words have been used not only to kill, but even to justify that killing. This book has been relentlessly employed by those who say they believe it to be God's Word, to oppress others who have been, according to the believers, defined in the 'hallowed' pages of this text as somehow subhuman. Quotations from the Bible have been cited to bless the bloodiest of wars. People committed to the Bible have not refrained from using the cruellest forms of torture on those whom they believe to have been revealed as the enemies of God in these 'sacred' scriptures. A museum display that premiered in Florence in 1983, and later traveled to the San Diego Museum of Man in 2003, featured the instruments used on heretics by Christians during the Inquisition. They included stretching machines designed literally to pull a person apart, iron collars with spikes to penetrate the throat, and instruments that were used to impale the victims. The Bible has been quoted throughout Western history to justify the violence done to racial minorities, women, Jews and homosexuals. It might be difficult for some Christians to understand, but it is not difficult to document the terror enacted by believers in the name of the Bible.

How is it possible, we must ultimately wonder, that this book, which is almost universally revered in Western religious circles, could also be the source of so much evil? Can that use of the Bible be turned around and brought to an end? Can the Bible once again be viewed as a source—even an ultimate source—of life? Or is it too late and the Bible too stained? These are the themes I will seek to address in this volume...

When the excitement of Christmas Day was over that year, I placed my treasured new gift (of a Bible) on the table beside my bed and began that night a regular practice of reading it, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. That was more than sixty years ago. There have been few days in my life since that Christmas that I have not intentionally and intensely read and studied these words. I suppose I have worked through this sacred text from cover to cover some twenty to twenty-five times. Some individual books, like the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Genesis, I have read many more times than that. Because I loved this book so much and because I read it so carefully, I could not fail to notice its gory passages that did not jibe with what I had been told about either God or religion. I met in its pages things that were disturbing, malevolent and evil. That was how the dark side of the Bible first began to dawn on my consciousness.

Looking back, I believe now that these insights would have come to me even sooner had I not been what the Bible seems to regard as a privileged person. I do not refer to my social or economic status, which was modest to say the least, but to the fact that I was white, male, heterosexual and Christian. The Bible affirmed, or so I was taught, the value in each of these privileged designations. It was clearly preferable to be white than to be a person of color; male, in whom the image of God was clear, rather than female; heterosexual and therefore 'normal' rather than homosexual and therefore 'bnormal'; and Christian, which was, of course, the only true religion. I grew secure in each of these definitions.

I hope these brief autobiographical comments will make it clear that I do not come to this biblical interpretive task as an enemy of Christianity. I am a Christian, a deeply committed, believing Christian. I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, as some of my biblical scholar friends now identify themselves. I recognize that the Christian faith has traditionally claimed that its beliefs and practices are based on and supported by the Bible. I understand that centrality of this book. I write as one whose entire professional life has been lived to the service of that Christian church with which I am still joyfully identified. I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church at age twenty-four and elected one of its bishops at age forty-four...

My election as a bishop tempered that ambition but did not diminish my zest for teaching. Like my great mentor John A. T. Robinson in England, I interpreted the office of bishop as a teaching and writing office. The result of this commitment was that I both know and love the Bible deeply. I also recognize where its warts are.

I know what parts of it has been used to undergird prejudices and to mask violence. I have discovered that there is a strange ability among believers not to see the negative side of their religious symbols. It did not take a genius to realize that human conflicts the world over always seemed to have a religious component. Slowly I was also forced to acknowledge that every great battle that I had joined both as priest and bishop, to call the church into being what I believed the church had to be, was ultimately a battle against the way the Bible had been used throughout history. It was out of the Bible that the pious and devout people drew the definitions they sought to impose on powerless people and to justify the oppression that those powerful religious voices seemed eager to impose. It was strange and uncomfortable to come to the awareness that the people who quoted this book most often were opposed to the justice issues that I found so compelling. At first I convinced myself that the problem was not the Bible itself, but in the way the Bible was used. That, however, was a defensive and ultimately dishonest response. I had to come to the place where I recognized that the Bible itself was often the enemy. Time after time, the Bible, I discovered, condemned itself with its own words.

This was certainly true in the battle to overcome the racism and segregation that so deeply affected my childhood church in North Carolina. Quotations from the Bible were frequently employed in the racist battle to maintain segregation in which I, as a white person, was judged to be of greater worth than a black person. Quotations from the Bible were also the chief source of that very patriarchal prejudice by which I, as a male, profited and through which women were diminished.

The Bible was clearly the enemy when I began to address the way that Christians had treated the Jews throughout Christian history. My church had filled me with a deep-seated but Bible-based religious bigotry. I breathed it inside my congregation's life. Whenever the gospels said 'the Jews,' there was no escaping the fact that something evil was meant. This evil was acted out in the Western world again and again, culminating in the Holocaust, but not ending with it. I have dealt with the defacement of synagogues even in the twenty-first century. Religious bigotry is certainly still present in the rhetoric of certain preachers, such as the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who said on national television not only in my presence but in the presence of his Jewish interviewer, Larry King: 'God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.'"

The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love,
Bishop John Shelby Spong, HarperOne (April 12, 2005) pp. 4-12