Book review By Sophie Shulman

the sins of scripture J. S. Spong Harper Collins 2005 ISBN: 0060762055

If asked to define in one short statement, The Sins of Scripture, written by J.S. Spong, I would say, “A brutally honest book by a highly intellectual expert of unshakeable integrity.” John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ for more than twenty years; he taught at Harvard, at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, and lectured all over the world. He is the author of 15 books on the topics of progressive Christianity. So, his opinions matter. With horrifying clarity Spong explores, as James Carroll did in another excellent book, Constantine’s Sword, how the Christian Church for two millennia has planted and nurtured rabid anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust. Says Spong, "The darkest and bleakest side of the Christian faith is revealed in the Christians' treatment of the Jews throughout history. Anti-Semitism is a terrifying prejudice that is rooted so deeply in the Church life..." With unassuming simplicity, Spong demonstrates how religion has justified the divine rights of rulers and horrors of the Crusades; how it has approved of slavery and of Inquisition; how the Bible has been used to ban scientific progress, to denigrate homosexuals and is still being used to support the treatment of women as inferior beings. Of religion Spong says: “…Even in the twenty-first century religion remains one of the most divisive and hostile forces in the world. …Religion has so often been the source of the cruelest evil,” perpetually breeding fundamentalism and fanaticism. The book is also a profound theological and historical study of Biblical origins expressed in language available to a layperson. Spong reflects on the question: “From where does evil come?” Having disproved the founding Christian myths of the primary human sin of disobedience to God as the cause of the fall from primordialperfection, Spong submits: “It [lack of perfection] rises rather from the incompleteness of the evolutionary process... We do not need to be punished either in this life or in the life to come, nor do we need to have some mythical god figure take our punishment for us. What we need is the power to take the next step into a new and more complete humanity…” At the end Spong goes so far as to voice a rhetorical question: Does there remain any room for Christianity in humanlife at all? And he answers: 'I do not know...' But, he concludes, as Jesus is Love and there is no life without love, he chooses to believe that Jesus remains in people's life.