An Exclusive Interview with John Shelby Spong David: It’s clear that Jesus was an advocate for women. Yet the early church quickly became patriarchal. So how did the feminine become buried? Bishop Spong: Well, it didn’t get buried, it just got repressed. It’s the old issue of the yin and the yang. We repressed the feminine as deeply as we could in Western Christianity. One of the symbols of this repression of the feminine is the fact that all of the authors of what we refer to as the Holy Scriptures are male voices. These are mostly Semitic male voices, though in our world they would be equated with white male voices. So the Bible has neither the voice of a person of color nor the voice of a woman. It’s
really strange that we would deny 50% of the human race representation in the Scriptures. If I talk about the “canon” of Scripture, many people who aren’t even involved with the church now know what I’m referring to, since so many have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. One of the reasons I regret that the canon of Scripture has been closed is that we aren’t able to add voices like Hildegard, Julian of Norwich, and many others from throughout history who could give us insight from the feminine side of life. When I say that the canon has been closed, I am referring to the fact that the Scriptures have been the same, with no additions, since they were Cinally deCined —though there’s some debate on the precise date. But the canon was pretty well established by the end of the second century.