Even a Stopped Clock is Right Twice a Day

From National Catholic Register-

You may want to sit down for this, but once upon a time flamboyantly apostate Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong actually thrilled me with a prescient bit of insight into Scripture! How is this possible?

Well, there is a basic principle at work in the universe called the Gomer Pyle Axiom of High and Low Expectations. It works this way: when you expect great things from somebody, then merely above average performances are often denounced as disappointing failures. So, when Pixar, whose worst movies still tower over the junk Hollywood emits, makes Cars, people groan at what a weak effort it is, even though Cars still dwarfs 99% of all other movies and 99.9% of all other animated films.

But when a guy like Gomer Pyle, from whom nobody expects anything at all, bursts forth in a voice of not-awful-but-certainly-not-very-good tone and talent, he is hailed as a New Caruso because we weren’t expecting anything at all from him.

It’s that “Wow! He didn’t utterly suck!” thrill that I am describing, because John Shelby Spong once, albeit briefly, scaled the snowy summit of common sense. Addressing the sort of people who blindly insist that Jesus never existed, and therefore appearing smart in comparison to them, we discover Spong declared:

"He was no myth," says Spong, who came through Toronto recently to promote his latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. "He really existed."

Read more:

 http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/even-a-stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day/#ixzz46YOb0DRP