Posted on 03/25/2002 7:44:16 AM PST by US admirer
Spong warns not to take Bible too literally
Controversial religious figure John Shelby Spong took the pulpit at Dilworth United Methodist Sunday and urged more than 600 worshippers not to believe everything they read in the Bible.
The retired Episcopal bishop, who was born and raised in Dilworth, is best known for questioning Christian tenets such as Jesus' virgin birth and his physical resurrection. Spong's Palm Sunday sermon focused on challenging those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God.
"The book we see as the book of life has for years been used as a weapon of oppression, and it's still being used to justify hatred and oppression," Spong said... (see URL for full article)
...Mary Cohen of Huntersville, who was raised Roman Catholic, said Spong's views make Christianity easier to swallow. [Emphasis added]
Are these people conscious of what they're saying, or is the journalist deliberately wagging?
Yeah, John Spong is who I'd want leading Sunday school classes in my neighborhood. </sarcasm>
LOL -- very good riposte! Tks!
Logic's a bitch, eh? ;-)
Of course, he'd vigorously deny that -- but then, he would never be able to tell us precisely why it would be wrong.
Both churches have been under attack for years by cabals of gay seminarians.....a UMC bishop died a few years ago, of AIDS, which kinda tells you how high up the rot has gone. The Anglican bishops in Africa and the Third World are fighting a valorous rearguard action against the English and American "reconcilers" (gays), and they may yet pull it out if American Episcopals realize their chanceries are in the hands of the enemy and kick over the table and shoot out the lights like the Southern Baptists did.
The Catholics' pederast problem has been outed, but the Episcopalians and UMC will continue to rot.....and the press will help the conspirators by continuing to cover up. They only went for the bait when the Catholic peds came out, because it was a chance to attack the Catholic Church -- the Big One. The media Leftists' strategy has been to pour obloquy on the Church hierarchy, and keep telling everyone that the miscreants are "pedophiles" when in fact they're homosexual pederasts -- John Spong's kind of people.
oohhhh....source please.
Your reply reminds me of the pharisees who insisted that they could remain "technically" moral by outwardly observing God's commands, eventhough they harbored sin within their heart.
But anyways I was just being playful. Just remember the lesson of the pharisees and that adherence to the letter of the law (technically, we are all god's "creatures") is really not going to cut it when the King returns. He will know exactly what you meant.
From A Call for a New Reformation
by Bishop John Shelby Spong
Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity in The Voice. I will post my theses on the Internet and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world. My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.
To sum up - God is dead, Jesus' death was useless and He stayed dead, atonement is barbaric, miracles never happened and never will, prayer is pointless, rules are relative to the time, and heaven is a myth. Preach it, Brother Spong. Just do us Christians a favor and call it something else.
As wonderful a book as that is, "Mere Christianity" is not what I would consider going "all the way back".
The persecutions and distruction of unapproved gosples was not completely successful. Funny that the parts edited out were things like 'you can fight city hall' just when christians were taking over city hall.
Maybe we need a hostage exchange program. We'll give the Episcopalians all of our liberal lefty crazies, and we'll gladly receive their conservative, traditional clergy and people -- especially the Anglo-Catholics.
WHy would I care what Ignatius has to say?
Perhaps because Ignatius, having been ordained by Peter, Paul, and John, was in a position to know the authentic Gospel far better than that of the Gnostic nutcases who wrote the trash you prefer.
That's a nice way to address the first person to compile the gospels into a "New Testament," as Marcion did in 140 A.D.
Marcion was also an anti-Semite who rejected the entire Old Testament and the Pauline Epistles. I prefer Christ's choice of Paul over your choice of Marcion.
That would be a trick, since the Emperor Theodosius made heresy punishable by death in 380 A.D. and it's around that perios that heresy was effectively quashed.
False. Death as punishment for heresy was unknown until the Middle Ages. Nestorius was not put to death, nor was Sabellius, nor were any number of other 5th Century heretics.
As for heresy being "quashed," what do you suppose was going at at 2 Constantinople (AD 381), Ephesus (AD 431), Chalcedon (AD 451), and all of the other councils. I guess the Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites, and the various other 4th and 5th Century heresies just really didn't happen, huh?
I hope you find your way out of your gnostic New Age cult, because it's not the truth.
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