For anyone who is interested, several of his writings can be found here:
http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/vox.html#spong
For example, one of the Myers Park church members organized a big show - I'll leave his name out of this - but those of you in Charlotte might have seen it. It was called "My Son, The Forgiver" - or something like that - and it went on a multi-denominational church tour in the area. They'd asked me to do the guitfiddling for it - but I declined because I didn't have the time. But I went to see it - and was completely amazed. The wholesale reinterpretation of Jesus's sayings was absolutely shameless. "If Jesus were alive today, he would embrace the gay cause blah, blah...the people of his time misunderstood his message...blah blah." This play would have made the author of that self-indulgent book "Conversations with God" blush, for its hubris in deigning to completely rewrite biblical history, quotes and facts to suit the "progressives" of the UMC.
So if you want to join a completely "hip" church that suits the momentary fashionable whims of "progressive" society - check out the Myers Park and Dilworth's UMC's.
I grew up Episcopal, but the beginnings of this drift two to three decades ago drove me to the LCMS. But now, even in the LCMS, I am seeing signs of a desire for "tolerance" and "inclusiveness" as evinced in a quote from my pastor saying, "...we must be careful which sinners we say we will not accept in the church", to which I responded, "How about unrepentant ones?"
So the battle rages....Keep up the good fight all....
Retired Bishop Spong raising cyber-hackles (The Bishop of Cybersex)
He should leave orthodox Christianity alone!!
...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>
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.
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.
spong is an idiot.