Billy must not really believe the Bible he's been preaching for some 40+ years.
What happened to the "no man comes to the Father except by Me" clause,Billy?
Must have been pressing his lips to the posterior of Slick Willy a bit too much recently...
I think Billy is on a lot of medication and I have noticed that even great people of God can start doubting as they grow older. I don't know why that happens but it does.
Have you ever read Paul Tillich? I read him in a a philosophy of religion course, my freshman year in college (a required course). I was shocked at the implications of this philosophy because the college was related to fundamentalist church that I had attended most of my life. I went home and asked my minister (who also taught at the seminary)if he agreed with Paul Tillich and he said yes. My next question is why is that not what we hear in the sermons, then. His answer was that you have to preach to the level of the congregation and preach the type of message that they want and need to hear. The church was an Evangelical Congregational and the college was Evangelical United Bretheren (now part of the Methodist Church) They shared a seminary because they were the same church at one time.
Here's a sample of Paul Tillich.
God is the answer to the question implied in the human awareness of the finitude. God concerns us ultimately. Whatever we grasp as our ultimate concern we call "god." "god" must be encountered by us in concreteness (214). Tillich uses the lowercase "g" to stress the necessity of concreteness over against ultimacy in the idea of god. Yet, our ultimate concern must transcend every concrete concern. Therefore, Tillich uses the uppercase "G" to stress the transcendent dimension over the concrete concern. However, in transcending the finite, our ultimate concern breaks off the concreteness of a being-to-being relationship with us. This is the indispensable inner conflict in the idea of God. For Tillich, this conflict is the guide to examine the history of religion. Tillich argues that polytheism rising from the need for concreteness or absoluteness motivates a step toward monotheism; and that one’s "need for a balance between the concrete and the absolute drives him toward trinitarian structures" (221). Trinitarian monotheism is not that it allows only one god, but that the ultimacy prevails over the concrete. It is rather a qualitative than quantitative characteristic of God. It also allows human to speak of the living God in whom the concrete and the ultimate are united. "Trinitarian monotheism is concrete monotheism, the affirmation of the living God" (228). The question is how we describe this living God? For Tillich, God is being-itself, not a being among other beings. To describe the relationship between being-itself and finite beings, Tillich takes the word, "ground." For Tillich, God is the ground of being, the ground of the structure of being. God as being itself is the ground of the ontological structure of being. In other words, every ontological being has its power to be in being itself, participate in the ground of being. All accounts of God are expressed through what we comprehend. Can we know God? For Tilich, the answer is clear: we can. Adopting the theory of analogia entis (analogy of being), that is, "that which is infinite is being itself and because everything participates in being itself" (239), The theory of analogia entis explains the possibility of knowing and saying anything about God. However, for Tillich, the analogia entis justifies our ways of saying about God only under a fact that "God must be understood as being itself" " (240). Thus, existential approach to God through the category of finitude must be described symbolically. God is the ground of being, being-itself; who concerns us ultimately. Thus, God is our ultimate concern.
Right. He's said it more times than I can recall in 40 years.
He said it on [& to] LKL, just prior to this last NYC thing.