Posted on 01/29/2005 7:33:32 PM PST by sionnsar
I know, I know, it's shooting fish in a barrel, but as long as John Spong keeps saying these silly things, there will be people who listen, so it's time once again to go red-herring hunting:
"Sex without any sort of loving relationship is always wrong. It's appropriate only inside commitment. What's the level of commitment? For me, it's marriage."
But for anyone else, it could be the commitment to go out to McDonald's tomorrow evening. And once they've made that bold step, it's time to hit the sack!
The words of a conservative preacher? No. The words of super-liberal John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal bishop, author and lecturer whose views on the Virgin birth ("myth"), the Resurrection ("it's not physical"), and gays in the Christian church ("Once a prejudice begins to be debated in the church, it's dying") are heretical or refreshing, depending on your point of view.
Spong's fans needn't fear that he's backpedaling. Although marriage is his preferred level of commitment, he says, expecting young people to remain celibate until marriage isn't realistic. Teaching them to treat sexuality with respect is.
"Over the last 500 years, we've lowered the age of puberty [an amazing act of control over human evolution, wouldn't you say?] and raised the age of marriage," Spong says in a phone interview from his New Jersey home. "We've created a space of 10-15 years."
Hmm. This raises some interesting mathematical possibilities. One is that puberty takes place at 12 and people can't get married until they are 22-27 years old. But I don't know of any jurisdictions in America where that's the case. People can marry with parental consent as young as 13 (girls in New Hampshire) or without parental consent as young as 15 (in Mississippi). Nebraska is the state that makes people wait the longest if they don't have parental consent, which is 19 years old (48 states use 18). That means Spong figures puberty typically begins anywhere from age 9 down to two years before conception (for girls in New Hampshire), in order to account for his 10-15 years of "space" (otherwise known as Freud's Conundrum, or The Time For Keeping Your Pants On in the layperson's vernacular).
Yet traditional Christianity still preaches the same message it did in the Middle Ages, he says: "Can you imagine any other creature coming into sexual maturity and being told you can't use that for another 15 years?"
So this is the Spongian doctrine of humanity: we are nothing but rutting animals, devoid of reason or free will, unable to control our passions, whose teen-aged years are nothing but a search for sex partners, and who certainly can't be expected to keep their pants zipped until such an indefinite, far-off event as marriage. Who says no one believes what they see on television? Spong has obviously gotten all his ideas about sexuality, and especially the sexuality of young people, from too many long years of watching Dawson's Creek reruns.
I used to get daily Bible readings from beliefnet.com. But the Spong banner ads on the side were increasingly creepy, so I stopped.
Perhaps Sprong is turning into a one - point Calvinist. He seems to recognize the total depravity of man. Now if he could just learn about regeneration and sanctification....
Maybe double predestination has Spong in its grip?
Spong. isn't even a Christian, if one defines Christinity by belief in the faith taught in the Bible, but ECUSA has never tossed that non-Christian out and he still receives his pension.
"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."
Why is the Bible completely wrong? Because Spong says so, based on the name-calling of famous scientists, whose works he never could comprehend, but he certainly knew their names.
He is certainly headed somewhere.
INTREP - The Book of Judges says that everyman does what is right in his own eyes.
Criticize Spong's theology and morality if you wish, but his biology is spot on. Girls mature *far* faster now than they did in the past. It is not unusual for girls to start puberty at age 8-9 and have their first cycle at age 9-10. This *is* a function of human evolution, because those groups with the lowest ages of puberty are proportionately having more children.
Historically, girls married very young, at 13-15 (usually a year after their periods began.) When life expectancies were 30 years, that made sense, and in that sense our biology *was* consistent with our social mores.
As far as jurisdictional ages of marriage, parents are not going to *permit* their children to marry at 16, and it wouldn't matter anyway, because they can't financially support themselves.
Please - seeing the words Spong and Calvinist in the same sentence makes my head hurt ......
Ryle
He is in jeopardy. Unless he gets straightened out, he is facing an unimaginably painful eternity, being punished for making others "twice the sons of hell" he is.
Spong is wrong.
Spong is possessed. Literally.
I thought that the puberty thing was mainly because we eat better and have superior medical care?
I've also heard it attributed to the rising rates of obesity in children. Obesity can have an effect on hormones and heavy girls are often the first to menstruate.
Some tinfoil-hatters also claim early puberty is caused by the chemicals in non-organic foods that most people eat.
indeed - what happened to control? If we don't expect teens to be chaste, they will lower themselves to our expectations. if we hold them to high expectations and don't preach this watered-down pseudo-Christianity of Spong, teens will respond. Heck, I started my period at 13 but managed to keep my pants on til my wedding night when I was 23. Of course, unlike Spong, I thought Heaven and Hell were pretty "relevant." It also helped that only two men were interested in me during that period :) Both were good Catholic gentlemen, and I ended up marrying the second.
Got to disagree with you there. Earlier puberty is a function of superior nutrition and fat accumulation. Artificial light may also play a part.
The groups with the earliest onset of puberty in this country are the groups with highest abortion rates.
LOL!
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