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To: Augustinian monk

""For Protestants it does not really, really, make a difference whether Jesus Christ is really God or not.""

Bishop John Shelby Spong comes to mind.

"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.
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.
The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way." SNIP~

http://www.anglicantas.org.au/tasmaniananglican/200310-spong.html


12 posted on 11/15/2006 12:01:53 PM PST by OpusatFR ( ALEA IACTA EST. We have just crossed the Rubicon.)
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To: OpusatFR

What exactly are you claiming?


14 posted on 11/15/2006 12:56:22 PM PST by A.J.Armitage (http://calvinist-libertarians.blogspot.com/)
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To: OpusatFR; Alex Murphy; Dr. Eckleburg; RnMomof7
Oh good grief. J. Gresham Machen directly addressed every single one of these 83 years ago in Christianity and Liberalism.
15 posted on 11/15/2006 1:06:07 PM PST by Frumanchu (Historical Revisionism: When you're tired of being on the losing side of history.)
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To: OpusatFR
Bishop Spong is no more a Protestant than Hans Kung is a Catholic, if the terms, Protestant and Catholic, have any meaning. So-called liberal Christianity is in fact another religion: secular humanism with a "Christian" veneer.
28 posted on 11/15/2006 2:10:35 PM PST by Wallace T.
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