John Shelby Spong is an Episcopalian Bishop (retired) who is one of the most important and revolutionary Christian voices in the world today. He is the author of several provocative books such as Why Christianity Must change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. He has aroused much controversy not only because of his stances supporting gay marriage and the ordination of women, but also because of a theological viewpoint which challenges such things as the virgin birth, miracles and the physical resurrection of Christ. Spong has even charged that theistic religion itself is outdated and must change. Here is a list of 12 provocative assertion which Spong has challenged Christians to debate:
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.
To me, reading Spong is like breathing pure oxygen but to to conservative Christians, needless to say, he is seen as a radical, an "atheistic Christian, " a heretic, etc.
I’d like to get a debate going here on Spong. I welcome both conservative and liberal Christian views. (Polycarp, since you, yourself are a liberal Episcopalian I’d especially like to get your take on Spong) I’d also like to ask atheists and agnostics if they find Spong’s rationalist views on Christianity to be more appealing to them than the more traditional dogmatism
