Sorry GOm - sometimes I forget that everyone else isn’t familiar with the things I am familiar with 
Here’s a site with a cite:
http://www.mac-2001.com/philo/scottsman.htm
The point being that FC’s claim that Christians believe certain things. Then when confronted with a Christian who believes differently, the response is, well, no TRUE Christian would believe that.
Make sense now?
Btw, do we have any actual proof of Spong’s allegations?
Who is the person who supposedly threatened Spong?
hmmm
He uses the word believers, plural, which implies more than one person allegedly threatened his life. When did these events happen? What was done about it? Police reports should be available to back up his claim.
Or could this be merely more attention-grabbing hype?
Now I’m real curious about this guy…
Yes. Thanks.
I am more than a little frustrated with the lack of direction and substantive discernment evidenced in this thread thus far. I have repeatedly sought answers defining the root basis for Bishop Spong’s declarations as posted in the OP. I have heard nothing to support his astonishingly abrupt dismissal of the essence of Christian faith. What I have heard is a rather pie-in-the-sky fancy that God is whomever and whatever any and every person makes Him out to be. Sheer arrogance. His sweeping rejection of the elements of our faith is to be replaced by some happy-pappy oh-so-reminiscent-of-the-60’s updated version of “If this rendering of god makes you feel good, then he’ll do!”, or perhaps a shorter phrase would be “Christianity? Don’t like it? Reverse it!”
I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: Does God define Himself , or do we define God?
Perhaps Paul’s words of so long ago will make some sense:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!..I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I am preaching is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”
Romans 1:6-8,11-12
We define God. God has never spoken that we know of.
Sez Paul, not God.
Draw a distinction between “the Gospel” and what people have embroidered on it.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a way to interpret how God can be Three Persons and yet One God.
The doctrines about Scriptural infallibility are manmade.
And I am flat out disgusted with the idea that good thinking people are “buying into namby pamby feelgood thinking” – that’s a classic accusation by those who feel their own faith threatened by people disagreeing with them. (I’m not saying that’s Na Sultainne’s reason – but it’s a common one.)
Make explicit criticisms of Spong, and I’ll be glad to debate them with you (and I might even agree with you). Start a new thread on “the basics of the Christian faith” and I’ll be with you in a New York minute.
I thought the discussion was going somewhat substantive – if you see otherwise, please be explicit (or if you have been and have not been answered, link back to the proper post, and I at least will try to respond to what you ahd to say).
hmmm
Why did you bring that up? Does Spong not accept the Trinity?
Speaking for myself only, it’s very saddening to see so much garbage being peddled as “Christianity” these days.
Christianity does NOT make people feel good. Not at first. It makes us realize how awful sin is, how bad we are in when compared to the pure holiness of God, and what our eternal destination will be unless we accept God’s freely provided pardon for our sins.
As a famous song says:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
It’s obnoxious and ludicrous. The more I read of Spong the more I find him to be a publicity hound.
I’m to the point where I strongly doubt anything that Spong claims. I will look in some of our libraries to see if they might have his book, but I want to see some police reports to verify his accusations of death threats. He has close to zero credibility with me.
Could the fundamentalists here name someone whom they do consider to be a legitimate, non-heretical religious visionary?
Maybe this is how it makes you feel, and that’s unfortunate for you, but that does not mean that your own personal self-loathing has to be the template for all other Christians. If that’s the most you can get from your faith then maybe you ought to try something else.
Your insistence on police reports is childish and unproductive. My own googling around on the matter show that Spong has received at least sixteen death threats, all of them from fundies. Presumably, Spong turns over all such letters to the police, and reports are filed but they are not linkable on the internet. If you want to call him a liar, that’s your prerogative but I think you should offer some kind of evidence that Spong is, or ever has been, a dishonest person. That fact that he disagrees with you philosophically does not in any way make him a liar. Accusing him of lying about death threats is not only an arumentum ad hominem, it’s not even a supported ad hominem.
Plus, let’s remember that death threats and violence are part of the stock-in-trade of Christian neanderthals in America. We went over this before with FriendofGod. Generally if someone in a school district opposes school prayer, they get called an atheist and a Satanist and have to deal with threats to their safety. One Jewish student in such a school was told things like, “Hitler missed one.” I’m not even sure he was involved in the school prayer case- he was in the district, and since he wasn’t Christian, the “you’re for me or against me” attitude turned against him.
All I will say about this is that I don’t want the fox guarding the chickens.
Conversion experiences do differ, GOM. When I first encountered the Lord, the moment wasn’t about hellfire or my sins - neither of which I thought about at all that night - or even about me at all really. It was about God.
Neither your first experience with the Lord, nor mine, are universal.
Well, that’s the problem right there, Poly - his complaint in this regard isn’t with the Church (be that the Episcopal Church, or with Christianity in general) but with an image embedded in the popular culture, in Far Side and Frank and Ernest cartoons. It’s got a certain amount of cultural inertia behind it (even the ridicule of the image seems to help perpetuate it), the way there’s a good bit of cultural inertia behind associating split-personality with the term ‘schizophrenia’. But Spong can’t really do anything about that, nor can anyone else. People will probably crack jokes based on that conception of God in the year 2525.
Not that I perceive it as much of a problem. Hardly anyone believes in that image of God, and even those who don’t believe in God at all, don’t think that’s what we theists mean by ‘God’, even if they aren’t sure what we mean instead.
So I think he’s entirely setting up a strawman in the whole theism business.
Yes. No question about it.
My apologies for being flip, but any attempt to say anything about God, including a statement about God’s existence, is an inadvertent attempt to define God. So yes, we define Him, or try to at least.
But as a Christian, I believe that there is a God that interacts with mankind, and reveals as much of himself to us as we are able and willing to handle.
I would have to say, though, that in the Bible, we encounter both simultaneously. We read the tales of God’s revelations to mankind, but those revelations come to us through the limitations of human words - and ‘define’ and ‘limit’ are just about the same thing.
I don’t know if that helps anyone’s position here, including yours or mine. I do know that Spong in WCMCOD makes a big deal about how much a part of the problem it is that the existing images of God are in words. But I’ll be damned if I know what he’s going to replace them with - flashing lights and musical tones, maybe? He doesn’t say, but I’m sure he’ll heroically defy existing religious conventions, and bravely strike out into the unknown, to find his new God-content.
hmmm
Are we both reading the same words?
What a fascinating twist…
A Christian asks for proof of some extremely serious allegations, but apparently is being told that Spong’s word alone is enough proof. Funny how that’s not convincing on any other debate thread…
Hi Poly,
Do you happen to have a link about this back to the Parlor?
I would like to read it, if you’ve ever posted it.
What kind of “proof” would be acceptable to you GOM? The police reports are not linkable. Do you find it somehow unbelievable that religious fanatics would make death threats. Do you think that Spong would make such easily falsifiable statements if they weren’t true? In a case like this I just use common sense. What is more likely, that such a higghly controversial figure as Bishop Spong would receive a few death threats, or that he would completely fabricate that assertion out of thin air? If he were lying, it would be realtively easy to uncover and his critics would love nothing more than to expose something like that. I can also consider the man’s credibility as a whole. There is simply no evidence that Spong has ever been dishonest about anything else, so I have no reason to disbelieve him now. You are fallaciously assuming that because he is not your kind of Christian that he can’t possibly be an honorable human being. That is utterly bankrupt reasoning
I’m not a fundamentalist, but I am a conservative member of the Church of England (High Church tradition, of course). I think C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton were legitimate, non-heretical religious visionaries. Regrettably, no one with their particular fire is writing today.
UnuMondo