Bear in mind that GOM has stated outright that all non-Christians are “workers of iniquity.”
The reason I directed the question at the fundamentalists is because it seems to me that there’s no room for visionaries in fundamentalism. According to FCism, God gave us his plan, and he explained it clearly, and that’s that. FCism is predicated on the idea that you already have all the answers, so it seems to me that any visionary must also be a heretic.
To be precise, I should say that GOM has said that all people who are not 100% doctrinally correct, yet presume to be members of the same religion that he is, are workers of iniquity. Perhaps GOM could tell us whether he thinks all atheists or Jews are WOI as well?
Forgive me if this has already been asked, but I was wondering if Na Sultainne and others could clarify something for me:
How many of Spong’s theses can one agree with before one is no longer a Christian?
Clearly twelve won’t do, but what if someone agrees with three of them? Are they still a Christian?
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Please pardon a dumb question. Would you explain to me exactly what that term means? I know Lewis has been a blessing to many Christians and non-Christians as well.
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Amen to that.
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I don’t know. This is the first I have heard about these allegations. I would still like to see one shred of** proof**. After all this IS the Straight Dope board. It seems like a reasonable request. Instead I’m told to have faith in Spong. Sorry. That doesn’t cut it for me. If you take him at his word, that’s okay with me. You’ll just have to pardon me for being a temporary cynic in this case.
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Maybe nobody’s bothered to look… I dunno. It’s sure something to ponder.
Even ONE name would be an excellent start. Then if you can provide a date and a location I will be happy to look into this further…
Ooops!
Thought I was responding to Poly in that post above…
Sheesh. My apologies to RTFirefly and Polycarp. I probably confused both of you.
:smack:
That’s true of course.
However, I do think it’s only fair to hold Mr. Spong to the same level of proof that you would expect of any other person making seemingly outrageous allegations. In every other thread I have seen you post in, you would agree with my position. So why do you give Spong a free pass?
GOM, I responded some time ago to your comment on this, with more than a little asperity, but owing to the grace of God, “the hamsters ate my post.” In point of fact, he does give a few specifics of incidents where he has either been threatened or a religious conservative has flat-out falsified his position in an effort to discredit him, in his autobiography. Unfortunately, a quick check through it failed to give me any specifics to post in response, and it’s not indexed under “death threats” or “misrepresentation.” I’ll reread the appropriate sections and post examples as I come on them, over the next few days, if that’ll be satisfactory proof to you.
I think it’s a fair request – although as noted, one cannot expect to find online evidence of police records of correspondence threatening him turned over by him to them – it’s not the sort of thing that is normally made available to the general public over the Internet. I could check with Mrs. Spong to find out what is public record, if you wish.
Ah. There it is…
I see. I did a little googling of my own and found 57,400 sites with proof of UFOs. Can I assume, with my overwhelming “proof”, that you now believe in UFOs?
You see my point? Your standard of proof does not seem to meet the standard for this board.
No thanks Poly. No point in upsetting her.
I’ll try to locate his book. Then I might have more questions.
Thanks Poly, but unnecessary. I learned years ago that posts of that type have nothing to do with me and instead reflect entirely on the poster who uses that style. Although I might just skip over certain posts, I have discovered, when I read some of them, that I have to add additional people to my prayer list. It’s obvious that some people are really hurting inside and they need the Lord.
I’m still learning…
.02
I would highly recommend Rowan Williams, who recently became Archbishop of Canterbury. He writes with both fire and beauty. I highly recommend Resurrection and The Wound of Knowledge. A few of his shorter essays are online in various places, and I’d be happy to point you to them as well if you like.
Relax. I consider it an honor to have been confused with Polycarp! 
(Disclosure: I am not a Christian and know very little about Christianity. I was brought up to be a Hindu.)
Well… this discussion that started out with defining the fundamental notions behind Christianity and whether Spong’s vision can be called “Christian” has changed quite a bit in character since page 2. But, I thought to offer my 2 cents on some of the initial points thrown out in the thread.
A poster wrote that if the concept of a Saviour is not important, then why not consider Buddhism as your religion instead of Christianity ? Therein lies a point that to my eyes is important to this debate. If you think of each religion as containing core principles, at which point do religions start to separate from one another? At which point can an individual differentiate oneself as Christian, Buddhist or Hindu?
At the outset, Buddha’s eight-fold path rests on the simple principles of kindness, compassion, honesty, tolerance, restraint and non-violence. All the major religions preach these values. So at the humane level, it becomes difficult to separate religions. The second level that IMHO starts to cause some differentiation is the nature of God. The notion of a supernatural God is important to Christianity while Buddha’s ideas exist within the domain of Man. Hinduism OTOH involves itself with both the notion of “human” God(s) who in fact take mortal forms and the notion of an ethereal omnipresent omnipotent all-pervading luminous God completely beyond Man’s comprehension. (The latter is closer to the notion of the Holy Spirit?). The third level where the most differences start to arise involve the texts/scriptures, mythology/epics, history of the people and their culture, and theologians and their interpretations. At this level, one can see significant separation between various denominations within each religion.
Now, considering the above (which must be obvious to many here), Spong appears to be defining his religion (whatever that may be) at the first level at which it is a difficult task to even separate the major religions. Unless he addresses at least level two successfully, it would be a stretch to call his vision “Christian”. OTOH, if his call is for a completely different way to define religion itself, as in - if he is arguing that level one coupled with an idea of a transcendental God is adequate to define religion, then one can posit that all religions are similar to one another (which would solve many of the world’s problems actually ;)) and in which case one is bound to ask if he finds Buddha as inspiring as Jesus?
And now GOM comes along and posts yet another example of this:
As hard as this may be for you to understand GOM, some people really do just get pissed off at you, and it really doesn’t indicate some “God-shaped-vacuum”, or mask some deep hurt from not believing in God like you do. In some cases, people just find you annoying. No, really.
Then please read what your “opponents” have posted without adding your own interpretations on to the plain meaning of the words.
You make one very pertinent point - you called for a cite for Spong’s death threats, and since we (me, Poly, et. al.) are the ones making the claim, the burden of proof is on us. I shall also attempt to look through my “vast Spong collection” and dig up further information to satisfy your questioning.
In the future maybe you could try to not take offense when none was directed towards you. Your name was not in my post. I wasn’t thinking about you. There is another poster on this board who clearly is hurting. There are obvious signs. I will keep the name between myself and the Lord, but I imagine Poly has noticed the same thing I have.
I’d have to revise that somewhat, litost. I’d say the second level you describe defines the family of religions one is in. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share very similar concepts of the nature of God, so at that second level, there is little to distinguish one faith from either of the other two.
FWIW, I think there is a necessity in having some idea where the outer bounds of one’s faith lie. Whether it matters or not in the heavenly scheme of things, not everyone is a Christian. Not even everyone who self-identifies as a Christian is a Christian. (If I didn’t believe in God, but grew up on and loved the Christian traditions, no longer believing in God would still mean I wasn’t a Christian, regardless of whether I self-identified as one.)
That’s why the classical creeds were written: to say, “in order to be accepted as a Christian, these are the things you have to believe.” Spong doesn’t like the classical creeds, of course. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of that doubt and get to the basics. There are two reasons why I don’t regard Spong as a Christian, no matter how he self-identifies, and those are his beliefs on the Crucifixion and Resurrection, which I discussed in a post back on page 2.
As long as he regards the Crucifixion as being an unfortunate interruption of a life that should have continued, rather than being the intended and necessary central reason of Jesus’ incarnation (“When [Jesus’] incredible life came violently and prematurely to an end…” (WCMCOD, p. 116)), then he’s preaching something other than Christ crucified. And that, says Paul, is what we’re preaching; that’s the heart of Christianity.
And despite Polycarp’s explanation, I’m not favorably disposed towards the notion of a non-bodily resurrection of Christ: the empty tomb is at the centre of the Resurrection stories; in fact, the earliest one consists of nothing but. This is not like the tales of differing genealogies; this is the heart of the Resurrection story. Either the disciples were confronted with the mystery of the empty tomb, or they weren’t. If they weren’t, then the Resurrection story is a lie. If they were, but it was really irrelevant, then the story is also a lie. The empty tomb needs to mean something in this story - and something more than, “if we don’t resort to imagery of bodily resurrection, nobody will ‘get’ it.” The Good News doesn’t need to get packaged and sold as something it’s not, and it didn’t need that treatment in 29 A.D., either.
Spong? Christian? I say no way.
It can also be argued, however, that the empty tomb is a direct lift from Mithraism superimposed over over the over the crucifixion story to make metaphysical sense of what seemed to be an inexplicable and unacceptable event. There is no actual *proof/i] of an empty tomb, after all and I think that John Crossan has convicingly argued that it was very unlikely that Jesus as ever taken off the cross at all.
I would argue that Christian soteriology as informed by the sacrifice/atonement/resurrection pradigm is really Paulism more than Christianity. The teachings of Jesus, himself, really had nothing to do with all of that. Jesus’ essential message was about love, acceptance, compassion, etc. If I just read the parables and sayings of Jesus without regard to the editorializing of the Gospelers or the letters of Paul, I do not see Jesus claiming to be God, or the Messiah, or any essential message about accepting him as a Savior, accepting a “sacrifice,” or really, any substantial theology at all. Jesus was an ethical teacher, (I think) a mystic, and perhaps a utopian visionary. I think one could found an ethical and spiritual system based solely on the ethical teachings of Jesus, which would have every right to claim authority in the teachings of Jesus, and which would not have to require a belief in any salvation. It would not be traditional Christianity, but I think it would still be Christianity.
Of course there’s no proof of an empty tomb - but there’s no proof of the existence of God, either.
I don’t know who John Crossan is. Plenty of people have argued various things about the Crucifixion, including that Jesus had plotted to survive it, appearing to die and be resurrected. At any rate, how can one say someone’s made a convincing argument about an event we can’t even prove happened to begin with?
What I, as a Christian, have to go by is what Paul and the Gospel writers recorded. If they lacked integrity in what they wrote, then
Christianity is without integrity from the beginning and is fundamentally suspect. (I obviously don’t believe that, but that would be the intellectual consequence.)
When Jesus is on trial before the High Priest, he claims to be the Messiah, the Son of God. You can call the passages where Jesus predicts his death and resurrection (e.g. Mark 8:27-33) to be editorializing, I suppose, but it sounds like a stretch to me.
Anyhow, that’s all an aside here. One can argue about what really happened back then, in the first century A.D. But that’s not our debate here. The debate’s about Spong.