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A General Summary Of Spong's Teachings
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From "A Call for a New Reformation"
Commentary by: Bishop John Spong
The following are Bishop Spongıs twelve points, which have never been
disputed by Griswold:
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 Christıs
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 Godıs image and must be respected for what each
person is. Therefore, no external description of oneıs 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.
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The
Tribune Papers