Bishop Spong and the Modernization of Christianity

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 written 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.

Tim the plumber said:

So that would be; Take out the god bit, the magic stuff, the traditions and anything else.

OK, what is left?

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PoS said:

Well Spong doesnt claim to know all the answers, but it seems youre left with the loving god bit, without the going to hell part. :mrgreen:

Personally, If I was a Christian I would adopt Spong's 12 points, and add that Jesus was an alien.

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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.

Click to expand...

Tim the plumber said:

Can't see any god left at all. No mention of love or anything at all.

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PoS said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong

Spong has been mentioned in a number of threads, but I think he deserves his own, so let's talk about his radical ideas.

What is clear is that Christianity has become outdated and is in danger of dying out. It is full of weird rituals that advocate cannibalism, blood sacrifice, and other disgusting things which do not belong in the modern world. The religion's theology dates back to a time of superstition and obsolete ideas that have been proven wrong by science (virgin birth, a worldwide flood, etc.).

Christianity has become so outdated that nobody who calls him or herself Christian can follow every single teaching in the bible anymore.

In comes Spong and his proposals- what he seeks is to get rid of the nonsensical trappings of Christianity to enable it to thrive and attain compatibility in today's world.

It seems that Spong might be this century's Martin Luther, and he has 12 points that ought ought to be heeded for reforming Christianity:

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 written 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.

While you may not agree with all of his points, what he proposes does make sense, and could be the launching pad for a Christian renaissance.

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it's just me said:

Don't tell us, you bought a Spong book and read it overnight.

For one thing, Christianity is not in danger of "dying out" it is growing. Take a look:

https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Global_Christianity

As for the rest of this nonsense, if the Church were foolish enough to adopt Spong's ideas then it would become extinct, and it wouldn't be Christianity.

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it's just me said:

Don't tell us, you bought a Spong book and read it overnight.

For one thing, Christianity is not in danger of "dying out" it is growing. Take a look:

https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Global_Christianity

As for the rest of this nonsense, if the Church were foolish enough to adopt Spong's ideas then it would become extinct, and it wouldn't be Christianity.

Click to expand...

Conservapedia is a self-described conservative and fundamentalist Christian alternative to Wikipedia (a more accurate description is a far-right authoritarian, American exceptionalist, and dominionist group blog). The project began as an attempt to collaboratively develop an online encyclopedia free from the "liberal bias" and “atheist bias”, both of which God-King Andrew Schlafly argue that Wikipedia is deceptively riddled with (but ironically, Conservapedia itself appears to be biased in a conservative Christian direction). In recent years, however, it has all but devolved into a vanity project and soap box that is used by Andy as a means to forward his own particular insights on matters political and scientific. Its policy appears to be to blame everything on liberals, atheists, LGBT people, and/or evolution/climate change supporters; if not possible, then ban making an article on it.

The site has few other regular editors and administrators[note 1],most of which use it to publicize their own projects or write articles on their own pet causes. There is, in effect, no way to speak of Conservapedia as a collective voice or a reflection of the insights of a larger community; in contrast to open platforms like RationalWiki or Wikipedia, what goes on at the much more top-down controlled Conservapedia reflects nothing more than the views of Schlafly and the handful of people he currently trusses trusts with full editing privileges. The problem is separating what Schlafly and his cohorts write as truth from what the trolls (and there are many of them) edit onto the site. Basically, the entire wiki has always been one giant exercise in Poe's Law. Way too many of the website's pages say their most recent edit was by either DavidB4-bot (a minor edit bot), with most of the rest being by Conservative or 1990'sguy. Another problem is that like RationalWiki, an unexplained mass abandonment by users happened back in 2009 for no apparent reason; they left a lot of stubs.

Conservapedia's front page is often packed with assorted bigotry directed at atheists, muslims, LGBT people, immigrants, and many other marginalized groups, and its administrators ("sysops," in wiki parlance) see liberals, atheists, and "evolutionists" as the direct cause of society's ills. A favorite obsession of Conservapedians is being part of the solution by going after the "evils of the world", notably Barack Obama, Richard Dawkins, video games, and that eternal seductress, homosexuality. To make their arguments appear in any way feasible, liberal (zing!) use is made of every fallacy in the book. Bathed in the just light of Conservapedian Admin Logic™, any failure to toe the party line on any given issue, even on the use of British spelling, is considered evidence that one is an infiltrator of the liberal flavor.

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PoS said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong

Spong has been mentioned in a number of threads, but I think he deserves his own, so let's talk about his radical ideas.

What is clear is that Christianity has become outdated and is in danger of dying out. It is full of weird rituals that advocate cannibalism, blood sacrifice, and other disgusting things which do not belong in the modern world. The religion's theology dates back to a time of superstition and obsolete ideas that have been proven wrong by science (virgin birth, a worldwide flood, etc.).

Christianity has become so outdated that nobody who calls him or herself Christian can follow every single teaching in the bible anymore.

In comes Spong and his proposals- what he seeks is to get rid of the nonsensical trappings of Christianity to enable it to thrive and attain compatibility in today's world.

It seems that Spong might be this century's Martin Luther, and he has 12 points that ought ought to be heeded for reforming Christianity:

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 written 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.

While you may not agree with all of his points, what he proposes does make sense, and could be the launching pad for a Christian renaissance.

Click to expand...

RAMOSS said:

Oh way, isn't that the site that wants to do a new translation of the bible, just because the current translation is 'too liberal'? That doesn't make it a trustworthy site as a source.

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<alt>doxygen said:

I love conservapedia! :lamo


https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia

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RAMOSS said:

Oh way, isn't that the site that wants to do a new translation of the bible, just because the current translation is 'too liberal'? That doesn't make it a trustworthy site as a source.

Click to expand...

TheGoverness said:

Is that place just a giant troll job? Every time I read an article over there is ridiculously dumb.

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it's just me said:

Of course it's not trustworthy, it doesn't tell you what you want to hear.

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it's just me said:

Don't tell us, you bought a Spong book and read it overnight.

For one thing, Christianity is not in danger of "dying out" it is growing. Take a look:

https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Global_Christianity

As for the rest of this nonsense, if the Church were foolish enough to adopt Spong's ideas then it would become extinct, and it wouldn't be Christianity.

Click to expand...

RAMOSS said:

Do you agree with the stated translation concept?

Yes, or no?

Click to expand...

PoS said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong

Spong has been mentioned in a number of threads, but I think he deserves his own, so let's talk about his radical ideas.

What is clear is that Christianity has become outdated and is in danger of dying out. It is full of weird rituals that advocate cannibalism, blood sacrifice, and other disgusting things which do not belong in the modern world. The religion's theology dates back to a time of superstition and obsolete ideas that have been proven wrong by science (virgin birth, a worldwide flood, etc.).

Christianity has become so outdated that nobody who calls him or herself Christian can follow every single teaching in the bible anymore.

In comes Spong and his proposals- what he seeks is to get rid of the nonsensical trappings of Christianity to enable it to thrive and attain compatibility in today's world.

It seems that Spong might be this century's Martin Luther, and he has 12 points that ought ought to be heeded for reforming Christianity:

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 written 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.

While you may not agree with all of his points, what he proposes does make sense, and could be the launching pad for a Christian renaissance.

Click to expand...

<alt>doxygen said:

https://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Conservative_Bible_Project

I love conservapedia.

Click to expand...

it's just me said:

Can you refute the article about the growth of Christianity? Yes or no? Or perhaps you can tell me of your experiences in Church planting?

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it's just me said:

The old "shooting the messenger" fallacy, eh, also known as ad hom

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RAMOSS said:

Didn't look at it. I don't give a damn about anything that web site says what so ever. Do you have a valid source?

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it's just me said:

Just like I said, it doesn't tell you what you want to hear so you think it's no good. Don't waste my time.

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