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What is clear is that Christianity has become outdated and is in danger of dying out.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Christianity has become so outdated that nobody who calls him or herself Christian can follow every single teaching in the bible anymore.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:
- 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.
- 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.
- The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
- The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
- Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
- 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.
- 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.
