Word: sinning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...twisted" the facts concerning Jesus' resurrection, which was never meant to be taken literally. The virgin birth of Christ is an unthinkable notion, and there is not much value in the doctrine of the Trinity, or in the belief that Jesus Christ was sent to save fallen humanity from sin. St. Paul, the missionary of Christianity to the Gentiles, was a repressed and "self-loathing" homosexual. As for the Old Testament, it contains a "vicious tribal code of ethics" attributed to a "sadistic" God. The idea that Yahweh bestowed the Promised Land upon the Israelites is "arrogance...
...contrary, those are assertions offered by a bishop of America's Episcopal Church, John Spong of Newark, in his new book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (Harper San Francisco, $16.95). Spong's unorthodoxy is of long standing, but it has now reached epic proportions. His previous book, Living in Sin?, assailed Christian dos and don'ts on sex and asserted that nonmarital sex can be holy under some circumstances. After the work appeared in 1988, Spong ordained a sexually active gay priest, inspiring the Episcopal House of Bishops to "disassociate" itself from Spong's action...
...concept without meaning. Many mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians argue that millenarians like Walvoord and Dyer misuse scriptural prophecies about the final days. These are not detail-specific guides to beating some kind of celestial point spread but timeless alerts that humanity must be constantly vigilant against sin's allure. The temptation to seek clues to the Second Coming on CNN is easy to understand, since Saddam has proclaimed himself a successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King who enslaved the Israelites of old. That makes it deceptively easy for prophecy mongers to identify Iraq with Babylon. Somewhat awkwardly...
...Muriel Spark. Ten guests assemble for a fashionable London dinner party, with no idea of just how murderously interesting the affair will turn out to be. The author here approaches the sinister elegance of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She introduces fundamental issues -- salvation and sin, inspiration and insanity, free will and destiny -- through the medium of light but lethal comedy...
...West German President and the wife of a first cousin of Poland's Catholic Primate. Nonetheless, in 1987 the German hierarchy forced the University of Essen to oust Ranke-Heinemann from her Catholic professorship and give her another teaching post that would not imply any church endorsement. Her sin: in defiance of Christian teaching, Ranke-Heinemann had concluded that Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus...