Word: spongings
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...might be surprised, however, to know that a lecture will be delivered at Memorial Church next week that will likely be just as bad as the above hypotheticals. I refer to the William Belden Noble Lecture, which this year is being given by retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong...
Given this purpose, it is disturbing to note that this year's Noble Lecturer will be John Shelby Spong. In his many writings, Spong has disavowed nearly every traditional Christian belief. In his self-congratulatory A Call for a New Reformation, Spong claims that theism is dead, that Jesus was not God incarnate, that original sin is false, that the virgin birth was impossible, that miracles never happened, that the story of Christ on the cross is "a barbarian idea," that Jesus was not resurrected, that prayer does not work, that there is no heaven or hell and that there...
...think the Bible is literally true," says Bishop John Spong of the Episcopal diocese of Newark, New Jersey, answering a question scholars have tugged at for the past 200 years. Spong, who is invariably described as the enfant terrible of liberal Protestant theology, writes books with such titles as Resurrection: Myth or Reality and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism that are guaranteed to make conservatives growl. "The Bible also says the woman is usually the property of a man. I don't believe that either," Spong declares. "The Bible says homosexual people should be put to death...
...belief in the Bible as the literal Word of God, a conviction that confounds his critics. "I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day," says liberal Episcopal Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who used to deliver newspapers to the Graham farm as a boy in North Carolina. "I wouldn't invest a book that was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 150 with that kind of moral authority." Graham, for his part, wouldn't think of doing otherwise...
...Angeles Bishop Frederick Borsch, who chairs the hierarchy's theology committee (on which Spong sits), explains that "we are not a confessional church that tries to write a definition of orthodoxy. A lot of us would defend this as the genius of Episcopalianism." Spong's latest work, however, leaves the genius somewhat embattled...