Ted said:
Free
You are certainly entitled to your opinion. Perhaps you would care to post something that he says that is heretical or give me a source where I can look it up for myself.
I was so hoping you would ask.
: A couple of years ago, or more, I subscribed to an email that he sends out (about once a week or so), answering peoples' questions regarding his position and his thoughts on a variety of theological and social issues. The emails are titled "A New Christianity for a New World: Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and the Christian Faith". I will give you direct quotes from these emails, I could even forward them to you if you would like.
From today even:
"
The miracles of the New Testament do not appear to me to be about supernatural events at all. I discussed that in great detail in my last book,
Jesus for the Non-Religious. The claims that the disciples of Jesus made for the God presence that they believed they had met in him were such that human language had to be elevated to the "nth" power to convey what they believed they had experienced. The holiness of Moses had to be topped by the holiness of Jesus. The powers attributed to Elijah had to be exceeded by the power of Jesus. The signs that would accompany the messiah inaugurating the Kingdom of God had to be claimed for Jesus' life. That was the agenda of the gospel writers.
They sought to enable people to see God in Jesus, not to describe what Jesus supposedly did. To literalize the miracles of Jesus is, I believe, to distort the intentions of the gospel writers." (bolded emphasis is mine)
August 15, 2007:
"The Friday that observes the crucifixion of Jesus was the most somber day of all to me as a child. To call it "good" seemed strange indeed.
The word good reflects the rescue and atonement theology of the Church. It was an attempt to say that the result of what happened on that Friday was good. The death of Jesus was thought of as good, since it broke the power of evil, rescued us from the original sin of the fall and restored us to the original relationship with God. That is how the word good became part of the title of the day of the Crucifixion.
Today,
that theology is badly dated and has been abandoned by all but the fundamentalist elements of the Christian Church  which come, as I always remind people, in both a Catholic and a Protestant form.
As post Darwinians,
we no longer believe we were created perfect. We were created as single cells of life and evolved into our present complex, conscious and self-conscious forms.
Since we were never perfect, we could not fall into sin. Since we could not fall into sin, we could not be rescued. How can one be rescued from a fall that never happened or be restored to a status we never possessed?
Of all the symbols of the Christian faith, these are the ones most in need of rethinking and reformation since our theology, creeds and liturgies all infected these dated concepts. This change will cause a mighty upheaval in Christian understanding. Indeed it will signal the beginning of a mighty reformation."
August 1, 2007:
"I do not know what the first Easter experience was. Neither does anyone else. The earliest record in Paul ascribed the Resurrection to an act of God raising Jesus into the presence of God.
In Paul, God raised Jesus, Jesus does not rise. If this is an action of God then that act does not occur in human history. However, people living in human history seek to make sense out of that experience. Whatever Easter was it caused the disciples, who had forsaken Jesus in fear when he was arrested, to be reconstituted and empowered in dramatic ways. It caused his Jewish disciples to redefine God so that Jesus was included in that definition. It caused a new holy day, the first day of the week to be born and eventually to rival the Sabbath.
So the effects of Easter were in history but Easter itself was not.
I regard the Easter moment as
more a life-changing experience than it was a miraculous event. I believe, however, that this experience was real for the believers who were transformed by it. I believed the Easter moment occurred somewhere between six months and a year after the crucifixion. I regard "three days" only as a liturgical symbol. The three-day time frame allowed worshippers to observe Jesus' death on Friday and his victory over death on Sunday, the first day of the week. I am confident that the Easter awakening had something to do with the common meal, that is, the words: "He was made known to them in the breaking of the bread," represents a remembered context. I am also convinced that the disciples were in Galilee and not in Jerusalem when Easter dawned on their consciousness.
I regard the Jerusalem Easter tradition as both secondary and quite mythological. I do not think that there was a burial that anyone would have remembered, or that Joseph of Arimathea actually existed. I do not think any women came to the tomb on the first day of the week because there was no tomb to which they could come. I do not believe that a resuscitated body appeared to anyone. I do believe that Peter was the first to "see," but I do not know what kind of sight that was: Insight? Second sight? A vision to the eyes of the mind? I do believe that Peter called others to see whatever it was that he saw and thus that he opened the eyes of the others."
November 22, 2006:
"When Christianity left its Jewish world, those ideas got understood in terms of a legal contract and God became an ogre who demanded a human sacrifice and a blood offering. Jesus became the victim of an abusive heavenly father and you and I became burdened with the guilt of having been responsible for his death. Jesus died for my sins became the mantra of Evangelical Christianity and the Mass as a re-enactment of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross became the center of Catholic liturgy. Part of what is going on in Christianity today is that these literalized concepts have reached a point of revulsion. "
November 15, 2006:
"The Christian movement had to find a way to understand and even to celebrate his death, which ran counter to everything they believed about a messiah. If they could not transform his crucifixion, there would have been no resurrection.
Indeed the resurrection was the story of that transformation. That took hard work. They did not do that by making up the story of the crucifixion. His death was real.
The interpretation of his death as the gateway to life made the Christian faith possible. "
December 6, 2006:
"I believe God is real, but my human mind and human language can never penetrate that reality. So I cannot describe God, I can only describe my presumed God experience and honesty compels me to state that I might be delusional. Only at that point can we begin a discussion on the reality of prayer.
When I wrote a book entitled, "A New Christianity for a New World," based on lectures I had given at Harvard University, I sought to address the issues you raise. The book is almost 300 pages long. It challenges most of the pre-suppositions of traditional Christianity. It seeks to find new meaning for the most traditional symbols.
It seeks to move between what I call both the God experience and the Christ experience which I believe are real and the way both the God experience and the Christ experience have normally been explained, which are to me dated, inadequate and generally unbelievable. "
June 16, 2004:
"The Bible is a human book written by human beings, who were trying to understand who they are and who God is. That is what makes a sacred text. It expresses the human yearning for the divine. It is not itself divine.
I take none of the Bible literally. I take all of it seriously. I study it daily and have done so for sixty years. My hope is that I might help my generation write the next chapter in the sacred story of human life in search of the holy. I read the history of my faith story so that I will profit from the experience of my ancestors in faith."
And I could go on, and on, and on. My first email from him is dated January 21, 2004.
As you can clearly see, he denies the most essential tenet of the faith and, in fact, most of the basic tenets of the faith, the very tenets which define what Christianity is and what one must believe in order to be a Christian. Those who deny the things he denies are not and cannot be Christians.
1Co 15:13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
1Co 15:14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.
1Co 15:15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.
1Co 15:16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.
1Co 15:17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
1Co 15:18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
1Co 15:19 If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
1Co 15:20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
Paul clearly would disagree with Spong.
