Die volgende is inligting oor Biskop John Shelby Spong:

Die volgende kom uit sy boek: A New Christianity for a New World : Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born:

Twelve points for Reform

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.

In “The Cross as the Moment of Glory – He Did Not Die For Your Sins (11a.m.)” – Sermon (11 Mar 2014) sê hy die volgende:

(9:58) There is no portrail of Jesus as the divine resquer who comes to save the sinner. … (10:15) The fourth Gospel would never lead anyone to say … that Jesus died for my sins. … (22:00) For John Jesus was not God’s victim. Jesus did not die for your sins. What a strange and terrible idea that is. It makes God and ogur who demand the death of the Son. That makes God the ultimate child abuser. It turns Jesus into being a masochistic sufferer. It turns you and me into being guiltleading people, because we become responsible for the death of Jesus. … (22:43) You and I were not born in sin. We were born incomplete. We do not need to be rescued from sin. We need to be empowered to become all that we are.

Kyk ook

• “The Cross as the Moment of Glory – He Did Not Die For Your Sins (11a.m.)” – Sermon (11 Mar 2014)
• Spong is wrong (9 Des 2009)
• Beyond Theism — John Shelby Spong (16 Mei 2008)
• What’s wrong with What’s wrong with Bishop Spong (7 February 2007)
• The Virginal Conception of Christ (24 December 2014)