New Reformation: Spong's 12 Theses

[doppelgänger]

Isn't this a DIR? Ahem . . .

[Victor]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

Isn't this a DIR? Ahem . . .

Oops...

Curse the statistic links.

[TashaN]

**MOD POST**

This is the DIR for Liberal Christianity. Please make sure you know the rules of DIRs before posting.

[Wandered Off]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

He takes the position that "belief in the existence of God" as a discreet thing or being is no longer comprehensible or meaningful to most people and instead that a re-opening of the divine experience from which "God" notions arise is where the future of human spirituality (and perhaps its past) really lies.

It's interesting how much his ideas are similar to those of Anglican Bishop Don Cupitt's. From Sea of Faith:

It is through this process of death and rebirth that Christianity must continually pass to renew itself. A living faith never was found and never will be found in any other way. We have to dispense entirely with all ideas of holding on to the truth of old meanings.
...
And so, returning to the question of what has happened and is happening to belief in God, it should be clear now that one particular meaning of God is evidently passing away, evaporating in the hands not of its enemies but of its own best proponents. People have been struggling for too long to hold on to a meaning of God which is passing away, no doubt because they think that this meaning is the meaning, the only possible meaning. But if meanings change and must be reminted then we should be looking for signs of a profound mutation of Christianity, a reforging of all its meanings.
...
Most people begin by thinking of their own religious beliefs as being 'literally' or descriptively true; as describing - however inadequately - real beings, forces and states of affairs. Thus there is supposed to be an objective God, another and higher world, a life after death and so forth. We call this naive kind of belief theological realism. Natural though it seems, there must be something wrong with it, for nowadays we have highly refined tests and standards for what is to count as knowledge, and by those criteria no religious belief whatever today belongs to the public body of tested knowledge.
...
A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held. This suggests that religious beliefs should be understood not in the realist way, but rather as being more like moral convictions. They are not universal truths but community-truths, and they guide lives rather than describe facts.
...
The first conscious believers are appearing, people who know that religion is just human but have come to see that it is no less vital to us for that. Religion has to be human; it could not be otherwise, for it would not work as religion unless it were simply human.

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by Wandered Off

It's interesting how much his ideas are similar to those of Don Cupitt's. From Sea of Faith:

It's what Christian mystics and "gnostics" have been saying all along. And a natural result of the process of turning Christian myths and symbology to act as a psychological pointer instead of regarding it as history or metaphysics.

Meister Eckhart, Joseph Campbell, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (in his latter works), and many of the early "Gnostic" texts, have taken this same approach (as have many philosophers).

Spong's "New Reformation" is a new take on the age old project of turning the symbols of Christianity around to point to the "mystery of Christ" within.

[Wandered Off]

For Christians interested in debating the topic (since debate is off-limits here in the DIR), a similar thread has been posted in Same Faith Debates:
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum...12-theses.html

[spiritually inclined]

The first conscious believers are appearing, people who know that religion is just human but have come to see that it is no less vital to us for that. Religion has to be human; it could not be otherwise, for it would not work as religion unless it were simply human.

I like the above quote. I'm not completely sure, but I believe Spong says in his autobiography that he was influenced deeply by Don Cupitt and his book Sea of Faith.

James

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by spiritually inclined

I like the above quote. I'm not completely sure, but I believe Spong says in his autobiography that he was influenced deeply by Don Cupitt and his book Sea of Faith.

James

He was. And also by Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be.