Was he right?
At first I'm inclined to say he's wrong because more liberal mainline protestant denoms are dying fast and conservative ones are staying fairly strong. But on the other hand, I know a lot of christians who are nominally catholic or in more conservative protestant churches, and when I talk to them about theology they seem more like deists or agnostic-theists who happen to like christian tradition and certain aspects of the gospels.
Of course not. Whenever you depart from the plain literal meaning of the bible, you get lost.
So you think the entire Christian world was wrong until some 16th century German priest decided the Bible was actually 100% literal?
I don't even mean if his theology was correct on a metaphysical level, but rather if he was right that christianity as a literal belief in Christ and god was dying out and that the church has to transform in to more of a cultural institution (sort of like reform Judaism).
Every cult leader, and cult, defines itself by one or both of the following:
1. They water down the divinity of Jesus Christ; and/or
2. They add to the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. As in, Jesus did his part, now you have to do your part, and stop sinning, etc.
This man has done both, by saying that Jesus was just adopted by God, and thus became a son of God, denying the virgin birth.
What an asinine question.
By saying that real Christianity, the confession that Jesus is the living God, risen from the dead, is dying, and should be replaced with this man's nonsense, no, he is not right in any way possible.
>2. They add to the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. As in, Jesus did his part, now you have to do your part, and stop sinning, etc.
Literally all of christianity save for calvinism says you have to be saved through faith, sacraments, or works.
>Spong's "Twelve Points for Reform" were originally published in The Voice, the newsletter of the Diocese of Newark, in 1998.[13] Spong elaborates on them in his book A New Christianity for a New World:
>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.
God has always been defined as the Creator of the Universe, a title belonging to the one who created the universe. That will never change.
>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.
Jesus is, was, and will always be God. That will never change.
>The Biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
It is God's eyewitness account of the events as God told to Moses. Darwin was a fool.
>The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
The virgin birth was a miracle of God, qualifying Jesus to sit on the throne of David forever. Dismissing miracles because you don't think they could have happened is insane.
>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.
And here he is, insane again. Denying miracles because you have not seen one is the mark of insanity.
>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.
It is the holiness, justice, and righteousness of God being satisfied by the substitionary sacrifice of the Lamb of God.
I don't need any more to know he's a false teacher, a heretic, and a scion of satan.
Literally all of the cult of Catholicism and Orthodoxy says that, yes. So does Islam. So do many other cults.
None of them are Christian. There are no Christian groups, only Christian individuals.
>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.
Bible verse: The way of the cross is foolishness to the lost, but to the saved, it is the power of God unto salvation. This man is lost.
>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.
Jesus bodily rose from the dead, discarding his entombment linens, hugged, ate, drank, talked with and otherwise lived with his disciples for 40 days before ascending, bodily, into heaven.
>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.
Copernicus had absolutely no access to the third heaven, nor would any sane man expect him to.
>There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
Literally the 10 Commandments will, carved in stone by the finger of God.
>Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
Prayer absolutely can contain requests to God to act in a particular way, and has, and always will.
>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.
Neither the Church nor this man know how to be saved.
>All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is.
No, this is not true. Only born again Christians have been restored to being in the image of God, and anyone can become a born again Christian. So treating everyone as such is fine, and is in fact one of the great commandments.
>It is God's eyewitness account of the events as God told to Moses. Darwin was a fool.
Stopped reading there.
Darwin, with his degree only in Theology, said the human cell is "simple", and "like a bag of salt."
No clue about DNA, RNA, the human genome, nothing.
And that is the fool you believe in.
They didn't know shit about genetics at the time other than "things can be inherited."
Copernicus and Galileo were right even though Newton's law of gravitation hadn't been discovered yet.
Same with theories of light before Maxwell's equations.
Answer me. Biblical literalism is new, and completely a response to the Protestant opposition to the academic study of faith.
I read his 12 “points” on Wikipedia cause this guy was foreign to me and frankly, I’m most annoyed that his points are incoherent. What the hell does “a non-theistic conception of God” even mean? There’s no syntactic sense to these points in the first place.
Furthermore, of course the miracles make no biological, scientific sense. That’s the whole fucking point, the divine directly breaking into the natural world is going to be explicitly lacking in naturalistic sense. Pointing that out is not profound and demanding that miracles be re-understood in natural terms is fatuous.
Using the analytical tools available to him at the time that isn't an unreasonable conclusion.
>Biblical literalism is new
No, not taking the bible literally is new.
I'm not necessarily sure how precisely you can disagree with the Nicene creed and still be considered a christian. However, literal interpretation of say, the book of genesis is absolutely retarded, and non-literal interpretations of parts of the bible existed long before this guy did.
>>Catholicism and Orthodoxy do not adhere to the Nicene creed.
This is false firstly, and secondly don't you ever get bored of wanting to refight the religious wars of the early modern period on an imageboard?
Dude, Origen was doing non-literal interpretations some 1800 years ago.
What did Richard Spencer call it, Cultural Christian?
It's actually pretty interesting. Most people calling themselves Cultural Christians are WNs like Richard Spencer, but Spong is liberal as fuck.
And those interpretations were always secondary to the literal meaning.
There is a difference between non-literal interpretation and reaching hard to appease your hip cool secularist buttbudies
I don't really care honestly, I'm not religious.