Saturday, June 16, 2007

Religious Conflict


Quote of the day:
“I have walked through picket lines in San Diego, California to deliver a lecture. I have endured a bomb threat at Catholic University in Brisbane, Queensland. I have been the recipient of sixteen death threats, all of which came from bible-quoting ‘true believers.’

“I am grateful for each of my critics. What they unwittingly did was identify me as a resource for the religious seekers of our world who yearn to believe in God but who are also repelled by the premodern literalizations that so frequently masquerade as Christianity.”
--Bishop John Shelby Spong

This passage comes from Spong’s book Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Published in 1998, it has become much more relevant in the nine years since.

Spong, who is a retired Episcopal bishop, is very concerned that the mainline church is shrinking. His thesis is that some of the central doctrines of the church are based on woefully outdated information and are thus incomprehensible to modern spiritual seekers.

Most “experts” on church growth attack the issue with a myriad of tactics to market, invite and welcome people to church. Instead of this “outside-in” approach, Spong advocates that the church move inside-out. And so he examines and critically questions the roots of doctrine.

Then he goes back further in an effort to discern what the life of Jesus and the earliest Jewish and Christian tradition has to say about the relationship between humans and the divine.

Jesus as “rescuer” has become an embedded part of Christianity, and has been proclaimed endlessly by conservative Christians. Because Spong has the audacity to remind us that this is but one of several interpretations of the life of Jesus (and is not the earliest), he continues to be vilified, attacked and threatened.

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