Bishop John Spong developed these twelve theses to challenge people to
think and debate him. These points are all addressed in the book. They
have garnered many thousands of email and regular mail responses over the
past few years. The Twelve Theses of Bishop John S. Spong are from his
book - HERE I STAND: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love
and Equality, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2000. |
The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are
these: |
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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. |
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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. |
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The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human
beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense. |
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The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity,
as traditionally understood, impossible. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or
on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time. |
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Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history
in a particular way. |
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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. |
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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. |
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