Sunday, May 01, 2005

Chattaway on Spong

On FilmChat, Peter Chattaway discusses a short article he has written on Bishop John Shelby Spong's latest:

Spong 'loves the Bible,' decries scripture's 'sins'

I have never met Spong myself but I've read bits and bobs that he has written, and I rather like Chattaway's blog summary:
I have mixed feelings about the guy, myself. I appreciate his thirst for knowledge, as well as his desire to keep his knowledge and his worship in some sort of relationship, but I am also repulsed by the way he builds up walls between himself and his intellectual opponents, the way he makes his theology completely subservient to the science and political ideologies of the day, and the way he cannot express one positive belief without expressing a dozen or two negative beliefs first. I can be a champion nit-picker, at times, and there is something about Spong's always-on-the-attack mode that appeals to the worst in me, I think. Plus it seems to me that Spong, for all his talk of relevancy, is still wrestling with the demons of his pre-World War II childhood, in a way that has already made him culturally and theologically irrelevant himself.

1 comment:

  1. sirs
    i regularly recieve the messages of bishop spong,i have read some of his books and i agree with him in most respects
    but two things should not go unnoticed
    first,in my opinion,by dropping the personhood of God j s spong undermines the very core of christianity,thereby driving his enterprise of creating a new "christianity" for a new world into absurdity and,second,he seems to be utterly free of self-critique..
    is this also the kind of modern christian he envisages
    best greetings
    a medical doctor an part-time theologian from graz,austria

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