Spong is wrong: But he is consistent
Bishop John Shelby Spong is well known for attacking almost every Christian doctrine
he swore in his ordination vows to uphold, e.g. God as sovereign Creator, the Incarnation,
Virginal Conception and Resurrection of Christ, and substitionary atonement.
(All this while drawing a salary contributed by those who presumably expect their
leaders to defend the official beliefs of their church.)
Not many face up, however, to the fact that his views on all these issues all flow
naturally from his acceptance of the idea of an evolutionary flow of history. Spong
says:
I live on the other side of Charles Darwin. And Charles Darwin not only made us
Christians face the fact that the literal creation story cannot be quite so literal,
but he also destroyed the primary myth by which we had told the Jesus story for
centuries. That myth suggested that there was a finished creation from which we
human beings had fallen into sin, and therefore needed a rescuing divine presence
to lift us back to what God had originally created us to be. But Charles Darwin
says that there was no perfect creation because it is not yet finished.
It is still unfolding. And there was no perfect human life which then corrupted
itself and fell into sin, there was rather a single cell that emerged slowly over
4½ to 5 billion years, into increasing complexity, into increasing consciousness.
‘And so the story of Jesus who comes to rescue us from the Fall becomes a
nonsensical story. So how can we tell the Jesus story with integrity and with power,
against the background of a humanity that is not fallen but is simply unfinished?’1
If the Bible is not accepted as true in its history, the Gospel story also comes
to be rejected. Note how even the idea of ‘progressive creation’, so
eagerly embraced by many evangelical leaders who reject evolution, also logically
destroys the idea of a perfect, finished creation which fell due to Adam’s
sin. This is because millions of years attributed to the fossils (rather than being
caused by a global Flood) means death and disease well before Adam. Hence it contains
within it the seeds of the same sort of thinking which spawned Spong’s views.
Related Articles
Further reading
Reference
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV Compass interview
with Bishop John Shelby Spong, by Geraldine Doogue, in front of a live audience
at the Eugene Groosen Hall, ABC Studios, Ultimo, Sydney, Australia, 8 July 2000.
Copied from transcript at <www.abc.net.au/compass/intervs/spong2001.htm>,
6 August 2001. Return to text.
| It has been said that “Information is power”. When it comes to creation information we’d have to agree. Keep the ‘powerful’ evidence for God being Creator coming.  | | |
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