Embracing new truth in the midst of a dying tradition that is either unable or unwilling to hear or to comprehend that new truth, is the only hope Christians have for a Christian future. I do not know of a single biblical scholar of world rank today who treats the Virgin Birth as either history or biology. Does that make those of us who agree with this almost universal scholarly consensus heretics? I do not know of a single biblical scholar of world rank today who thinks the story of the resurrection of Jesus is about the physical resuscitation of his three-day dead body. Does that make those of us who have read and been convinced by this consensus heretics? Such charges of heresy are little more than the frightened responses of the religiously insecure who can not seem to comprehend that the gospels did not drop from heaven fully written. They were composed some 40-70 years after the crucifixion of Jesus and in a language neither Jesus nor his disciples spoke. The heresy hunters do not understand that the creeds were hammered out in a Church convention in the fourth century and that neither Paul nor the disciples of Jesus would have recognized the concepts in which that debate was carried out. Christian truth is not contained in static propositional statements. It is ever changing and constantly evolving because it is always an attempt to place a timeless experience into the time limited vocabulary of the speaker's generation.
Bishop Spong puts the burden of preaching incorrect ideas on traditional teachers of the Bible in this essay. He does not let them off the hook while they are preaching non-sense.
Tags: Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious
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