Posted on 03/25/2002 7:44:16 AM PST by US admirer
For your reference, here are the 12 Theses:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. 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.
12. 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.
These theses are easily turned aside.
You might want to discuss the matter with St. Luke. He's long since dead, of course, but he wrote extensively on the topic, and his writings are widely available. Find youself a Bible, and open it to the section ("book") called "The Gospel according to St. Luke". Chapter 1 of that book addresses the matter quite definitively. Another book of the Bible, called "The Gospel according to St. Matthew", also addresses the matter in no uncertain terms. See chapter 1 thereof for details. Enjoy. Really. In addition to being the Word of God, the Bible is just full of really whacking good stories. :)
AB
They always do.
Dan
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For a very brief period you probably could have said that the Anglicans were basically Catholics with no pope. I don't think you could say that by any stretch today. You could probably say that there are SOME Episcopalians that are a lot like Catholics, but the heirarchy in their church is doing a remarkably good job of driving them out and fully into the Catholic Church.
patent
The Episcopal Church is a small-c catholic church, and is part of the Anglican Communion (the worldwide outgrowth ot the Church of England). The two churches are similar in many ways, but dissimilar in about as many ways. Anglicans are not quite reformed, but neither are they as hierarchical as the Roman Catholics.
For a quick overview of the basic beliefs of Anglicanism, peruse the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.
The virgin birth is clearly taught in the Gospels, which predate the Nicene creed by more than 200 years.
I think you're confusing the dogma of the Virgin Birth with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Mary is, as she stated at Lourdes, the Immaculate Conception. The Virgin Birth of Our Lord is a basic tenet of the Church...it's in the Gospel and as such is "Gospel Truth".
This creature Spong is a disgrace to all Christians. Several years ago he said we should ignore the Pauline Epistles becaause Paul was obviously a latent homosexual lashing out at the homos of his day because of his own repressed sexuality. Now he goes directly against the Gospels themselves. Why the Episcopalians put up with this clown I'll never understand.
Just wondering
Hat-Trick (USCGC Diligence & Courageous 1980-1983)
patent
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
Anything goes!
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