Not long ago, Bishop Spong of the Episcopal Church created a bit of a stir with his twelve theses. He considered his theses the beginning of a new reformation, equal in weight to the work of Martin Luther. At that time it seemed to some that this was the work of a theological idiot. But this is not the case. All he has done is to state in a provocative and flamboyant fashion what he learned in seminary. In fact, the substance of his ideas are held by respected theologians and taught at a number of Episcopal seminaries. He has simply expressed their ideas in ways that are crude, arrogant, and offensive. But he has not deviated from their substance. He belongs to a tradition, the liberalism of Paul Tillich. He thinks this tradition will win out in the end, and one step in that victory is to take these ideas out of the academy and into the pew. That is his mission, and as these ideas win out in the market place, the new reformation will be complete.
In the traditional understanding of that word, I [Spong] am not a theist. I do not believe that I have been a theist since the time that my theological life first began to be shaped by the aforementioned Christian scholar named Paul Tillich in the early fifties. Tillich and his fellow academicians trained a generation of clergy, but they themselves remained in the theological centers of learning, where they talked about this theological revolution only to one another. They did not worry about how their concepts affected the ordinary believer, the person in the pew, or even the ordained one who interacted daily with the people of the pews.(1)
My goal in this short essay is to show that Spong is not an aberration. I will do so by comparing his twelve theses to the thought of Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Macquarrie. All three are influential theologians within the Episcopal Church. I will begin by stating Spong's twelve theses.
Spong's Twelve Theses
1. Theism, as a way of defining God is dead. So most theological Godtalk 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
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