Jason Lee Steorts reviews Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious, and says
[Spong]has tried to lob his book like a hand grenade into the institutions of Christendom. The idea is to explode two millennia of traditional belief on which these institutions rest, thereby making room for a new Christianity based on a conception of Jesus that is palatable to “a twenty-first century person.” What actually crawls out of the rubble is a Jesus for John Shelby Spong.
Steorts concludes:
It is hard to see how the new story can survive when the God at its center is nothing but an overwrought sentimentality plummeting down an abyss. If that is all we have left, Spong can keep his Christianity. (more)
Steort should have put "Christianity" in quotation marks since Spong's religion is a subjective quicksand of his own making.
Speaking of liberal Christianity, the Boston Globe reports that the top official of the Episcopal Church USA stands foursquare behind the Episcopal Church's endorsement of homosexual activity. According to the Globe, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori regards
the election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire as "a great blessing."
In an interview during a visit to Boston, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori compared the gay rights struggle to battles over slavery and women's rights, and said she believes that it has become a vocation for the Episcopal Church "to keep questions of human sexuality in conversation, and before not just the rest of our own church, but the rest of the world."
Jefferts Schori said that it could take 50 years for the debate over homosexuality to be resolved, but that she believes it will happen. She said she hopes that the Anglican Communion, an umbrella organization including the Episcopal Church and the Church of England, will stay together.
"Where the protesters are, in some parts of Africa or in other parts of the Anglican Communion today, is where this church and this society we live in was 50 years ago, and for us to assume that people can move that distance in a year or in a relatively instantaneous manner is perhaps faithless," she said. "That kind of movement and development has taken us a good deal of pain and energy over 40 or 50 years, and I think we have to make some space so that others can make that journey as well."
There is no equivocation here. There is, however, incredible arrogance. The church in Africa sees the West as once again imperialistically imposing itself on their life, culture, and (in this case) understanding of Biblical Christianity. The best place to follow the struggle over the soul of the Anglican Communion worldwide is at VirtueOnline.
For an illuminating article on how referring to God/Jesus as "Lord" is losing favor in liberal circles, read this. If you are anything like a traditionalist, or a Biblically-centered person, these developments will shock you. What developments am I talking about?
"Lord" has become a loaded word conveying hierarchical power over things". . . "The way our service reads, the theology is that God is love, period," St. Philip's deacon Thomas Lindell added. "Our service has done everything it can to get rid of power imagery. We do not pray as though we expect the big guy in the sky to come and fix everything."
. . . First Congregational United Church of Christ in Midtown even has a different name for The Lord's Prayer. They call it "The Prayer of Our Creator." "We do still use the word 'Lord' on occasion, but we are suspicious of it"
. . . "If God is understood and viewed as within creation, acting inside of it, loving, compassionate, hopeful, creative - all of those produce a very different way of imagining the Christian life and living it out," he said. "If you are always calling God 'Lord,' you are sticking him into that outside place. It seems to me, in order to avoid doing that, one of the first things you do is call God something different."
The article also mentions those who see these novelties as quite wrongheaded:
"We are to bow before him. He is king, savior, Lord and master. ... God is the great patriarch of heaven and Earth," said Mark Roessler, pastor of Catalina Foothills Church, part of the non-mainline conservative Presbyterian Church in America. "We call him 'Lord' because he is Lord," said the Rev. Joe Bettridge, senior pastor at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church on Tucson's Northwest Side. . . "If you read the Bible, he - God - created everything from nothing. That's pretty powerful to me."