The Religion of Submission

The answer for:
A New Judaism for a New World
A New Christianity for a New World
A New Islam for a New World

In his book Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism and more recently A New Christianity for a New World, Bishop John Shelby Spong addresses some of the failings of Christianity, and where the majority of Christians went wrong. Bishop Spong is the 8th bishop of Newark Diocese of the Episcopal Church. He is now retired. The Bishop makes it quite clear that the words of the Bible are not the words of God. For example, he says, “This is the word of the Lord,” the liturgical phrase used in Christian churches to mark the end of a reading from the Bible, “is a strange, even a misleading, phrase. Yet Sunday after Sunday it is repeated, reinforcing in the psyches

of worshipers a rather outdated attitude toward Holy Scripture. In many of its details, the Bible is simply wrong!”

To one of the questions posed to him, Bishop Spong states: “The real question is what is Christianity? Is it what the Pope says it is? Is it what Billy Graham says it is? Is it what Al Sharpton says it is? Or Jerry Falwell or James Kennedy or Robert Schuler? You see when we pose the issue this way, we discover that there is no consensus, and when the various defenders of Christianity discover that, when each defines what he or she believes Christianity to be, there is no consensus.”

He argues that while liberal, mainline churches have abandoned the Bible, fundamentalists have made an idol of it. Bishop Spong denies virtually everything about Jesus that orthodox Christianity has believed for the last two millennia. The virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the atoning death on the cross, the resurrection, the miracles, everything that would verify the biblical claims of Christ’s authority and uniqueness are discounted. Spong argues that “the essence of Christ was confused with the form in which that essence was communicated.”

cont’d on page 2