Charismatic Chaos

H iPhat,I have to say that I agree with Brian about the essential dishonesty of Spong's position. Take a look at this; What utter nonsense! He is reducing God to the status of some kind of New Age hippy energy field, yet at the same time he is happy to refer to this alleged phenomenon as "God", complete with capital letter, as for a personal pronoun. This is clearly hypocritical.It is also completely at odds with the Bible. The god described in both Old and New Testaments is, quite clearly, a big-supernatural-father-figure-in-the-sky. He is emphatically not some hippy-dippy energy field. Spong has thrown out the entire Bible and yet he still pretends to be Christian. As far as I can tell, he isn't. What's the pint in that? Why not just meditate if you want to meditate and simply call it meditation? If you want to issue a call to action, just call people to action (and I have no idea why a person praying on their own would need to call themselves to action). Calling these actions prayer just obfuscates matters an guarantees the continuing survival in worshippers minds of the supernatural god that Spong says doesn't exist. Again, he denies the existence of a supernatural god, but uses the personal pronoun in his next breath.Spong's approach doesn't turn pray into a "journey". It turns it into an exercise in pointless waffle and mutual delusion. It certainly doesn't sound like Christianity.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : Fix dB.

---

"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Cheers for the reply Phat,

quote:

---

So this brings up an interesting question: What is a Christian?

---

We could discuss that one until the proverbial cows come home. In my view though, Spong has gone so far away from the Bible that his philosophy no longer bears any resemblance to what the authors of the Nicene Creed had in mind. When he says "God" he is talking about an entity that has staggeringly little in common with the Bible or with tradition forms of Christianity.Were I in his position, I would feel obligated to come clean and admit that my views were not Christian, and in fact were not even especially religious; Spong seems to be pushing a vague philosophy rather than a religion.

quote:

---

What is the difference between the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Counselor, and your alleged hippy-dippy energy field?

---

Well first, I can't be sure that the "energy field" actually is what Spong believes in; that's just what it sounds to me like he's pushing.In fairness, the answer to your question is "Not much." The Holy Spirit sounds like a pretty good match for what Spong is getting at.My problem with this is simple; where are God (with that big fat capital G) and any kind of divine Jesus in all of this? The spirit is only one aspect of God and not even that if you aren't Trinitarian. In Spong's world, God the Father seems to be entirely absent. That in turn leaves Jesus as little more than an especially smart and "spiritual" mortal. Sure, you could centre a philosophy around the teachings of such a man, but a religion? That seems to me to be going a bit too far.Spong is also guilty of equivocation on a massive scale. Worship is love. Prayer is meditation. God is "the source of life" (whatever that is supposed to mean). Worship is living life to the best of one's ability.No they're not. He's just trying to redefine Christianity back into some kind of relevance.An atheist is just as capable of living life to the fullest as any Christian or for that matter, Jew, Hindu or Zoroastrian. It is not worship and it won't become worship no matter how diligently Spong tries to equivocate. We all know what is meant by the word "worship" and "living life to the fullest" is not it.It is my opinion that Spong is only hanging onto the trappings of Christianity out of tradition and sentiment. He defends the practise of prayer because he wants to preserve the comforting ritual that he enjoys, even while he recognises the contradictions that it presents.As for the Bible itself, he doesn't seem to believe much of it. When you get to this point, it seems to me that clinging on to the Bible and the "Christian" label, is both intellectually dishonest and hypocritical. It is also counter-productive; why keep the Bible at all when it contains so much to promote the kind of primitive sky-father religion that Spong goes out of his way to denounce? Isn't it just going to lead people astray (creationists spring to mind )?Mutate and Survive

---

"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade