SPONG, Part 5
by SteveThis week I am continuing with a few more tantalizing quotes from John Shelby Spong’s newest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. Many have said that this will be the work for which he will be most remembered.
It was the experience of being loved that opened my eyes to see the love that is all around me, something that I had never been able to see before. It was the presence of love that empowered me to be able to receive love and then required me to give it away. Love expanded my life to new dimensions. Love enabled me to risk, to be vulnerable, to cross boundaries, to interact and to grow to the point where I could actually be free of those survival fears that caused me to victimize those who are defined as “different.” Those fears, so deeply rooten in the survival mentality from our evolutionary history, must be transcended lest our own humanity be truncated. Again, Paul seemed to be grasped by this same vision when he wrote that inside the Christ-experience, which surely is an experience of the unbounded love of God, there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female (Gal. 3:28). A new humanity is always the product of love, and that new humanity then grows into an even deeper humanity, an unbounded humanity, even a transcendent humanity. The more I was privileged to live inside the acceptance of an unmerited gift of love, the less I needed to relate to the theistic images of my religious past. So the realm of the supernatural faded while the experience of love as the ultimate dimension of the divine began to grow. (Spong, op.cit. pp. 201-202)
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