SPONG, Pt. 6
by SteveHeads up everyone! I just learned that Bishop Spong will be speaking at Myers Park Baptist Church on Friday evening, October 16. Judy and I will definitely be going, and I hope some of you will be able to as well. I promise you it will be worth your time, and could well be life-changing. Here’s another tantalizing quote from Eternal Life: A New Vision.
I find myself increasingly unable to tolerate an ecclesiastical hierarchy that pretends to speak for that which is holy in order to diminish that which is human. I care not whether that spokesperson is the pope who defines some lives as “inherently flawed” because they are different from the majority, the archbishop of Canterbury who dares to elevate ecclesiastical unity above justice and truth, or one of the popular evangelists who uses the Bible to condemn that which is a normal part of the variety of human life, but which threatens him or her.
I came to the realization that I would never want to leave the church, yet I was also aware that I fitted less and less comfortably into its traditional boundaries. I then dedicated my energy to opening the life of the church to new possibilities. I wanted to reform the institutions of religion to make them serve the purpose for which I believed they were created. That purpose was not to hide from reality, but to engage it. It was not to run from truth, but to be in dialogue with it. It was not to become something, but to be something. (Spong, op.cit. p. 203)
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