Hiya BVS,
I will be the first to tell anyone that if they believe Christ died for their sins and accept that as the only means by which someone can be saved then they are a Christian. Then also, striving to be Christ-like factors in of course because that is what the word Christian means. But to embrace only what Christ teaches and discount everything else in scripture in the end undermines everything Christ taught. I can explain this on another thread if needed or via email (thacraic@yahoo.com). I feel like the original purpose of this thread has been overlooked, and I am guilty of having done that more than anyone. And I am about to do it again...
In todays world, relativism is present in both the beliefs and the interpretation of Biblical truths. I will show you an example of relativism. After reading the snipets that Dreadsox has posted of Bishop Spong I did a little reasearch of my own. I found that Spong has came up with his version of Martin Luther's 95 theses. Thankfully Spong's only amount to 12, anymore and I think I would have taken a hammer to my monitor in a weak moment of sheer human rage. Spong's theses are as follows:
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
Now this is probably worthy of a thread into itself. Maybe after seeing replies to this, I will in fact start a new thread which pertains to these theses. It would be interesting to see what both Christians and non-Christians have to say about it.