Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Anybody that takes Schori or the radical Episcopal leadership as either a legitimate or Scriptural expression of the Body of Christ on earth needs their head examined.

I have a good friend who is an Episcopal priest who is bemoaning this whole sad, sad situation. No worries the Anglican Communion will get legitimacy soon enough and within a generation or two this will be "history."

I weep when I see such a corruption of the faith.

 

The Episcopal Church has long been on the liberal leaning front of Christianity. Former Bishop John Shelby Spong has laid out issues for discussion as items of faith to be defined in the context of modern scientific understanding. Here are his words:

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity in The Voice. I will post my theses on the Internet and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world. My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

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.
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These are certainly interesting from a perspective of dialog and examining how people believe and interpret Christianity over time and across various denominational boundaries. Needless to say, these are not the views of most Baptists, or even most who call themselves Christians. Yet I believe it is helpful to understand how others view these issues, and how they compare and contrast to my own views.

Edited to add: I find it interesting to speak of God in non-theistic terms, since this seems to be a conflict by definition. The only reconcilliation I see is that Spong views God as a rhetorical device rather than an actual being.