“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…

“Bob” wrote:

If Jesus Christ is NOT God Incarnate, He was a LIAR

Jesus never stated that he was God incarnate. Never! Others (towards

the end of the writing of thenbible books) stated that (most notably John)

How much heresy can you believe and still go to heaven?

The amount that YOU hold. 😉

God does not look for doctrinal purity but love and obedience to Himself.

What else can we throw out; starting with the Deity of Christ, how about the Virgin Birth,

Yep.

the Substitutionary Atonement

Yep.

the Resurrection

If in the flesh …Yep.

the Second Coming

Yep.

a fiery hell for unbelievers

Yep.

Where does it stop?

Probably lots more. 😉

I do not agree with Spong on all his answers but he is a good starting

point for discussion as he raises the problems and issues

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Twelve Theses – John Shelby Spong

from “Here I Stand” ( HarperCollins; New York:2000 pp. 468 -469)

Drawn from my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile

A Call for a New Reformation

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk

today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.

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 the divinity

of Christ, 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 that must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus 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 cither rejection or discrimination.

Author’s Note: These theses posted for debate are inevitably stated in

a negative manner. That is deliberate. Before one can hear what Christianity is one must create room for that bearing by clearing out the misconceptions of what Christianity is not. Why Christianity Must Change or Die is a manifesto calling the church to a new reformation. In that book I begin to sketch out a view of God beyond theism, an understanding of’ the Christ as a God presence and a vision of the shape of both the church and its Liturgy for the future.

[* This was more fully presented in his later book “A New Christianity

For A New World”]