A netfriend wrote

I doubt that what will ultimately be the church will have much of a resemblence to that which we have now. The God we are talking about is far greater and more expansive than anything that is contained by church doctrines or creeds. Just as our consciousness of the cosmos has expanded incredibly over the past 2,000 yrs, so our perception of god will have to expand as well. We can no longer use language and liturgies that relate to a God who has fitted the old cosmologies. To which another replied:

Yep, as a scientist Spong is a tad simplistic and naiive. As a Bishop I am sure he knows his stuff but one has to take Spong’s theorising on scientific matters with a grain of salt 😉

Spong has swallowed the myth of Bronowski and embellished. Yes, our consciousness of everthing has expanded incredibly in the last 100 years, particularly the last 50, but prior to that the rate of expansion was cyclical 2 steps forward 2 back, for millennia. The Sumerian civilisation of 4000 to 6000 years ago was as technologically advanced if not more so than Medieval Europe 4 or 5 millennia later. The ancient greeks were intellectually superior to their successors until more than 2 millenia later in the late European renaissance. There was no gradual linear advancement, more like various sine curves in various empires, and a huge blip in the 20th century, hopefully not capped by a mushroom cloud.

More importantly, our great expansion of late has found God in the cosmos, not discarded God from it. From so many scientific perspectives, and especially Cosmology, we are in a far better position to put God in the Cosmos in 2003 than they were in 60 AD.