© 1998 Meredith Sprunger
© 1998 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
For decades the mainline (old line? sideline?) Christian Churches have been losing credibility and membership in our culture. As Mark Noll points out in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994) there is a lack of scholarly respectability in conservative Christian Churches resulting in their being largely ignored by our secular society; and as Bruce Bower points out in Stealing Jesus (Crown, 1997) they seriously distort the religion of Jesus. Thomas Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity (New York, Free, 1996), declares that zealous, entrenched, liberal denominational elites care more about the latest political and ideological fads than the basic Christian gospel. The negative religious atmosphere has become so critical that we see articles in theological journals like “Will Our Churches Still be Churches in the Twenty-First Century?” by David R. Inglis (Prism, Spring 1997).
In this issue of the Journal we review John Shelby Spong’s latest book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Bishop Spong gave lectures at the Plymouth Congregational Church (UCC) here in Fort Wayne, May 9-12, which I attended. I should like to thank Stephen Zendt and Jay Newbern for sending me copies of a paper Bishop Spong sent to the theological world entitled “ACall for a New Reformation,” dated 5/10/98. The paper concludes:
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 Christians of the world to debate are these:
- 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.
- 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.
- The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
- The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
- 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.
- 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.
- Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resurrection occurring inside human history.
- 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.
- There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tables of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
- Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
- 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.
- 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.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.
The implications of these twelve theses reflect the crisis in Christian theology and show how desperately Christianity is in need of the Fifth Epochal Revelation. Unless Christianity can be revitalized by this new and inspiring spiritual paradigm, it will continue to decline in credibility in our scientific, scholarly, secular culture. More and more people who think critically about religion are hungering for a meaningful spiritual view of reality.
Students of The Urantia Book will recognize that Bishop Spong is skirting the edges of the teachings of the Fifth Epochal Revelation. As I observed in reviewing Why Christianity Must Change or Die, his religious view would really soar if it had the wings of the spiritual cosmology and the vision of Deity and Reality in The Urantia Book. Hopefully, we are getting closer to the day in which Christian theologians will undertake a serious evaluation of the Fifth Epochal Revelation.