When I was in college I reviewed John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die for our undergraduate philosophy journal. Though I didn’t consider myself a Christian (or even a theist) at the time, I was flabbergasted by Spong’s sloppy arguments which were full of straw-men, distortions, and ad hominem attacks. I knew that the targets of Spong’s diatribes bore little resemblence to the classic Christian tradition as found in the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, or Wesley.
From Jonathan at the Ivy Bush I came across this exchange from a few years ago between Spong and Rowan Williams. Spong presents his “12 theses” for a “new reformation” (again with the grandiose aping of Luther!):
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.
Williams ably dismantles this incoherent mess, which interested parties can read for themselves. What strikes me here is the very same thing that struck me in reading his book – the arguing against positions no one holds, the positing of false dilemmas, the assertion without evidence or argument of propositions that are debatable at best if not outright false.
In other words, Spong continues to come across as every bit as dogmatic as the “fundamentalists” he scorns.
A Thinking Reed 
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