A few weeks ago, I recommended to our Progressing Spirit writers that we should all write articles that responded to Bishop Spong’s book, Unbelievable. Then it hit me. I was going to be doing the article this week and as I had suggested to our writers, I would have to start with Spong’s first thesis. “Holy moly,” what was I thinking? For Spong’s first thesis is “God.” Now, I am a student of the Bible. I have been studying it for over forty years. Nearly thirty years ago I came to the dramatic conclusion that the vast majority, if not the entire Bible, was written as metaphor by people who may have been very bright for their time in history but were largely ignorant of the world that inherited this book. We really do not understand the world they lived in, and obviously, they did not understand the world we live in today. Many of their sincere beliefs would be considered, at best, superstitions today. That is one of the reasons it has always amazed me people can argue for an inerrant interpretation of the Bible, using the Bible to “prove” their own interpretation.
In the light of our expanded knowledge, God, understood theistically, turned out to be our own creation in which we human beings tried to fit God into words that …
Revelation and insight do not occur in a vacuum. They always come through a person. They have the effect of expanding the being of the recipient by opening his …
Dear Moderator Cantwell,
I write with some alarm at what is happening in the United Church of Canada, a church that I have long admired. I recall your history. …
Who was the person who stood in the center of the most dramatic moment in Christian history, the experience we call Easter? Who was it who first saw the …
His name was Charles. His wife of 57 years, and now his widow, was named Cynthia. He was a lawyer who, after ten years and with a wife and three …
On Monday, August 14, 2014, beginning at 9:30 a.m., my wife Christine and I were seated in the Federal District Courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, preparing to listen to the testimony in …
It was an exciting day in the Vatican on April 27, 2014, probably the most exciting day since the election of Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina to be Pope Francis a little …
Spain is a nation of 47 million people located on the southwestern part of the continent of Europe. It almost touches North Africa at Gibraltar and thus has a much …
He was my Professor of Theology, teaching me for two of the three years I was in Seminary. For me he was the major voice on that 1950 …