Post by Vernono OUnspotted "from" the world does not mean to avoid the world. It means don't
let the world change you.
Arrant and stupid nonsense. The world must change or you are spiritually dead:
QUOTE
"I have called for a new and radical reformation that I've suggested will
be so radical it'll make the Reformation of the 16th century look like a
Mothers' Union tea party....
.....If you look back from the vanish point of 400 years on the
Reformation of the 16th century, it was basically about authority and
power. Both the Protestants and the Catholics read the same Bible and
treated it more or less in the same manner; they had the same Creeds; the
real issues were which of these two parts of the body of Christ are
authorised to speak for God and to represent Jesus in the world of the
16th century.
Now I think what we live in today is a totally different kind of reality.
I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer
conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record
books.
I live on the other side of Isaac Newton; I can no longer conceive of
things that I do not understand as simply being supernatural invasions of
the theistic God to do a miracle.
I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human
light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather
emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and
higher levels of complication.
I live on the other side of Sigmund Freud, and I can no longer use the
kind of parent language of the past without being selfconscious about the
passive dependency that that encourages.
And I live on the other side of Albert Einstein, and I know what
relativity means in all of life, and so I can no longer claim that I
possess objective and revealed truth and it's infallible, or it's
inherent, those become claims out of the past that are no longer relevant
for 21st century people.
Now my question is: I am a Christian and I want to be able to sing the
Lord's song in the 21st century but I can't sing it in the accents of the
1st century or with the words of the 1st century, so how can we reshape
the very words of our tradition so that this old song can be sung in a new
way so that I and my children and my grandchildren can still acknowledge
Jesus as their Lord? That's what I think the Reformation is about...
....I don't think that in a post Copernicum world we can still think of
God as a being who sits above the sky and periodically invades the world
in a supernatural way. And that's the God that we find described primarily
in the Bible. But that's also the God who in many places acts in a rather
immoral fashion. A God who can send plague after plague after plague upon
the Egyptians, a God whose final plague is to murder the first-born of
every Egyptian household, a God who will open the Red Sea to let the
Jewish people go through and enclose the Red Sea to drown all the
Egyptians is at the very least, not a very pleasant God if you happen to
be an Egyptian. And I think that's what we've got to begin to understand.
There's a lot of tribal memory, a lot of tribal history that we have
called the word of God. A God that I know happens to be a God of the
Egyptians and the Amarites, and the Malachites and the Jews and the
Christians as well. And I think we've got to broaden that concept...
Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only
alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a
language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think,
are sterile categories of theism and atheism.
I believe that God is very real. I believe that I live my life every day
inside the reality of this God. I call this God by different words. I
describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground
of being. I engage God when I live fully and love wastefully and have the
courage to be who I am. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, and
that's the God I want to live out of so that all of the people of this
world have a better opportunity to live fully and love wastefully and to
be who they are in the infinite variety of humanity.
That's why I think we can't have a Christian church that discriminates
against people of colour, or that discriminates against women, acting as
if they're second-class citizens and not capable of being priests or
bishops or pope. And I don't think we can have a church that discriminates
against gay and lesbian people or any other people on the basis of who
they are...
...The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even
supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we
could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just
building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured
God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. God is beyond
that....
...I want us to go into the radical roots of our faith tradition so deeply
that we break every boundary and escape every limit. I think that the
limits that we have in the Christian faith today where we claim that only
those of us who do certain things and say certain creeds are really God's
people. I don't believe God is a Christian, John, I believe that
Christianity is a way we travel into the mystery of God, and I don't
believe we combined God with the limits of our Christian system or any
other religious system. I think that they're only doorways through which
we walk into an ultimate mystery that's beyond all of our words. I'm
impressed with the mystical tradition more and more as I get older, and
one of the things I find out about the mystics is that on their journey
into the wonder and mystery of God, they get to the place where no words
any longer can be uttered, so they simply sit in silence in awe and wonder
before the Divine mystery. There's a sense in which all theology must
finally be transcended. All Bibles, all creeds, as you journey into the
wonder of God...
I grew up in the fundamentalist church, an evangelical Anglican church.
But it was a church that taught me a lot of my prejudices. It taught me
for example, that blacks were not welcomed in that church and that
segregation was really god's will. It taught me that Jews were evil
people. The only Jews I eve met in my church was through my Sunday School
literature, and they were always evil people out to get Jesus. It gave
birth to anti-Semitism in me. It also taught me that women were inferior
to men because women couldn't be priests, women couldn't be acolytes,
women couldn't serve on the vestries of our church, women had to do the
kitchen work or the laundry work of the church not the leadership work.
And it taught me that homosexuals were evil people. And every one of those
disputes, whenever I would question them, the Bible would be quoted to
prove that those prejudices were in fact God's will.
Well getting out of that system was an incredible experience for me, and
it was race was the original thing, because the segregated world that I
lived in was finally broken down by law in the United States, and the
nation had to adjust to a new bit of reality...
I didn't have a black classmate in any school I ever attended until I was
in graduate school at the Theological College. So my church was deeply
implicated in segregation in negative race activities. And when the Civil
Rights movement began in the United States it was clear to me that I had
to identify with that movement, because it's a movement calling people out
of the bondage of prejudice and into the fullness of humanity. I happen to
believe that God's image is in every human being, and that every human
being must treat it with ultimate respect, as I would treat somebody who
is a very God presence to me. And the black people in America were the
first people who made this very clear to me. Later in my life, women and
gay and lesbian people also confronted me with the same dimension but the
beginning was the Civil Rights movement and the black people who are the
children of God and who had to be welcomed in the life of the church. Well
the church was living a lie, and I didn't want to be a part of a church
that would say not all of God's people are welcome here...
...I regard the march in our church to free us from our racism, the
tremendous struggle we underwent to sort of bring women into the life of
the church, and even the struggle in more recent days to have a new
understanding of what it means to be a gay or lesbian person, I regard
those as gospel opportunities that have called me even deeper into my
experience of being a Christian. But so many people in the church regard
those as well, controversial times that people have sort of disturbed the
church's unity. I'm not really interested in being a member of a church
that is racist or male chauvinist or homophobic. I have got to be a member
of a Christian community that takes God at God's word and says 'Come unto
me all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' If
we ever hang out a shingle that says 'All are not welcome to come just as
they are', then I don't want to be a part of that church any longer, it's
a very simple process for me....
Now I think I've got a responsibility personally, to seek to bring my
understanding of God and my value system in my life together, and I will
bear witness to that in any way I can. But I don't think it's up to me to
tell anybody else how God is operating in their life, at least in a
specific way. I'll certainly be willing to say that in a principle way. I
believe that there is truth, ultimate truth, but I don't believe that
anybody captures it. And what we've done as a church throughout history is
to identify our partial truths with the ultimate truths of God, and the
test that we know that that's wrong is that when we do that, we wind up
rejecting and hating and killing and persecuting anybody that disagrees
with us. That cannot be a manifestation of the ultimate truth of God."
Bishop Spong (retired)
excerpts from an interview on ABC Australia