Upper South Carolina Churches Invite Bishop Spong to Re-educate Their Sheep

The following alarming announcement came from the Diocese of Upper South Carolina last week. Bishop John Shelby Spong   September 22nd, 2015 7 pm - 9 pm St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Columbia  Hosted by St. Luke's, ColumbiaEpiscopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of such books as Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, will speak in Columbia, SC, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church on Tuesday, September 22, 2015, at 7 pm.  St. Luke's is located at 1300 Pine Street in the Historic Waverly neighborhood, near Five Points in downtown Columbia.    Spong will lecture on "CHRISTPOWER in the Radical Center of Life--A New Christianity for a New World," followed by a question and answer session with the audience. Spong always promises to provide a provocative, thoughtful, and enlivening experience for seekers from all faiths and denominations (or none) and across all religious and political spectrums.  His appearance in Columbia is a cooperative effort of several local congregations including St. Luke's, St. Martin's in the Fields, Church of the Cross, and St. Simon & St. Jude Episcopal Churches, as well as the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia and the Jubilee! Circle, Columbia. When I looked up Jubilee Circle, Columbia, I was not surprised to find that their tag line reads,  "From certainty to mystery ..." captures our mission at Jubilee! Circle. Our goal, in both community and worship, is to move us out of the dogmatic forms of religion that restrict us and quash our creative spirit with their "certainty" and move us instead into the "mystery" of the Holy where we can experience liberation, freedom, and new ways of moving and being in the world. Liberal, progressive Episcopalians would feel quite at home at Jubilee Circle where they follow a Pelagian theology called "Creation Spirituality", "Jubilee! Circle uses as its guide the principles of Creation Spirituality outlined by Matthew Fox. Most of the Christian theology today is drawn from a story of fall and redemption - where we've fallen from God's grace and are originally cursed with sin. Instead, Jubilee! Circle focuses on a theology of Original Blessing, which Fox tells us is older than the fall and redemption story which traces its roots to the fourth century and Thomas Aquinas." While no more harm can be done to the Jubilee circle crowd or to the Unitarian Universalists by Bishop Spong's falsehoods, it is alarming that the Bishop of the Diocese of Upper South Carolina is letting this old heretic come and teach his Episcopal sheep. So what if Spong teaches that there was no virgin birth, so what if he professess that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' own wedding, and so what if he denies the physical resurrection of Jesus.  According to Spong in his book "Jesus for the Non Religious, Therefore, when I say that God was in Christ or when I assert that I meet God in the person of Jesus, I mean something quite different from the theological definitions of the past that forged doctrines like the incarnation and the trinity, both of which depend on a theistic definition of God. So in order to get to the essence of who Jesus was and even who Jesus is, I must get beyond the traditional theistic definition of God that I now regard as both simplistic and naïve, to say nothing of being wrong. p 214   This means that anyone seeking to discover the meaning of Jesus today must be prepared to acknowledge that this story of the crucifixion is not history. While Jesus was undoubtedly crucified by the Romans, the familiar details that accompany the story of the cross are not literally true and did not actually happen. p. 112   The resurrection language of the gospels is literal nonsense. Earthquakes do not announce earthly events. Angels do not invade time, space and history to roll back a stone, to make a historic resurrection announcement. A resuscitated Jesus does not walk out of his tomb in some physical form that can eat, drink, walk, talk, teach and expound on scriptures. p. 122 If anyone in the world qualifies as a false teacher, it would be Bishop Spong. Who dares to tell God what He cannot do? So what Bishop in his right mind lets his priests invite false teachers into his house? Upper South Carolina is going down the tubes. Thank you Bishop Spong, I now believe there will be no resurrection... of this diocese.