Cool Faith and Science Site

In a comment on the previous post, on Spong's views, Bob Schneider made some keen observations. Which I believe are spot on. Dr. Schneider writes:

Thanks for these words. Your reference to the post-Modern in the last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter, I believe. I think that Bp. Spong is the archetypal Modernist, and in a sense representative of the end of that era. In a way he is a kind of empiricist who paradoxically resists the objectivism he is anchored in.

I think it was Phyllis Trible who said that the last 500 years of Christianity in the West can be book-ended by Martin Luther at the earlier end and Jack Spong at this one. We are entering a new era of western Christianity marked by the movement called the emerging church, she holds. Certainly, in my view, we are in a major transition period, and what will "emerge" is not yet clear to this observer.

One way of understanding Bp. Spong is that he is reaching out to the unchurched modernists who have rejected the Myth (in the postive sense of the Truth) to tell them, "Hey, there is a deeper truth beyond the literalism (of the Bultmannian biblical universe) that you can embrace." Christianity must change or die. But history tells us that Christianity always changes. Will it move beyond the problem +Spong diagnoses? Likely so. Will it shatter further into new forms of first-world and old forms of third-world? (If those terms have any meaning anymore.) It appears so. Will the many worlds of Christianity become in the post-modern deconstructionist way incommensurable? No time ofr anxious souls.

Sadly, in his often senasationalist way of poutting things, +Spong has alienated a lot of the faithful. And he has become a useful weapon to the dissidents who "spong" whomever they are unhappy with in the leadership of TEC.

His web pages on faith and science are also pretty keen, but they are hard to find by Googling. So here they are. I hereby invite the good professor to consider being a regular poster here at the Anglican Centrist.