Belief in the myth is fading, and it was never taught by Jesus. In a doc’s office, someone grinned over an evangelist canvassing her neighborhood with the question, “Have you been saved?” and her neighbor’s answer, “None of your G*#%& business!”
In God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky, I ask,
Saved from what? Eternal damnation? Residence in a condemned neighborhood? Hell-fire? Few people read the ancient phrases literally anymore.
I agree with Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong:
Jesus does not save us from a fall that never happened or restore us to a status that we have never had. He empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and to enter higher and higher levels of consciousness where we finally discover that we live in God and God lives in us. . . .In church last Sunday we again heard the familiar only-through-Jesus stuff, but the closing hymn in our service urged us to go deeper:
I think we are headed for the most exciting century in Christian history. I anticipate that most of what we call religion today will die in the next century. Rigor mortis has already set in. Out of that death, however, will come a new beginning. I am glad that I have lived to see the birth pangs. Hard labor is ahead but a new creation is being born and in that new creation God will be newly experienced and newly discovered — not as a Being who lives above the sky, but as the presence that is revealed in the heart of the human.
"From shallow waters call us, God, from safety near the shore,
And bid us launch upon the depths where faith is tested more. . .
We cannot fish the ocean’s depth with nets shrunk small by fear. . . "
The song urged us to be open to surprises, to
"launch on unknown seas and cast our nets abroad."
It’s exhilarating to step outside the box of thought placed over us in childhood.
2 comments:
You don't know what Christianity saves you from? What did they teach you in the School of Theology.
You do know that it is silly for one to say, "I anticipate that most of what we call religion today will die in the next century." This is what atheists and agnostics have said every century since Isaac Newton, and it never happens. Obviously, the great religions can last for thousands of years; it is reckless to predict that they will all die out in a century. Spong says that just because that's what he wants to happen.
I agree that religion will not die and in several posts have expressed my expectations of where religions are headed. But beliefs keep changing, in Christianity as well as in other religions.
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