A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born - Hardcover

John Shelby Spong

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060670843 ISBN 13: 9780060670849

Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

Synopsis

Bishop John Shelby Spong has devoted his life to championing an authentic Christianity based on love, not hatred. In his bestselling book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong convincingly demonstrated the limits of traditional faith and the toll its outmoded beliefs take on human life. Now the controversial champion of a more open and progressive Christianity courageously presents his inspiring alternative of what true faith should be today, offering a unified vision of authentic Christian belief for the third millennium.

What does God look like beyond theism? How do we understand evil? Who is Christ when traditional concepts such as incarnation, atonement, and the Trinity no longer communicate any meaning? In answering these questions, Bishop Spong goes beyond abstract theology to present his vision of a radically new humanity rooted in God, yet matured beyond the need for a supernatural parental deity.

A New Christianity for a New World offers an understanding of Christianity that is free of exclusivity and shame. Bishop Spong empowers those who are disillusioned by religion to discover a God who is the source of life and the source of love, unbounded by the limits of any tradition. The Church of tomorrow, lie writes, must be able to "incorporate all of our reality. It must be able to allow God and Satan to come together in each of us . . . . It must unite Christ with Antichrist, Jesus with Judas, male with female, heterosexual with homosexual."

After explaining why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, and the rules and dogmas of the Church are not just inoperative but dangerous, Spong offers his contemporary vision of the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth. This work is the ultimate legacy of his struggle to discover and promote a faith system that can live in our new world. Only someone who has spent a lifetime crusading for change and the rights of outcasts in the Church could give voice to such a reasoned, just, and loving faith. With Bishop Spong we can take the brave step to discover the Christianity of tomorrow.

About this title

Review:

Christianity will not be a viable belief system for honest people in the contemporary world, writes John Shelby Spong, until it drops a few outmoded ideas--for instance, belief in a supernatural God who reveals Himself from outside creation. A New Christianity for a New World continues the work begun in Spong's bestselling Why Christianity Must Change or Die, in which the former Episcopalian bishop diagnosed Christianity's major problems. Here, he offers a vision of what authentic Christian belief might look like today, stripped of theism and all its corollaries (doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Atonement). Christians may come to believe that "God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God and Jesus is my way into God." Readers inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's tantalizing writings on "religionless Christianity" in Letters and Papers from Prison and by John A.T. Robinson's Honest to God will find much challenge and comfort in Spong's New Christianity, his most mature and most radical book. --Michael Joseph Gross

About the Author:

John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at more than 500 other universities all over the world. His books, which have sold well over a million copies, include Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy; The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic; Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World; Eternal Life: A New Vision; Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He writes a weekly column on the web that reaches thousands of people all over the world. To join his online audience, go to www.JohnShelbySpong.com. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New Jersey.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060670843
• ISBN 13: 9780060670849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276