The thing is to be secure enough in your own belief not to be threatened by others believing differently.
I remember well a conversation I had with an older woman in our congregation whose son was dying.
I wanted to talk about Spong, that old reprobate who so stirred up the Church in the 90s with his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.
(He now has a new book out, A New Christianity for a New World, in which he explains why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, the Church, and their rules and dogmas are wrong and dangerous. He spells out his contemporary vision of God, Jesus, prayer, worship, evil, the afterlife, and the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth.)
Anyway, the woman stopped me. She actually held up her hand like a policeman. She said, "I don't want to have my faith shaken right now, not with my son so ill. I don't want to think about this."
I felt terrible and apologized. But it occurred to me later that if her "faith" was so fragile, it was probably already too late.
We seem to have the idea of "faith" and "being saved" all rolled up together.
I'd forgotten all about Spong. He had a really bad name for awhile, people gasped at his blasphemies, and then he was forgotten.
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Date: 2004-12-08 12:18 pm (UTC)I remember well a conversation I had with an older woman in our congregation whose son was dying.
I wanted to talk about Spong, that old reprobate who so stirred up the Church in the 90s with his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.
(He now has a new book out, A New Christianity for a New World, in which he explains why the traditional understandings of God, Christ, the Church, and their rules and dogmas are wrong and dangerous. He spells out his contemporary vision of God, Jesus, prayer, worship, evil, the afterlife, and the Church as a community of love, equality, and truth.)
Anyway, the woman stopped me. She actually held up her hand like a policeman. She said, "I don't want to have my faith shaken right now, not with my son so ill. I don't want to think about this."
I felt terrible and apologized. But it occurred to me later that if her "faith" was so fragile, it was probably already too late.
We seem to have the idea of "faith" and "being saved" all rolled up together.
I'd forgotten all about Spong. He had a really bad name for awhile, people gasped at his blasphemies, and then he was forgotten.