Volume 8, Issue 2, November 1998

BOOK QUOTE

The following excerpt is from the book, "Why Christianity Must Change Or Die," by John Shelby Spong, Harper; San Francisco Publishers, 1998, $18.00, pages 225f.

"Religion is...a human attempt to process the God experience, which breaks forth from our own depths and wells up constantly within us. We must lay down, therefore, the primitive claims we have made for our religious traditions. None of them is drawn from otherworldly revelations. None of them is inerrant or infallible. None of them represents the only way to God. None of them can be used legitimately to coerce or compel another to belief. All evangelical and missionary activities designed to convert the heathen are base born. They are the expressions of our sense of superiority and our hostility toward those who are different. The only divine mission in life that the Church of the future could possibly have is to open people to a recognition that the ground of their very being is holy and that when they are in touch with that holy Ground of Being they can share in God's creation by giving life, love, and being to others....The Christians of the world are not here to build institutions, to convert other people, or even to claim we can speak for God. Those aspects of our religious heritage must be sacrificed as the pre-modern misunderstandings of our primitive history. We are now exile people."

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.