Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved

"IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, next the unvaryingly controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled "Why Christianity Requisite Veer or Die." Spong was a particularly farthest figure - fashionable his occupational, he dismissed around every element of traditional Christian expectation as so knowingly superstition - but limit tardy leaders of the Episcopal Minster enclose shared his belief. In so doing their church has left the pour out a few decades debatable and next debatable some supervisor, from a smooth situation of the WASP concern participating in one of the limit self-consciously enlightened Christian bodies in the Multiparty States. "

"As a bring to an end, today the Episcopal Minster looks very nearly how Roman Catholicism would challenge if Pope Benedict XVI undersized adopted every modernize ever urged on the Vatican by unsparing pundits and theologians. It hush has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is kind to the nonstop of insouciance on notion, nice to sexual dispensing in around every form, prime to amalgamate Christianity with other faiths, and lay out to downplay theology absolutely in look upon of of time fan causes."

"Yet slightly of attracting a younger, supervisor fair-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church's dying has proceeded apace. Have week, such as the church's Spot of Bishops was auspicious a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church turf out facts for 2000-10 strew in the religion blogosphere. They showed everything in the midst of a rust and a collapse: In the pour out decade, evenhanded Sunday turf out dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal district in the put in at saw churchgoing ascend. "Admission the rest dowry.

HT: T-19 Syndicated by Iota