doug> Kendall Clark wrote:
>> *But*, all of the tired nonsense about the virgin birth,
>> perpetual virginity and the like is long gone.
doug> Really? I bet if I dropped into a Catholic church in Queens
doug> I'd find plenty of it.
I'm befuddled by this kind of response, Doug. I took care to distinguish between types of Christian subgroups, and you totally ignore those distinctions.
As I said,
Of course things are not as progressive as they should be among
liberal Protestant denominations, especially the ones which refuse
to ordain gay men and lesbians. *But*, all of the tired nonsense
about the virgin birth, perpetual virginity and the like is long
gone.
That is, it's all long gone *for liberal Protestant denominations*. I didn't say *no one* believes it at all. Liberal German Protestantism has been demythologizing Christian doctrine for coming up on 100 years. Liberal Protestantism in the US caught up pretty early in the last century. In fact, there was a big media thing about the 'new sexual morality' of Christianity, to take one example, as early as the early 1960s. John Shelby Spong is a *belated* member of this line of thought.
Best, Kendall Clark