Spong's books are largely popularizations of the earlier work of people like Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, as he readily admits. And Tillich's philosophizing about God is to a large extent, warmed over Feuerbach, anyway. In fact both Michael Harrington in his book, *The Politics at God's Funeral* and Peter Berger in book, *The Sacred Canopy*, stressed the influence that Feuerbach had on many twentieth century theologians, from Karl Barth to Tillich, to the Death-of-God theologians of the 1960s.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists? Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:31:08 -0400
And, according to John Shelby Spong and a raft of other religious scholars, the gospels were written by Jews - who knew little or nothing in terms of the details of Jesus' actual biography - for Jews about the god experience followers found in Jesus' humanity. The first three gospels then draw almost completely on OT prophesies and express the life in Jesus in terms of prophetic fulfillment rather than historical accuracy. Only the last gospel was written after the schism, and it contains the least accurate history. So... if theres gobs of toxic waste in the OT and a very large proportion of the NT is meant to indicate the realization of OT prophecies then their a good likelihood that reading Jesus' life in prophetic terms translates a good bit of toxicity - along side the complete historical inaccuracy - into the NT. Some day I'll get to the end of Spong's book and find out what he means by god perceived and sought through Jesus' and our lived humanity but, hell, to me that sounds an awful lot like the immanence of species-being, though I don't expec tthat this is where he'll end up. (let the floodgates open....)
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