John Shelby Spong is in Melbourne this week, promoting his new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, explaining again why he discounts almost everything in the Bible as unreliable but still believes Jesus has much to offer.
In this article, Barney Zwartz writes that ‘Spong admits that he is not a theist and rejects the idea of a personal God, but says that doesn’t make him an atheist either. He dislikes simple categorisations’. He goes on:
The problem I have with Bishop Spong is not that he is an interesting and challenging thinker, the problem I have is that he is a bishop. Because I cannot see in what meaningful sense of the world he could be called a Christian. I think he is a secular humanist – an entirely respectable position but not one that should be funded by the Anglican church. And I suspect, though this may be unworthy, that he wouldn’t have received the same notoriety as plain Jack Spong.
C’mon Zwartzy, tell us what you really think! What do you think?
jasongoroncy.com 
Spong’s problem is that he’s the most miserable modernist I’ve ever read. He just assumes that western secular culture is this universally valid meta-narrative and then says to the extent that Christianity can conform to it- it’s valid. I’d love to see a debate between him and John Milbank- perhaps N. T. Wright. What angers me the most about him is that he’s so popular in the US among mainline Protestants. I used to work at a theological bookstore and we’d get requests for his books all the time. It angered me so much, that my friend used to play a joke on me- just to get up my ire-of sneaking up on me and saying “excuse me sir, where are the books of Bishop Spong.”
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