Why Christianity Must Change or Die

[kayky]

This is the title of one of John Shelby Spong's most well-known books. Spong refers to himself as "a believer in exile" because he can no longer relate to "orthodox" Christianity. Many thinking Christians identify with this position completely.

Consider the following passage from this book:

Creedal language comes out of another time. It reflects assumptions that this generation can no longer make. It thus employs a language that is not native to us. If we could just cease being believers, these problems would disappear. But some of us cannot cease believing. God is too real for us. We also cannot resign from our modern world or close our minds to its insights. We cannot pretend that we live in the first century. We cannot park our brains at the door of our places of worship in order to accept as real the words that were used to interpret God in years past but can no longer today illumine our understanding of God.

Is it time for forward-thinking denominations to rewrite the Nicene Creed in order to reflect a modern understanding of Christianity?

[kayky]

Stalin may have had the advantage of technology, but the Inquisitors had more vivid imaginations.

[Cathar1950]

Stalin may have had the advantage of technology, but the Inquisitors had more vivid imaginations.

And they killed them after they confessed so they would go to God and not to hell. They had the best intentions.

[kayky]

Yes...that's the main thing!

[East of Eden]

You're saying the Soviet Union's population was larger than that presided over by the Catholic Church?

I think it is more a matter of better technology. Stalin could perform his atrocities with much greater efficiency than Torquemada.

I'm pretty sure the reason Stalin killed 1,000 times as many in a few decades as the Inquisition did over centuries wasn't because Torquemada had any trouble killing those he sentenced to death. Stalin's killing methods were pretty primitive, death in the Gulag prisons, intentional famine in the Ukraine, and shootings. Hitler was the one who really used technology to kill, and even he didn't come near Stalin's death totals.