God?

Charles Darwin portrays a world that never had a perfect and finished creation, that never had a human life that was made perfect, that later fell from that perfection into a sinful life demanding a divine rescue. What Darwin proposes for us to look at is that we are constantly emerging into our new humanity. I think the revival of the future will be when religious organisations, and whether they’re called churches or not I do not know, but where religious organisations take people in the process of becoming, and help them connect with what it means to be even more fully human than we have been, calling us beyond our barriers and our boundaries into a kind of new humanity that will have a universal quality about it, and inviting people to journey into the mystery of God without telling them that there’s only one way to do that journey. That I believe is going to be the mark of the religious revival in the future, and that’s what I think we’ve got to begin to talk about. And I tried to develop that in a book I wrote called ‘Why Christianity Must Change or Die’; I really think that the forms that we have had in Christianity have reached their saturation point and they are declining. There aren’t many modern people who are going to be attracted to a religious system that at its centre and heart, says that God somehow needed to sacrifice his son on a cross in order to be able to forgive people. That’s a really strange concept when you lift it consciousness. [John Selby Spong, 2007]