A Quote by John Shelby Spong
They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.
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Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
At Sunday worship, as in every dimension of our existence, many of us pretend to believe we are sinners. Consequently, all we can do is pretend we have been forgiven. As a result, our whole spiritual life is pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss.
And to stick our head in the sand and pretend that we are somehow safer if we do not know or to pretend we are somehow safer if we limit our options seems to me not only foolish but actually dangerous.
We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up. The children themselves haven't yet isolated themselves by selfishness and indifference; they do not fall easily into the error of despair; they are considerably braver than most grownups. Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
Infallible denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading and so means wholly trustworthy and reliable; inerrant means wholly true. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God who cannot lie, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly.
Man is unable to accurately predict events which are but twenty-four hours distant; only the Divine Mind could have foretold the future, centuries before it came to be. Hence, we affirm with the utmost confidence, that the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies in the Bible attest and demonstrate the truth that the Scriptures are the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God.
We pretend with a spiritual life we don't live, a peace we don't experience and a holiness and commitment we don't possess. ... We will never make any progress in becoming more like Jesus unless we permit God to cut us open, search our hearts, try us, know our thoughts and then change us from the inside. Only then can we become real according to the Word of God.
God's unfailing love for us is an objective fact affirmed over and over in the Scriptures. It is true whether we believe it or not. Our doubts do not destroy God's love, nor does our faith create it. It originates in the very nature of God, who is love, and it flows to us through our union with His beloved Son.
Women - whether in politics, media or business - can't have it both ways. We can't demand to be judged irrespective of our gender if we also plan to manipulate our sexual identity to our advantage. We can't both play the game and pretend to be sitting it out. We can't deliberately act 'female' and complain about male bias.
Start believing the Word of God over our feelings. The truth always overrides our feelings. Find the truth in the scriptures.
We pretend to be a free society, and we pretend to be an adult society, but if you look at the facts, our news is just as contrived, and controlled as Pravda!
However, the Bible is called the Word of God because the whole transcript is an inspired, faithful, and infallible record of what God determined essential for us to know about Himself, the cosmos in which we live, our spiritual allies and adversaries, and our fellow man.
Pain is one of the unavoidable facts of life. We Bidens have had our share. We don't pretend otherwise. And we don't pretend that we are different from families all over America that have to face the loss of loved ones or have to deal with the fallout of divorces.
Our duty is found in the revealed will of God in the Scriptures. Our trust must be in the sovereign will of God as He works in the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives for our good and His glory.
Only if we face up to our past can we regain our credibility. If we pretend that our trust is greater than it is, we will be like someone who tries to patch over a crack.
When we turn away from the reality of what we do to animals for our gustatory pleasure, we play a game of pretend, like the child who covers her eyes and thinks you can't see her. And yet, there she remains. Closing our eyes doesn't make violence disappear; it only closes our minds and hearts and enables the violence to continue.
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