The Spong that afflicted the Anglican Church

But Spong spoke with the confidence of a Voltaire, sure that the age of reason will prevail over churchly superstition. This appealed to the aging majority of the Jesus Seminar, no doubt. But Spong's New Agey description of God as a subjective experience unique to every individual was edgy enough to separate him from most of the rationalist skeptics in the audience. He's too old to have ever been a hippie, but he tried desperately to mimic some of the gooey love language of Sixties-era theorists such as Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox, Marianne Williamson, or Rosemary Ruether. The aging bishop's efforts to be "with it" were perhaps not entirely unsuccessful, at least by the standards of this crowd. But that's not saying much. [My bolds, heh heh heh]

When Spong had finished and the seminar adjourned for a break, I left the hotel ballroom and had walked only a few blocks down Broadway before coming face-to-face with the right-wing religion Spong had so colorfully warned me of just an hour before.

There was loud singing coming from a store-front church meeting in an old theater. I walked in and discovered hundreds of worshippers filling the auditorium at a weeknight service, clapping, singing, and, in many cases, jumping up and down. The majority were black, Asian, or Hispanic, and represented the full spectrum of ages. It was standing room only, and the gathering was alive with an energy absent from the hotel ballroom in which the Jesus Seminar scholars had exchanged their wry observations.

It was an unexpected and jarring reminder that even in Manhattan, the Jesus Seminar's perspective is hardly dominant. The multiethnic audience of the evangelical congregation reflected the international nature of the orthodox Christian revival that is sweeping the globe, in some cases even infecting the liberal bastions of mainline Protestantism in the United States. Here is the future of Christianity, and it is leaving Spong and his like behind.