“There is no inerrant Bible. There is no one true Church. There is no faith once-for-all delivered to the saints.” Once again Bishop Spong has expressed his deep and abiding detestation for the Christian faith, this time in a dialogue/debate with Al Mohler on Faith Under Fire. He likewise denied the resurrection, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement—i.e., the entirety of the core of the Christian faith. He is, without question, an anti-Christ. Does that surprise you? Does that make you flinch? Why? Let’s remember what John said long ago:
1 John 2:18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us. // 4:2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.
Remember that when John wrote these words, the Christian church was still small, and growing, and in fact, it was racked by division and the presence of false teachers. It was a difficult time! Even the churches founded by, or in direct contact with an apostle, like John, were not immune to apostasy and heresy. These anti-Christs had once been within the fellowship of the church (compare Acts 20:24ff). Think about what an attraction they would have had when they went out and began to form churches in competition with the truth! John used the term “anti-Christ” of men he once knew by name and fellowship. And yet he identified them as anti-Christs.
You might get thrown in jail in Australia today, or maybe Canada, for saying someone is an anti-Christ, so anti-truth and anti-Christian Western society has become. But much more to the point, in most of evangelicalism today, you have one of two extremes: you have on the one side the unthinking attitude that throws such terminology around with abandon, applying it to anyone who does not agree on every jot and tittle of one’s theology (e.g., KJV Onlyism), and on the other, an unwillingness to believe that the core of the faith has been revealed with sufficient clarity to ever apply that term again. They may give the apostles a “pass” on using such terminology, but surely no one today would dare do so. It just isn’t “Christian.”
The fact is, my friends, John Shelby Spong is an anti-Christian teacher. He hates the faith, hates the Word, hates the Gospel. He is a blight upon the good names of godly men who were part of the Anglican communion in the past. As an utter heretic he should have been excommunicated a very long time ago. And since he denies the Incarnation and the resurrection, he is, by any fair reading of the Bible, an anti-Christ. If that bothers you, to be honest, you might wish to check your “post-modern infection level.” Are you really willing to abandon John’s words just because modern men are offended by the proclamation of objective truth? Think about it.
