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Eternal Life

A New Vision

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Eternal Life

By: John Shelby Spong
Narrated by: John Morgan
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About this listen

Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Sins of Scripture, and many other books, is known for his controversial ideas and fighting for minority rights.

In Eternal Life: A New Vision, a remarkable spiritual journey about his lifelong struggle with the questions of God and death, he reveals how he came to a new conviction about eternal life. God, says Spong, is ultimately one, and each of us is part of that oneness. We do not live on after death as children who have been rewarded with heaven or punished with hell but as part of the life and being of God, sharing in God's eternity, which is beyond the barriers of time and space. spong argues that the discovery of the eternal can be found within each of us if we go deeply into ourselves, transcend our limits and become fully human.

By seeking God within, by living each day to its fullest, we will come to understand how we live eternally.Always compelling and controversial, Spong, the leading Christian liberal and pioneer for human rights, wrestles with the question that all of us will ultimately face. In his final book, Spong takes us beyond religion and even beyond Christianity until he arrives at the affirmation that the fully realized human life empties into and participates in the eternity of God. The pathway into God turns out to be both a pathway into ourselves and a doorway into eternal life. To Job's question "If a man (or a woman) dies, will he (or she) live again?" he gives his answer as a ringing yes!

©2009 John Shelby Spong (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers
Bible Study Christianity Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts Religious Studies
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Editor reviews

For many disciples, eternal life is the great dangling carrot that’s finally handed over to hungry believers at the end of a life well spent serving and living according to selected spiritual principles.

However, in Eternal Life: A New Vision, Bishop John Shelby Spong, a controversial figure in some closed circles, proposes a new idea of what eternal life actually means. According to Spong, eternal life goes, "beyond religion, beyond theism, beyond heaven and hell."

In other words, Spong doesn’t imagine eternal life will be spent lounging on puffy clouds and spending pain-free days and nights worshiping and feeling great from the moment we die until forever...and ever….and ever. Whew.

Narrated with non-judgmental clarity by John Morgan.

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Constrained view on religion and perception of God

First of all the author has clearly done a huge amount of research and it is written well.
The problemm comes when he (previously a Bishop) gets theological, scientific and philosophical facts wrong, sometimes slightly and sometimes some great whoppers.
Atheists will lap this all up because it is stated so matter of factly however, all of it is "in his opinion" is he states several times and his arrogance of his "new self" starts shining through with exclamations such as "we almost know everything there is to know (reference to scientific knowledge)".
It's all very one sided and honestly just starts reading either as propoganda for atheism or the lamentations of an old man who has swallowed the bitter pill of misunderstanding, possibly belief, and has been found wanting.

He then goes on to concluding that God is not an outward deity of which to look for but for looking within oneself; something that has been readily practiced and encouraged for millenia through meditation and prayer (what did he think prayer was for).

This is a story of a sad old man lamenting on his fundamentalist and conformative beginnings to come to a conclusion that most of us find in our thirties. Yes, God is obviously not a person in the sky - no need to go on about it for 6 hours of the audio book.

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