But Spong spent a good portion of his talk pointing out discrepancies among the four gospels and the letters of Paul. One gospel passage Spong cited at First Christian has Jesus, Mary and Joseph returning home uneventfully to Galilee after his birth. Another depicts them fleeing to Egypt during the same time period to escape the wrath of King Herod. Far from it. The place we have to begin is to understand that there is a difference between the experience of God and our human attempts to explain that experience.
Human explanations are always time-warped.
To first-century men and women, the earth was flat and the stars were peepholes used by God to peer down upon us. This made the idea of a virgin birth a little more problematic, since Mary would have been an equal partner in the conception. He sees Jesus as a rebel who delighted in puncturing the prejudices of his day, as evidenced by the parable of the Good Samaritan and his encounter with the woman at the well. He sees mankind as still evolving. The doubts and questions Spong raises are nothing new, of course.