The Rt Rev John Shelby Spong obituary – The Times

The Right Rev John Shelby Spong disbelieved so many of the tenets of Christianity that his critics wondered how he could call himself a Christian at all. Trying to ground his faith in modern science, he discarded the virgin birth as a biological impossibility, denied the existence of miracles, and believed that humanity was not created in God’s image, but moulded haphazardly by natural selection.

He did not think that God answered requests to intervene in the world and described the Bible as “not that holy”, saying it was not the work of God but of “human beings, and some of them had real hang-ups”. One of those writers, St Paul, was to Spong’s mind a “self-loathing and repressed gay male”. Spong did not even