Creating a New Christianity

I'm reading retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong's book "A New Christianity for a New World."

In it he writes, "The time has come to create a new thing. Not a new religious coping device that will enable us to bank the fires of hysteria for another generation, but a new way to affirm self-consciousness as an asset and to seek within it that which is timeless, eternal, real and true."

And, "No more existential concern has ever faced those who have walked our evolutionary path." "The time has surely come when human beings must begin a new exploration into the divine, must sketch out a vision of the holy that is beyond theism but not beyond the reality for which the word God was created to point."

Wow. I'm not a Christian but I could not agree more. Affirming self-consciousness as an asset is certainly a basis of my Zen practice. More to come from the bishop.