John Shelby Spong quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Shelby Spong on Wise Famous Quotes.

A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don't have any interest in doing that. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty.

I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books.

Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.

I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious.

The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion,but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

I believe that God is very real.

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.

Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.

Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be.

I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.

I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

I can only give away the love that I have received.

I experience God as the power of love.

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.

The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels.

I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.

As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.

I go where I'm invited. And all I can tell you is if we accepted every invitation we had, I'd be away every day of my life.

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order.

Death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched,miserable and sinful they are.

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.

I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.

Paul drew, however, little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party, for whom any change threatened their security.

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is
open to life, open to love and open to being.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

I have become convinced that we must put an end to atonement theology or there will be no future for the Christian faith. This

I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.

Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.

[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

I prepare for death by living.

Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.

I am a child of the 21st century.

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another

We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

Mother Nature is not sweet.

My basis of morality is this: does this action enhance life, or does it denigrate life? Does it build up or does it tear down?

Religion is a mixed blessing.

I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as "a priest forever" (Ps. 110:4).

Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God.