John Shelby Spong Quotes
Top 69 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
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.
It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
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.
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.
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 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.
When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.
Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."
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.
open to life, open to love and open to being.
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.
Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.