Shelby Spong Quotes
Collection of top 69 famous quotes about Shelby Spong
Shelby Spong Quotes & Sayings
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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.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.
— John Shelby Spong
I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious.
— John Shelby Spong
The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.
— John Shelby Spong
When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.
— John Shelby Spong
The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
— John Shelby Spong
I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
I believe that God is very real.
— John Shelby Spong
It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
— John Shelby Spong
I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.
— John Shelby Spong
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
— John Shelby Spong
Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.
— John Shelby Spong
Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be.
— John Shelby Spong
I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.
— John Shelby Spong
I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.
— John Shelby Spong
I can only give away the love that I have received.
— John Shelby Spong
I experience God as the power of love.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.
— John Shelby Spong
The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.
— John Shelby Spong
Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.
— John Shelby Spong
As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
Death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.
— John Shelby Spong
Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
— John Shelby Spong
When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.
— John Shelby Spong
I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched,miserable and sinful they are.
— John Shelby Spong
Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."
— John Shelby Spong
What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
— John Shelby Spong
Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.
— John Shelby Spong
I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.
— John Shelby Spong
Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.
— John Shelby Spong
Paul drew, however, little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party, for whom any change threatened their security.
— John Shelby Spong
The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God isopen to life, open to love and open to being. — John Shelby Spong
The way you become divine is to become wholly human.
— John Shelby Spong
I have become convinced that we must put an end to atonement theology or there will be no future for the Christian faith. This
— John Shelby Spong
![Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/shelby-spong-quotes-by-john-shelby-spong-77356.jpg "Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's")
I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.
— John Shelby Spong
Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
— John Shelby Spong
![Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/shelby-spong-quotes-by-john-shelby-spong-183354.jpg "Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby")
Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.
— John Shelby Spong
It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
— John Shelby Spong
God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.
— John Shelby Spong
I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.
— John Shelby Spong
![Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: [Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/shelby-spong-quotes-by-john-shelby-spong-280037.jpg "Shelby Spong Quotes By John Shelby Spong: [Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who")
[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.
— John Shelby Spong
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
— John Shelby Spong
It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.
— John Shelby Spong
I prepare for death by living.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
— John Shelby Spong
I am a child of the 21st century.
— John Shelby Spong
Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
— John Shelby Spong
We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.
— John Shelby Spong
I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
Mother Nature is not sweet.
— John Shelby Spong
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?
— John Shelby Spong
Religion is a mixed blessing.
— John Shelby Spong
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).
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
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.
— John Shelby Spong
I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.
— John Shelby Spong
