Top 100 John Shelby Spong Quotes
#1. 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
#2. God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.
John Shelby Spong
#4. 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
#5. Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
John Shelby Spong
#7. We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.
John Shelby Spong
#8. It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
John Shelby Spong
#9. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
John Shelby Spong
#10. Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves.
John Shelby Spong
#11. Jesus represents the possibilities of a new dimension of existence that transcends all the boundaries that restrict us from opening ourselves to God and allowing this source of love to flow through us.
John Shelby Spong
#12. When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.
John Shelby Spong
#13. We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.
John Shelby Spong
#14. I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.
John Shelby Spong
#15. I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.
John Shelby Spong
#17. All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
John Shelby Spong
#18. If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.
John Shelby Spong
#19. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.
John Shelby Spong
#21. I spend my life studying that book, and every book I've written has in some sense been a book about the Bible, and that's what I mean by reclaiming its value and its essence for a world that no longer treats it literally and no longer reads it traditionally.
John Shelby Spong
#22. 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
#23. We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We've murdered them; we've burned them at the stake; we've run them out of town for something over which they have no control. And that's immoral.
John Shelby Spong
#24. It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
John Shelby Spong
#25. You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'
John Shelby Spong
#26. 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
#27. "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbor's." Your neighbor is clearly a male, and the woman, the ox and the ass are property of the male. That's not morality I will salute today.
John Shelby Spong
#28. Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.
John Shelby Spong
#29. I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view.
John Shelby Spong
#30. We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.
John Shelby Spong
#31. Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.
John Shelby Spong
#32. Prayer is rather the activity that enables each of us to be givers to and receivers from one another of the deepest meaning of life - a meaning I call God.
John Shelby Spong
#33. Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being.
John Shelby Spong
#34. Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.
John Shelby Spong
#35. The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.
John Shelby Spong
#36. 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
#37. I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church.
John Shelby Spong
#38. I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
John Shelby Spong
#39. True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.
John Shelby Spong
#41. I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.
John Shelby Spong
#42. They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.
John Shelby Spong
#43. I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.
John Shelby Spong
#44. 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
#45. Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
#46. The ultimate meaning of the Bible escapes human limits and calls us to a recognition that every life is holy, every life is loved, and every life is called to be all that that life is capable of being.
John Shelby Spong
#48. 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.
John Shelby Spong
#49. So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.
John Shelby Spong
#50. I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.
John Shelby Spong
#51. Erich Fromm, a German-American psychologist and author, reminds us that people never think their way into new ways of acting, they always act their way into new ways of thinking.
John Shelby Spong
#52. The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
John Shelby Spong
#53. If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system.
John Shelby Spong
#54. We have a democracy within the bounds of a constitution which provides certain guarantees related to the basic humanity of every person. I think that's the best way to go.
John Shelby Spong
#55. I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, "What does it mean to live in Christ?" by saying, "There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
John Shelby Spong
#56. The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.
John Shelby Spong
#57. The great danger ... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.
John Shelby Spong
#58. If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths.
John Shelby Spong
#59. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
John Shelby Spong
#60. Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.
John Shelby Spong
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The powers of nature are so great, and our power is so inept. So,in order to cope with the incredible anxiety that human self-consciousness produced, I think we created God in our own image, and then portrayed this God as having supernatural power that we didn't have.
John Shelby Spong
#65. The cross reveals that we're called to a deeper, fuller experience of what it means to be alive and open to new dimensions of life which our religious boundaries - creeds, atonement theologies - have kept us from experiencing.
John Shelby Spong
#66. I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child.
John Shelby Spong
#67. Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity.
John Shelby Spong
#68. I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.
John Shelby Spong
#69. 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
#70. The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.
John Shelby Spong
#71. I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is
open to life, open to love and open to being.
John Shelby Spong
#72. I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.
John Shelby Spong
#73. Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.
John Shelby Spong
#74. 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
#75. I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.
John Shelby Spong
#76. Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.
John Shelby Spong
#77. We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.
John Shelby Spong
#78. I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life.
The primary reason the old idea of rescuing the fallen is no good is that there never was a time when we fell from perfection into sin.
John Shelby Spong
#80. The Bible tells me that every life is holy; the Bible tells me that every life is loved; the Bible tells me that every life is called to be all that it can be.
John Shelby Spong
#81. I treasure the Bible. I live in it and work on it all the time. But it is not the word of God. It's the tribal story of a particular people, and the best thing about that story is that the story keeps growing and evolving.
John Shelby Spong
#82. 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
#83. I don't like to talk about it in those terms; it's impossible to describe who or what God "is." Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it;
John Shelby Spong
#84. Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience.
John Shelby Spong
#85. Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.
John Shelby Spong
#86. 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
#87. The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see.
John Shelby Spong
#88. 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
#89. The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.
John Shelby Spong
#90. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
John Shelby Spong
#91. 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
#92. Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, says, "From the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles." This encompasses the whole world. Suddenly it's not the Jews against the Gentiles, or my tribe against your tribe.
John Shelby Spong
#93. Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.
John Shelby Spong
#94. I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.
John Shelby Spong
#95. 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
#96. I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand.
John Shelby Spong
#97. There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We're a little higher than the apes. It's a very different perspective.
John Shelby Spong
#98. I was baptized as an infant. I was confirmed as an adolescent; I was active in my church's youth group and in my university student group. I was married before the church's altar; trained at the church's seminaries, ordained deacon and priest at age 24.
John Shelby Spong
#99. 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
#100. 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
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