Top 100 Spong Quotes
#1. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.
Richard Dawkins
#2. [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
#3. Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
#4. I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.
John Shelby Spong
#5. 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
#6. Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
John Shelby Spong
#7. 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
#8. "I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven located somewhere in the sky. My knowledge of the size of this universe reduces that concept to nonsense."
John Shelby Spong
#9. 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
#10. I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious.
John Shelby Spong
#11. The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
John Shelby Spong
#12. 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
#14. You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.
John Shelby Spong
#16. 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
#17. In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.
John Shelby Spong
#18. I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
John Shelby Spong
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.
John Shelby Spong
#22. 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
#23. Death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.
John Shelby Spong
#24. 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
#25. If I want to put a Christmas tree in my yard, or three crosses for the crucifixion story, that's fine. But if I try to use public property or a public school as a way to impress my religion on other people, I think that violates the constitution.
John Shelby Spong
#26. 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
#27. Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
John Shelby Spong
#28. 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
#29. Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies.
John Shelby Spong
#30. Secular journalists ... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.
John Shelby Spong
#31. 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
#32. In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ's hands and feet and the spear wound in his side.
John Shelby Spong
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
John Shelby Spong
#36. 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
#37. The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
John Shelby Spong
#38. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
John Shelby Spong
#39. We didn't educate women, because the leaders then didn't think they were educable. That changed when a shortage of teachers developed, because men didn't get paid enough to teach school. Then men, who held the positions of power, sent women to teachers' colleges.
John Shelby Spong
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication.
John Shelby Spong
#44. I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.
John Shelby Spong
#45. So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.
John Shelby Spong
#46. What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.
John Shelby Spong
#47. Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
John Shelby Spong
#48. I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.
John Shelby Spong
#49. 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
#51. 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
#52. It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
John Shelby Spong
#53. I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.
John Shelby Spong
#54. I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.
John Shelby Spong
#55. 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
#56. In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.
John Shelby Spong
#57. [Apostol Paul's] views were translated as, "Your rule is to be kind to black people; you don't beat them." It's very much the way we treated women in the 14th and 15th centuries. A woman was not human, and you should be kind to your wife like you are to all dumb animals. That was the mentality.
John Shelby Spong
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references.
John Shelby Spong
#61. 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
#62. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
John Shelby Spong
#63. I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don't think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There's nothing unconstitutional about that.
John Shelby Spong
#64. 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
#65. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.
John Shelby Spong
#66. The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go.
John Shelby Spong
#67. The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.
John Shelby Spong
#68. 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
#69. I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue ... We cannot say we have the only truth.
John Shelby Spong
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
John Shelby Spong
#75. God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.
John Shelby Spong
#76. 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
#77. I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.
John Shelby Spong
#78. Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement.
John Shelby Spong
#79. The Hebrew scriptures say it's okay to enslave anybody except your fellow Jews. It says you should enslave only your neighbors. I say to people that means Mexicans and Canadians are a bit at risk if we want to be literal about the Bible.
John Shelby Spong
#80. 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
#81. Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.
John Shelby Spong
#82. What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
John Shelby Spong
#83. "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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
John Shelby Spong
#87. Or, as a dear pal of the RevGals once advised, whoever you are and wherever God sends you, "Be fierce and fabulous for Jesus.
Martha Spong
#88. 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
#89. We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.
John Shelby Spong
#90. Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark's gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all.
John Shelby Spong
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.
John Shelby Spong
#95. We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.
John Shelby Spong
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. 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
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