John Shelby Spong famous quotes

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Christian #Buddhist #Thinking

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Believe #Trying #Calling

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

#Swimming #Church #Noise

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Sacrifice #Ideas #Views

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

#Respect #Race #Ethnicity

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

#Order #Differences #Dust

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

#Religious #Christianity #Eternity

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

#Thinking #Looks #Humans

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

#Believe #Views #People

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

#God #Thinking #People

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Life Is Good #Evil #Life Is

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Enemy

I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Thinking #Mindfulness #Phrases

The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one's neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Biblical #Two Sides #Justice

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

#Religious #Jesus #Memories

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

#Challenges #Church #Want

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

#Journey #Religion #Doe

Praying and living deeply, richly and fully have become for me almost indistinguishab le. Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. Prayer is entering into the pain or joy of another person. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Prayer #Pain #Joy

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

#Religious #War #Religion

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

#Punishment #Forever #Religion

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

#Prayer #Religion #Atheism

Mother Nature is not sweet.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Mother #Sweet #Mother Nature

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

#Different

I can only give away the love that I have received.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Giving

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

#Accepted #Invitations

When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Hate #Men #Taught

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

#Moon #Thinking #People

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

#Believe #Humanity #Mind

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Journey #Dimensions #Timelessness

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Easter #Religion #Exit

Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Christian #Biblical #Simple

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

#Gay #Past #Years

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

#Journey #Perspective #Doe

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Religious #Dying #Atheism

My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Love #Religious #Justice

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

#Jesus #Order #Humanity

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

#Jesus #Humanity #Looks

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

#Easter #Moving #Religion

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

#People #Dieting #World

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

#Roles #Way #Christianity

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

#Praying #Easy #Enough

I am a child of the 21st century.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Children #Century #21st Century

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Deny

I experience God as the power of love.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Power Of Love

I believe that God is very real.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Real #Believe #I Believe

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

#Thinking #Self #Vastness

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

#Book #Sky #Records

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

#Real #People #Enemy

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

#Yesterday #People #Giving

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

#Gay #Issues #People

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

#Mean #Police #Way

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

#Fall #Light #Perfect

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

#People #Trying #Church

The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Believe #Mean #Thinking

The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Christian #Hero #Party

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

#Prayer #Father #Maturity

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

#Girl #God #Son

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Heart #Mind #Religion

...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

#Gay #People #Catholic

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

#Truth #People #Church

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

#Christian #Immaturity #Church

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being...
-- John Shelby Spong

#Love #Reality #Names

"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

#Jesus #Believe #Sky

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

#Games #Atheism #Unbroken

I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naïveté?
-- John Shelby Spong

#Believe #Book #People

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Ignorance #Biblical #Two

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

#Religion #Atheism #Divinity

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

#People #Want

Religion is a mixed blessing.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Blessing

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

#Jesus #Giving #Justice

The way you become divine is to become wholly human
-- John Shelby Spong

#Way #Divine #Humans

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

#Miracle #Religion #Atheism

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
-- John Shelby Spong

#Hate #Found #Humans

The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Christian #Writing #Biblical

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Golf #Thinking #Play

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

#Differences #Historical #Word Of God

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

#Determination #Live Life

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

#Thinking #Source #Figures

The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Godly #Views #Decision

If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Jesus #Views #Religion

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

#Jesus #Reality #Apologetic

A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Insecure #Views #People

Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one's neighbor.... The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative.
-- John Shelby Spong

#Hands #Giving #Justice