John Shelby Spong Quotes:
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
I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.
John Shelby Spong
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
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
The way you become divine is to become wholly human.
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
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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
Source: National Catholic Reporter
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
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
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
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
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
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
There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.
John Shelby Spong
I believe that is what the God experience does for us. It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life – into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love – and into an ability to be who we are.
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
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
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
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
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
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