John Shelby Spong Quotes

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Last Updated on May 30, 2021

Enhances
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Nov 07, 2020

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.

Nov 07, 2020

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.

Person
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Mother
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Nov 07, 2020

Mother Nature is not sweet.

Police
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Nov 07, 2020

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.'

Enemies
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Nov 07, 2020

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.

Hope
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Life
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Nov 07, 2020

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Light
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

I believe that God is very real.

Commandment
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Enough
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Nov 07, 2020

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

God
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Nov 07, 2020

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

Mixed
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Nov 07, 2020

Religion is a mixed blessing.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

I experience God as the power of love.

Hero
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Person
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Nov 07, 2020

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

I Can
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Nov 07, 2020

I can only give away the love that I have received.

Go
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

I Can
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Nov 07, 2020

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

Century
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Nov 07, 2020

I am a child of the 21st century.

Christian Church
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Nov 07, 2020

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

God
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Church
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Control
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

People
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Christian
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Nature
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Debatable
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Nov 07, 2020

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

Humanity
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Controversial
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Nov 07, 2020

In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.

History
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Most
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Nov 07, 2020

Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.

Nov 07, 2020

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.

History
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Divine
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Church
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Earth
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Storm
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Denigrate
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Nov 07, 2020

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?

Path
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Best
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Find
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Nov 07, 2020

I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.

Life
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Nov 07, 2020

I believe God is real, but I believe God calls me beyond myself to take responsibility for my life and to try top work to allow other people to be themselves and to take responsibility for their lives.

Experience
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Me
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Green
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Nov 07, 2020

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.

Asked
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Nov 07, 2020

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

Affirm
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Hate
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Life
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Life
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Find
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Love
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Experience
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

I Am
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Nov 07, 2020

I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious.

History
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Nov 07, 2020

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

People
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

Human
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Nov 07, 2020

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

God
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Nov 07, 2020

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.

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