Top 35 John Shelby Spong Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I experience God as the power of love.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe that God is very real. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. I call this God by different words. I describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground of being.

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.

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.

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.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Mother Nature is not sweet.

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.

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.