John Shelby Spong Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I prepare for death by living.

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.

I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

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.

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

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

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

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

Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.

Mother Nature is not sweet.

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

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

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.

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

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.

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 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.

[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.

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.

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

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.

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

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

It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

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

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

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect.

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible."

One of my professors said to me once, "Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god."

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.

What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.

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

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

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.

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.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human

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.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.