John Shelby Spong Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“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 -
“The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“I can only give away the love that I have received.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.”
-- John Shelby Spong -
“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
