Top 35 John Shelby Spong Quotes

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?

Mother Nature is not sweet.

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

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.

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.

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.

I believe that God is very real.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

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.

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.

I am a child of the 21st century.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 experience God as the power of love.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.