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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

John Shelby Spong Quotes

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

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– 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

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.’

– 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

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.

– John Shelby Spong

Mother Nature is not sweet.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

I am a child of the 21st century.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

Religion is a mixed blessing.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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.

– John Shelby Spong

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

– John Shelby Spong

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