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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
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John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
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Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
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Charlotte
North Carolina
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More quotes by John Shelby Spong
Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.
John Shelby Spong
The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures.
John Shelby Spong
That's why the virgin birth never gets rid of the human mother. The story only gets rid of the human father. So Jesus' life was the life of God nurtured through the Virgin Mary. That's because the virgin birth died as a literal story as soon as we discovered that women had an egg cell. It's interesting to watch what the Roman church did about that.
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
Edward Schillebeeckx is probably as fine a New Testament scholar as I've ever read. He's a Dutchman. And he was harassed so many times that it was just painful for him. He constantly had to go to Rome to explain his views.
John Shelby Spong
Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
John Shelby Spong
You need to identify the values that come out of that kind of belief system, because I don't see them. All the polls I look at say, for example, that adultery is committed as much in the Bible Belt as in any other part of the country. The same goes for abortion, child abuse, spouse abuse or murder.
John Shelby Spong
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.
John Shelby Spong
The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.
John Shelby Spong
The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years.
John Shelby Spong
I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.
John Shelby Spong
What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
John Shelby Spong
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.
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
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.
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
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
John Shelby Spong
I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naïveté?
John Shelby Spong
The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.
John Shelby Spong
