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I experience God as the power of love.
John Shelby Spong
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John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
Author
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
Writer
Charlotte
North Carolina
Experience
Power
Love
More quotes by John Shelby Spong
The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.
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
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 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
I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.
John Shelby Spong
Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
John Shelby Spong
[Apostol Paul's] views were translated as, Your rule is to be kind to black people you don't beat them. It's very much the way we treated women in the 14th and 15th centuries. A woman was not human, and you should be kind to your wife like you are to all dumb animals. That was the mentality.
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
I can only give away the love that I have received.
John Shelby Spong
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.
John Shelby Spong
The church had to find a way to protect Jesus' perfection so that he could do the work of salvation which, in their frame of reference, only God could do, because God had to come into this world from outside this world to rescue the fallen creation.
John Shelby Spong
What we now need to see is that human life doesn't need to be rescued from a fall that didn't happen. Human life needs to be empowered. We have to begin to see the work of God as expanding the humanity of people so that they do not have to relate to one another out of the survivor mentality of fallen people.
John Shelby Spong
Nobody in the scientific or medical world thinks that homosexuality is something that people choose. It's something we are. Now, I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up when I was about twelve years old and girls didn't look obnoxious to me any longer, but I didn't make a choice about the matter. I just responded to my own hormones.
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
I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.
John Shelby Spong
To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it.
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
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
The way you become divine is to become wholly human
John Shelby Spong
Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.
John Shelby Spong