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Mother Nature is not sweet.
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
Sweet
Mother
Nature
More quotes by 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
Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another
John Shelby Spong
I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, What does it mean to live in Christ? by saying, There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
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 the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
John Shelby Spong
If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.
John Shelby Spong
I experience God as the power of love.
John Shelby Spong
The thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.
John Shelby Spong
The way you become divine is to become wholly human
John Shelby Spong
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
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
Religion is a mixed blessing.
John Shelby Spong
You don't take your newborn baby, put that baby on your lap, and say, Now listen, kid, you were born in sin, you're not worth anything, and you've got to pray for mercy. That's not going to raise a healthy adult. And that's what we do Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
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
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
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
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
In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.
John Shelby Spong
There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.
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