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Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
John Shelby Spong
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John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
Author
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
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Charlotte
North Carolina
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Theistic
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Humans
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Atheism
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Prayer
Religion
More quotes by John Shelby Spong
Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.
John Shelby Spong
Religion is a mixed blessing.
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
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 don't like to talk about it in those terms it's impossible to describe who or what God is. Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn't do it.
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 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
What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.
John Shelby Spong
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.
John Shelby Spong
The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.
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 virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
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
The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours. The Bible is full of such references.
John Shelby Spong
I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.
John Shelby Spong
Mother Nature is not sweet.
John Shelby Spong
...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.
John Shelby Spong
Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.
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
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
