Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
Author
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
Writer
Charlotte
North Carolina
Thinking
Faith
Christian
Makes
Indication
Stories
Deeply
Become
Fully
Human
Moral
Humans
Religious
Think
Story

More quotes by John Shelby Spong

Image
It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.
John Shelby Spong
Image
I think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was The Terrible Text of The Bible.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.
John Shelby Spong
Image
It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
John Shelby Spong
Image
The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
John Shelby Spong
Image
We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.
John Shelby Spong
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future it is the last gasp of the past.
John Shelby Spong