Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
John Shelby Spong
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: June 16
Author
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
Writer
Charlotte
North Carolina
Facts
Sins
Scripture
Parts
Bible
Sin
Dreadful
Terrible
Text
Working
Title
Fact
Titles
More quotes by John Shelby Spong
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
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
Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
John Shelby Spong
The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.
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
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
I experience God as the power of love.
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
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
It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?
John Shelby Spong
I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is I say that's my experience of God.
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
I go where I'm invited. And all I can tell you is if we accepted every invitation we had, I'd be away every day of my life.
John Shelby Spong
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
Religion is a mixed blessing.
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
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
Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
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
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
