John Shelby Spong Quotes

91 quotes in 1281 categories

• Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be. All
• When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference.… Angry
• The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. Atheism
• The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. Atheism
• The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and… Atheism
• Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way. Act
• The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its… Abandon
• If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that… All
• The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view… Act
• The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen. Becomes
• All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on… All
• Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference. Difference
• I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather… All
• 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… All
• Praying and living deeply, richly and fully have become for me almost indistinguishab le. Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It… Addressed
• "I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven… Any
• The way you become divine is to become wholly human Become Divine
• Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than… Age
• Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another Denigration
• True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the… All

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