John Shelby Spong Quotes

Quotes about:

• God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

  John Shelby Spong

  God, Christian, Buddhist

  "Walking into the Mystery of God" by John Shelby Spong, www.uua.org.

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• 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 mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.

  John Shelby Spong

  Journey, Religion, Doe

  "Q&A on The Parliament of the World's Religions". Weekly mailing, September 5, 2007.

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• I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Christianity, Eternity

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• 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 experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be.

  John Shelby Spong

  Love, Thinking, Mindfulness

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• A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one's anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.

  John Shelby Spong

  Insecure, Fundamentalist Religion, Views

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks this Meaning of Script”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

  John Shelby Spong

  Swimming, Church, Noise

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• 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

  Believe, Humanity, Mind

  "Why We Must Reclaim The Bible From Fundamentalists". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 13, 2011.

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• It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

  John Shelby Spong

  Different

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love”, p.12, Harper Collins

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• You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Self, Grace

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

  38 Copy quote

• 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

  Rights, Battle, Slavery

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• The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and it's filled with the knowledge that people had in that period of time, some of which you and I rejected long ago. The Bible says that women are property, that homosexuals ought to be put to death, that anybody who worships a false God ought to be executed, that a child that talks back to his parents ought to be stoned at the gates of the city. Those ideas are absurd.

  John Shelby Spong

  Children, Cities, Ideas

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Book, Believe, People

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• 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 must be dismissed.

  John Shelby Spong

  Sacrifice, Views, Ideas

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• The Bible is full of dreadful things. There's a Psalm that says "Happy will you be when you take your enemy's children and dash their heads against the stones." Don't read that to me on Sunday morning and say "This is the word of the Lord." It's like that crazy man down in Alabama who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

  John Shelby Spong

  Morning, Children, Crazy

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.

  John Shelby Spong

  Differences, Dust, Order

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• 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 is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. Prayer is entering into the pain or joy of another person. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so.

  John Shelby Spong

  Prayer, Pain, Joy

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• 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

  Believe, Trying, Calling

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• When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.

  John Shelby Spong

  Hate, Men, Taught

  "Spong's Christian Humanism". "The Spirit of Things" with Rachael Kohn, www.abc.net.au. August 12, 2012.

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• I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

  John Shelby Spong

  God, Thinking, People

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• There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.

  John Shelby Spong

  Ignorance, Biblical, Church

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

  John Shelby Spong

  Miserable, Mets, Wretched

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Looks, Way

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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 race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

  John Shelby Spong

  Respect, Race, Ethnicity

  82 Copy quote

• I think if you're convinced that you're evil, and that God has had to rescue you, then the best you can be is grateful. But nobody ever loves the person they have to be perpetually grateful to. That's just not the way it works in humanity. You need to be set free. You need to be loved just as you are so that you can become all that you can be. That's the direction we have to turn the Christian message; when we do, it becomes universal.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Grateful, Thinking

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

  27 Copy quote

• I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Looks, Humans

  "Challenging the 'Sins of Scripture'". "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly, www.foxnews.com. April 13, 2005.

  64 Copy quote

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