John Shelby Spong Quotes - Page 3

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• Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.

  John Shelby Spong

  Ignorance, Biblical, Two

  John Shelby Spong (1994). “Resurrection: myth or reality? : a bishop's search for the origins of Christianity”, Harpercollins

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• I prepare for death by living.

  John Shelby Spong

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• I began to read [Bible] as a critic, an in-house critic. So I got to a place where when I got to the university, I just couldn't reconcile that book and some of its points of view with stuff I was learning in my academic career. And so then you have a choice: either you give up your academic career and close your mind and become a constant fundamentalist, or you give up your religion and become a citizen of the modern world and get a modern education, or just spend the rest of your life balancing the two things together, forcing them into a dialogue.

  John Shelby Spong

  Giving Up, Book, Careers

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

  John Shelby Spong

  Who God Is, Able, Way

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

  John Shelby Spong

  Spiritual, Thinking, Doe

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• We have to start at ground zero and ask what it means to have a real connection with God and what it means to pray. We have to recast our whole understanding of God. We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, a whole group of people who have recast the way we think about reality.

  John Shelby Spong

  Zero, Real, Mean

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."

  John Shelby Spong

  Book, Mean, Night

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.

  John Shelby Spong

  Prayer, Thinking, People

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Our problem is not that we're fallen; our problem is we haven't become human yet. The question is, what can make us human, so that we can give life away and give love away and not be grasping after trying to protect our own lives all the time? That's the way I see the Jesus story, and I think it's a powerful and profound story.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Powerful, Thinking

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

  John Shelby Spong

  People, Dieting, World

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• There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We're a little higher than the apes. It's a very different perspective.

  John Shelby Spong

  Angel, People, Perfect

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• It's the 21st century, and somebody has to rise from within this faith tradition and retranslate it for the post-modern world... The Earth is not the center of the universe, therefore, God is not a being who lives above the sky, who splits the Red Sea from time to time, or creates a miracle, or whatever.

  John Shelby Spong

  Sea, Sky, Miracle

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, People, Kind

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I didn't choose to be white, I didn't choose to be male, I didn't choose to be heterosexual, I didn't choose to be right-handed. Those are the givens of life. And I don't know why the church can't deal with that, why they can't understand that. Well, I do know why: because people are always afraid of anybody who's different.

  John Shelby Spong

  White, People, Church

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• Anybody who's a mythology ... there's always a fear. That's why we don't like people whose skin color is different, whose eye slant is different, or whose worship is different. It makes them feel insecure. So we strike out. The thing that bothers me most about the Christian church today is that we spend our time confirming people in their own sense of wretchedness.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Eye, Insecure

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• ...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

  John Shelby Spong

  Journey, Dimensions, Timelessness

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell”, p.20, Harper Collins

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• I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.

  John Shelby Spong

  Fall, Mean, Order

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Biblical higher criticism is preserved in the particular enclave of academic Christian scholarship and is thought to be too unfruitful to share with the average pew-sitter, for it raises more questions than the church can adequately answer. So the leaders of the church would protect the simple believers from concepts they were not trained to understand. In this way that ever-widening gap between academic Christians and the average pew-sitter made its first appearance.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Biblical, Simple

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• I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand.

  John Shelby Spong

  Believe, Thinking, Punishment

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• Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.

  John Shelby Spong

  Life Is Good, Evil, Life Is

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• Human beings are hardwired by however many millions or billions of years to orient toward their own survival. That's why we're tribal people. That's why we're prejudiced people.
  That's why we treat women as second-class citizens, that's why we are homophobic, and that's why we make religion a weapon to prove we're superior to other people.

  John Shelby Spong

  Years, Class, People

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Fall, People, Humanity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• If you're going to live in a community, you have to refrain from killing one another and stealing from one another. You must have honor and honesty in your dealings with one another. But I think the deeper thing that we need to do is to become so fully human that we don't grasp at life; we give life away. We give love away. We give being away. That is the ultimate work of religion.

  John Shelby Spong

  Honesty, Thinking, Giving

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Jesus, Mean, Writing

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

  John Shelby Spong

  Struggle, Years, Humanity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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