John Shelby Spong Quotes - Page 6

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• The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Party, Hero

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• 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

  Titles, Scripture, Facts

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.

  John Shelby Spong

  Opportunity, People, Church

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• At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension.

  John Shelby Spong

  Easter, Religion, Three

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?”, p.21, Harper Collins

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• In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.

  John Shelby Spong

  Crazy, People, Wish

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that if was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.

  John Shelby Spong

  Makeup, Heaven, Dying

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• Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one's neighbor.... The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative.

  John Shelby Spong

  Hands, Giving, Justice

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• In supporting argument for segregation, Paul [the apostol] addresses the people in his epistle to the Colossians, and he tells them how to treat their slaves. "Slaves, obey your masters. Masters, be kind to yourslaves." Paul was in favor of a kinder and gentler slavery; it never occurred to him to raise the question about whether slavery itself was immoral.

  John Shelby Spong

  People, Slavery, Addresses

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Rigor Mortis, Dying

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• Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Giving Love, Justice

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• 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

  Two, Library, Archives

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

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• [Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.

  John Shelby Spong

  Example, Stories, Way

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

  John Shelby Spong

  Prayer, Religion, Atheism

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• Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Order, Humanity

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• The powers of nature are so great, and our power is so inept. So,in order to cope with the incredible anxiety that human self-consciousness produced, I think we created God in our own image, and then portrayed this God as having supernatural power that we didn't have.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Self, Order

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Christian, Catholic, Church

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Children, Thinking

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

  John Shelby Spong

  Opinion, Ends, Organized

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Jesus, Pay The Price

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Thinking, Humanity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Men, Thinking, Years

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Horse, Impossible, Like You

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  John Shelby Spong

  Prayer, Thinking, Land

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• 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

  Mother, Jesus, Father

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational.

  John Shelby Spong

  Country, War, Men

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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