John Shelby Spong Quotes

There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

The thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.

I know Jerry [Falwell] fairly well, and he's probably not bright enough to recognize all of the implications of what he said.

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

I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

I want the traditional family upheld, but I don't want it upheld to the detriment of other people.

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.

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another

I am a child of the 21st century.

I've never known about anyone being helped by being told how wretched, miserable, sinful, and evil they are.

Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us.

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.

Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case.

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.

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

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

I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be.

Benedict XVI kept saying that homosexuals are deviant. They're not deviant. They're deviant only if you say that anyone who is different from me is abnormal.

It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.

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.

I experience God as the power of love.

I believe that God is very real.

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

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.

As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.