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" All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake. "
John Shelby Spong
Religion
Only
Need
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" In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ's hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. "
John Shelby Spong
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Feet
" I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories. "
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" I can only give away the love that I have received. "
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" I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. "
John Shelby Spong
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" The ultimate meaning of the Bible escapes human limits and calls us to a recognition that every life is holy, every life is loved, and every life is called to be all that that life is capable of being. "
John Shelby Spong
Limits
Bible
Recognition
" I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf. "
John Shelby Spong
Long
Golf
Green
" Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies. "
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" I experience God as the power of love. "
John Shelby Spong
God
Experience
Power
" Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark's gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all. "
John Shelby Spong
Narrative
Gospel
History
" I spend my life studying that book, and every book I've written has in some sense been a book about the Bible, and that's what I mean by reclaiming its value and its essence for a world that no longer treats it literally and no longer reads it traditionally. "
John Shelby Spong
Value
Life
Book
" The cross reveals that we're called to a deeper, fuller experience of what it means to be alive and open to new dimensions of life which our religious boundaries - creeds, atonement theologies - have kept us from experiencing. "
John Shelby Spong
Life
Alive
New
" It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish. "
John Shelby Spong
Easy
Enough
God
" Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order. "
John Shelby Spong
Divine
Shift
Much
" When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless. "
John Shelby Spong
Define
Almost
Asked
" Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history. "
John Shelby Spong
Jesus
Reality
Explained
" If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths. "
John Shelby Spong
Walk
Saying
Paths
" I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth. "
John Shelby Spong
Believe
Experience
God
" I was baptized as an infant. I was confirmed as an adolescent; I was active in my church's youth group and in my university student group. I was married before the church's altar; trained at the church's seminaries, ordained deacon and priest at age 24. "
John Shelby Spong
Age
Student
Church
" The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history. "
John Shelby Spong
Life
Journey
History
" 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
Say
Against
Hero
" I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. "
John Shelby Spong
Think
Worth
God
" The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels. "
John Shelby Spong
Minds
Tell
Survive
" The way you become divine is to become wholly human. "
John Shelby Spong
Way
Human
You
" My basis of morality is this: does this action enhance life, or does it denigrate life? Does it build up or does it tear down? "
John Shelby Spong
Up
Life
Build
" I believe that is what the God experience does for us. It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life - into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love - and into an ability to be who we are. "
John Shelby Spong
Love
People
Experience
" Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience. "
John Shelby Spong
Faith
People
Myself
" There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years. "
John Shelby Spong
Three
Book
Over
" God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny. "
John Shelby Spong
God
Define
Presence
" Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history. "
John Shelby Spong
Who
Never
Real
" Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals. "
John Shelby Spong
Will
Used
New