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" I can only give away the love that I have received. "

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

" 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

" 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

" I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it. "

John Shelby Spong

" Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence. "

John Shelby Spong

" Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. "

John Shelby Spong

" I experience God as the power of love. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" 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

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

John Shelby Spong

" I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile. "

John Shelby Spong

" The Bible tells me that every life is holy; the Bible tells me that every life is loved; the Bible tells me that every life is called to be all that it can be. "

John Shelby Spong

" The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world. "

John Shelby Spong

" I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication. "

John Shelby Spong

" Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them. "

John Shelby Spong

" I believe God is real, but I believe God calls me beyond myself to take responsibility for my life and to try top work to allow other people to be themselves and to take responsibility for their lives. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go. "

John Shelby Spong

" You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.' "

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" Religion is a mixed blessing. "

John Shelby Spong

" I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books. "

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

" The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. "

John Shelby Spong

" I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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. "

John Shelby Spong

" 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

" I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. "

John Shelby Spong