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" The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person. "
John Shelby Spong
See
Way
Life
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" 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. "
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" Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence. "
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" I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious. "
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" I experience God as the power of love. "
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" The way you become divine is to become wholly human. "
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" In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches. "
John Shelby Spong
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" 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
Way
Universe
Sun
" 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
" I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. "
John Shelby Spong
Places
Early
Right
" 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
Side
Feel
Feet
" 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
" 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
God
Name
Speak
" When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless. "
John Shelby Spong
Define
Almost
Asked
" I believe that God is very real. "
John Shelby Spong
Very
God
Believe
" 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
Create
You
World
" 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
Tomorrow
People
New
" Religion is a mixed blessing. "
John Shelby Spong
Blessing
Mixed
Religion
" 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
Negative
Die
People
" 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
Boots
Universe
Think
" 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. "
John Shelby Spong
Christian
Used
Church
" I can only give away the love that I have received. "
John Shelby Spong
I Can
Received
Only
" 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
" 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
" We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We've murdered them; we've burned them at the stake; we've run them out of town for something over which they have no control. And that's immoral. "
John Shelby Spong
Church
People
Run
" 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
" I believe that God is very real. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. I call this God by different words. I describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground of being. "
John Shelby Spong
Live
God
Day
" I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view. "
John Shelby Spong
Storm
Men
Women
" 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
Looking
Live
Down
" A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don't have any interest in doing that. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty. "
John Shelby Spong
People
Meaning
Me
" My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway. "
John Shelby Spong
Own
Stand
Want