John Shelby Spong Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church.”

“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.”

“I experience God as the power of love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.”

“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.”