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 Read Quote
I don’t think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. John Shelby Spong Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote