John Shelby Spong
John Shelby Spong
John Shelby "Jack" Spongis a retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church. From 1979 to 2000 he was Bishop of Newark. He is a liberal Christian theologian, religion commentator and author. He calls for a fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth16 June 1931
CountryUnited States of America
John Shelby Spong quotes about
buddhist mind muslim saying suspect tibet
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.
document fuels gospel john liked presented visitor
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.
appears christ invited last nail physically prints risen spear thomas time wound
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.
human paradigm shift
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.
rights battle slavery
The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose.
stories way faces
[Charles] Darwin, for example, is the one who made us face the fact that the primary way we tell the Christ story doesn't work anymore.
religion atheism divinity
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
yesterday giving people
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.
enemy
I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.
life-is-good evil life-is
Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.
golf thinking play
I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.
punishment forever religion
The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
honesty thinking giving
If you're going to live in a community, you have to refrain from killing one another and stealing from one another. You must have honor and honesty in your dealings with one another. But I think the deeper thing that we need to do is to become so fully human that we don't grasp at life; we give life away. We give love away. We give being away. That is the ultimate work of religion.
tasks tradition christianity
As for the status of Western Christianity, we are in a place where our task is to redefine the primary symbols of our faith or tradition in a more human direction. That's the thing I spend my time doing.