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.
billion cannot centre conceive earth galaxy hundred middle planet possibly rather star stars within
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.
among discovered highly viewed
In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.
prayer thinking people
If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so.
jesus ideas perfection
I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life. The primary reason the old idea of rescuing the fallen is no good is that there never was a time when we fell from perfection into sin.
jesus humanity looks
I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.
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.
pain prayer joy
Praying and living deeply, richly and fully have become for me almost indistinguishab le. Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. Prayer is entering into the pain or joy of another person. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so.
jesus views religion
If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.
religion atheism divinity
The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.