Top 120 John Shelby Spong Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Live life to it’s fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be.”

— John Shelby Spong

2. “True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.”

— John Shelby Spong

3. “I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don’t say that’s what God is; I say that’s my experience of God.”

— John Shelby Spong

4. “I experience God as the power of love.”

— John Shelby Spong

5. “I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.”

— John Shelby Spong

6. “I treasure the Bible. I live in it and work on it all the time. But it is not the word of God. It’s the tribal story of a particular people, and the best thing about that story is that the story keeps growing and evolving.”

— John Shelby Spong

7. “Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who’s going to take care of us.”

— John Shelby Spong

8. “The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.”

— John Shelby Spong

9. “Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.”

— John Shelby Spong

10. “When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.”

— John Shelby Spong

11. “The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

— John Shelby Spong

12. “The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.”

— John Shelby Spong

13. “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.”

— John Shelby Spong

14. “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

15. “Mother Nature is not sweet.”

— John Shelby Spong

16. “The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity.”

— John Shelby Spong

17. “Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.”

— John Shelby Spong

18. “God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.”

— John Shelby Spong

19. “The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive.”

— John Shelby Spong

20. “When any human group decides that they can define God, the outcome is always predictable. The “true faith,” once defined, must then be defended against all critics, and it must also then be forced upon all people – “for their own good, lest their souls be in jeopardy.”

— John Shelby Spong

21. “Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn’t. That’s magic, that’s not God. Sometimes, you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

— John Shelby Spong

22. “The demolishment of the power of organized Christianity in the Western world to finally realize the emancipation of women and give them the vote in 1920. Women couldn’t even own property in their own names until the last quarter of the 19th century in America.”

— John Shelby Spong

23. “All religion seems to need to prove that it’s the only truth. And that’s where it turns demonic. Because that’s when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.”

— John Shelby Spong

24. “I can only give away the love that I have received.”

— John Shelby Spong

25. “Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.”

— John Shelby Spong

26. “I don’t think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf.”

— John Shelby Spong

27. “Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.”

— John Shelby Spong

28. “I don’t think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that’s something which people don’t really understand.”

— John Shelby Spong

29. “We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.”

— John Shelby Spong

30. “Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another.”

— John Shelby Spong

31. “I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.”

— John Shelby Spong

32. “The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don’t see any great value in that.”

— John Shelby Spong

33. “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

34. “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.”

— John Shelby Spong

35. “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

36. “If I want to put a Christmas tree in my yard, or three crosses for the crucifixion story, that’s fine. But if I try to use public property or a public school as a way to impress my religion on other people, I think that violates the constitution.”

— John Shelby Spong

37. “It’s not going to be a straight upward progression, but there’s no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don’t burn witches anymore.”

— John Shelby Spong

38. “I prepare for death by living.”

— John Shelby Spong

39. “What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.”

— John Shelby Spong

40. “The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.”

— John Shelby Spong

41. “I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don’t see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.”

— John Shelby Spong

42. “When a human life is open to all that humanity can be, humanity and divinity flow together as one. It was and is a radical insight, and one the consciousness of the mystic is destined to understand.”

— John Shelby Spong

43. “The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.”

— John Shelby Spong

44. “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

45. “The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.”

— John Shelby Spong

46. “Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves.”

— John Shelby Spong

47. “Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.”

— John Shelby Spong

48. “Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.”

— John Shelby Spong

49. “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.”

— John Shelby Spong

50. “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