Top 120 John Shelby Spong Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— John Shelby Spong

52. “Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was “The Terrible Text of The Bible.””

— John Shelby Spong

53. “There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We’re a little higher than the apes. It’s a very different perspective.”

— John Shelby Spong

54. “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

55. “I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he’s no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile.”

— John Shelby Spong

56. “I think the worst way to go is to have somebody think they speak for God. If you look at history, every nation that has operated as if it spoke for God has become violently destructive.”

— John Shelby Spong

57. “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

58. “The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn’t have to have defensive tribal lives, “God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn’t like yours.” The Bible is full of such references.”

— John Shelby Spong

59. “We are in a survival mentality, and that’s hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.”

— John Shelby Spong

60. “They amuse themselves by playing an irrelevant ecclesiastical game called “Let’s Pretend.” Let’s pretend that we possess the objective truth of God in our inerrant Scriptures or in our infallible pronouncements or in our unbroken apostolic traditions.”

— John Shelby Spong

61. “It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.”

— John Shelby Spong

62. “The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.”

— John Shelby Spong

63. “You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don’t have any freedom left, or you’re going to build a world that doesn’t create terrorists – and that means a whole different way of ‘getting along.’”

— John Shelby Spong

64. “Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It’s a fantastic statement.”

— John Shelby Spong

65. “I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.”

— John Shelby Spong

66. “We have a democracy within the bounds of a constitution which provides certain guarantees related to the basic humanity of every person. I think that’s the best way to go.”

— John Shelby Spong

67. “So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.”

— John Shelby Spong

68. “I don’t want a God that would go around killing people’s little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.”

— John Shelby Spong

69. “The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don’t put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people.”

— John Shelby Spong

70. “The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.”

— John Shelby Spong

71. “I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.”

— John Shelby Spong

72. “I think one of the things we’ve got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.”

— John Shelby Spong

73. “When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times.”

— John Shelby Spong

74. “I don’t like to talk about it in those terms; it’s impossible to describe who or what God “is.” Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn’t do it;.”

— John Shelby Spong

75. “It’s almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?”

— John Shelby Spong

76. “We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.”

— John Shelby Spong

77. “In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things.”

— John Shelby Spong

78. “I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.”

— John Shelby Spong

79. “I am a child of the 21st century.”

— John Shelby Spong

80. “Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.”

— John Shelby Spong

81. “I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter.”

— John Shelby Spong

82. “I have no problem with anybody who wants to bear public witness to their religion, but I don’t think they can do it on public property. They have to do it on private property. There’s nothing unconstitutional about that.”

— John Shelby Spong

83. “The way you become divine is to become wholly human.”

— John Shelby Spong

84. “Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.”

— John Shelby Spong

85. “There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.”

— John Shelby Spong

86. “Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, says, “From the rising of the sun to its setting, God’s name shall be great among the Gentiles.” This encompasses the whole world. Suddenly it’s not the Jews against the Gentiles, or my tribe against your tribe.”

— John Shelby Spong

87. “I go where I’m invited. And all I can tell you is if we accepted every invitation we had, I’d be away every day of my life.”

— John Shelby Spong

88. “The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.”

— John Shelby Spong

89. “Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The.”

— John Shelby Spong

90. “All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.”

— John Shelby Spong

91. “The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.”

— John Shelby Spong

92. “I believe that God is very real.”

— John Shelby Spong

93. “Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don’t think that’s the case.”

— John Shelby Spong

94. “God is. Because God is, I live, I love, I am. Does that mean that God exists? I do not know what that question means. I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.”

— John Shelby Spong

95. “Religion is a mixed blessing.”

— John Shelby Spong

96. “Jonah’s “sin,” as noted above, was that he dared to limit God’s definition of what is holy to his own definition of what is holy. He assumed that God had no ability to love beyond the boundaries of Jonah’s love.”

— John Shelby Spong

97. “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

98. “Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.”

— John Shelby Spong

99. “Prayer is rather the activity that enables each of us to be givers to and receivers from one another of the deepest meaning of life – a meaning I call God.”

— John Shelby Spong

100. “To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.”

— John Shelby Spong