Quotes from John Shelby Spong

We then tried other coping devices, drugs, alcohol and even suicide. As the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: "God is dead and modern men (and women) gather nightly around the divine grave to weep."*

So the first step that those of us who wish to explore the meaning of resurrection must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.

What we have done is to literalize the DeMille film while thinking that we are literalizing the biblical story!

I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as "a priest forever" (Ps. 110:4).

Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin.

Lawrence Meredith

knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called "midrash.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.

So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live.

The Battle of Tours in 732 CE stopped the encroachment of Islam into Christian Europe and divided the world into religious spheres of influence. The Crusades represented a hostile invasion of Christian power into Islamic strongholds

we do not possess a single scriptural document written any less than twenty-one years after the crucifixion that purports to tell us anything about the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth! We then have to face the fact that, at the very least, there is absolute silence for twenty-one years.

Mark provides us, for example, with the first mention in Christian history of the figure we call John the Baptist. Mark is the first to relate the story of Jesus' baptism and the account of his temptation in the wilderness. He is the first to suggest that the betrayal was by the hand of one of "the twelve." He is the first New Testament writer to associate miracles with the memory of Jesus. He is the first to assert that Jesus taught in parables.

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

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

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

death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

I prepare for death by living.

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

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.

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

Erich Fromm, a German-American psychologist and author, reminds us that "people never think their way into new ways of acting, they always act their way into new ways of thinking.

I have become convinced that we must put an end to atonement theology or there will be no future for the Christian faith. This

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.

The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see.