Quotes from John Shelby Spong

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.

Hallowed be thy name" means that the ultimate, the mystical, the ineffable can never be captured in human words. Perhaps we need to learn from the Jews that if one speaks the name of God, one is pretending that one is able to know and to define God, which is the beginning of human idolatry. That is when we begin to create God in our own image, while pretending it is the other way around. Perhaps

Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being.

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 sees Jesus symbolically as the serpent lifted up on his cross, drawing the venom out of human life, restoring wholeness. It is a powerful image. John

Word of God" or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.

In Yom Kippur, the status of being unclean fades before the divine presence. Yet if one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, if one calls evil good, if one's religion places limits on the love of God, if one claims that being God's chosen means that all others are God's rejected, then there can be no atonement, and Yom Kippur is a failure.

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.

Paul drew, however, little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party, for whom any change threatened their security.

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.

I believe that is what the God experience does for us. It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life - into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love - and into an ability to be who we are.

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.

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.

I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view.

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.

I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation.

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

The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures.

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.

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.

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.

Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.

I can only give away the love that I have received.

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