John Shelby Spong Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von John Shelby Spong:

I believe that God is very real.

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

John Shelby Spong

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

I am trying to understand what it means to be a Christian without being religious.

John Shelby Spong

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

John Shelby Spong

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

John Shelby Spong

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

John Shelby Spong

The ultimate meaning of the Bible escapes human limits and calls us to a recognition that every life is holy, every life is loved, and every life is called to be all that that life is capable of being.

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.

John Shelby Spong

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.

John Shelby Spong

Mother Nature is not sweet.

John Shelby Spong

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

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

I am a child of the 21st century.

John Shelby Spong

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

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

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good.

John Shelby Spong

My basis of morality is this: does this action enhance life, or does it denigrate life? Does it build up or does it tear down?

John Shelby Spong

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.

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

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

It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.

John Shelby Spong

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

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

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

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong

We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We've murdered them; we've burned them at the stake; we've run them out of town for something over which they have no control. And that's immoral.

John Shelby Spong

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

I believe that God is very real.

John Shelby Spong

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

John Shelby Spong

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.

John Shelby Spong

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.

John Shelby Spong

The cross reveals that we're called to a deeper, fuller experience of what it means to be alive and open to new dimensions of life which our religious boundaries - creeds, atonement theologies - have kept us from experiencing.

John Shelby Spong

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

John Shelby Spong