John Shelby Spong Quotes About Christianity

Quotes about: Christianity

• 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

  Religious, Christianity, Eternity

• 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

  Believe, Humanity, Mind

  "Why We Must Reclaim The Bible From Fundamentalists". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 13, 2011.

• You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Self, Grace

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

• I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Gay, America

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Humanity, Looks

• I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.

  John Shelby Spong

  Spiritual, Thinking, Doe

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.thinkpiecepublishing.com

• I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.

  John Shelby Spong

  Fall, Mean, Order

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• 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

  Jesus, Thinking, Different

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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

  John Shelby Spong

  Roles, Way, Christianity

• Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Rigor Mortis, Dying

• If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Views, Religion

  John Shelby Spong (1994). “Resurrection: myth or reality? : a bishop's search for the origins of Christianity”, Harpercollins

• 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

  Tasks, Tradition, Christianity

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• I know that Arnold Toynby, the great historian, said he had always hoped the religions of the world would evolve until they began to bring the very best of each tradition into one tradition. He hoped that Christianity would be the one religion that finally incorporated the values of Hinduism and Buddhism, and enriched itself with them.

  John Shelby Spong

  Buddhism, Would Be, World

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• 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

  Men, Thinking, Years

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

  John Shelby Spong

  Saws, Christianity, Ends

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• 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

  Thinking, Humanity, Survival

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one's neighbor.... The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative.

  John Shelby Spong

  Hands, Giving, Justice

• I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christianity, Term, Humanistic

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• 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

  Names, America, Giving

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• I think I could make the case for any kind of organized religion, but I'm not an expert in those, so let me narrow my focus to talk about Christianity.

  John Shelby Spong

  Thinking, Focus, Experts

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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