John Shelby Spong Quotes About Tradition

Quotes about: Tradition

• 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.

  John Shelby Spong

  God, Christian, Buddhist

  "Walking into the Mystery of God" by John Shelby Spong, www.uua.org.

• It's the 21st century, and somebody has to rise from within this faith tradition and retranslate it for the post-modern world... The Earth is not the center of the universe, therefore, God is not a being who lives above the sky, who splits the Red Sea from time to time, or creates a miracle, or whatever.

  John Shelby Spong

  Sea, Sky, Miracle

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

• 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

  Games, Atheism, Scripture

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

• The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one's neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out.

  John Shelby Spong

  Biblical, Two Sides, Justice

• 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

• 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

• The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

  John Shelby Spong

  Christian, Catholic, Church

  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

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