277 Quotes by John Shelby Spong

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

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

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

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

It's almost inevitable that we become religious people. The question is, what kind of religion is it?

I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates.

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.