277 Quotes by John Shelby Spong

I don’t like to talk about it in those terms; it’s impossible to describe who or what God “is.” Suppose you were a horse, and you were asked to describe what a human being was like. You couldn’t do it;.

The Hebrew scriptures say it’s okay to enslave anybody except your fellow Jews. It says you should enslave only your neighbors. I say to people that means Mexicans and Canadians are a bit at risk if we want to be literal about the Bible.

Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.

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

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.

Erich Fromm, a German-American psychologist and author, reminds us that “people never think their way into new ways of acting, they always act their way into new ways of thinking.

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.

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.

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.