277 Quotes by John Shelby Spong

It’s not going to be a straight upward progression, but there’s no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don’t burn witches anymore.

If you’re really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn’t like? I don’t think so.

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

Jonah’s “sin,” as noted above, was that he dared to limit God’s definition of what is holy to his own definition of what is holy. He assumed that God had no ability to love beyond the boundaries of Jonah’s love.

I don’t think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don’t think it’s got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that’s something which people don’t really understand.

Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.

Human wholeness can never be found in the denigration of another.

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.

Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being.