277 Quotes by John Shelby Spong

You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don’t have any freedom left, or you’re going to build a world that doesn’t create terrorists – and that means a whole different way of ‘getting along.’

In Yom Kippur, the status of being unclean fades before the divine presence. Yet if one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, if one calls evil good, if one’s religion places limits on the love of God, if one claims that being God’s chosen means that all others are God’s rejected, then there can be no atonement, and Yom Kippur is a failure.

When any human group decides that they can define God, the outcome is always predictable. The “true faith,” once defined, must then be defended against all critics, and it must also then be forced upon all people – “for their own good, lest their souls be in jeopardy.

God is. Because God is, I live, I love, I am. Does that mean that God exists? I do not know what that question means. I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.

There’s no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we’ve experienced God, not what or who God is.

To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.

Prayer is rather the activity that enables each of us to be givers to and receivers from one another of the deepest meaning of life – a meaning I call God.