John Shelby Spong

I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.

— John Shelby Spong

Mother Nature is not sweet.

— John Shelby Spong

Mother Nature is not sweet.

— John Shelby Spong

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

— John Shelby Spong

In [the story of Jesus] I found ... a center for my being. Behind the supernatural framework of the first century, behind the language of myth, magic, and superstition, I discovered a life I wanted to know; a life that possessed a power I wanted to possess; a freedom, a wholeness for which I had yearned for years.

— John Shelby Spong

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth.

— John Shelby Spong

True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.

— John Shelby Spong

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.

— John Shelby Spong

The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.

— John Shelby Spong

Jesus could not have imagined such an idea as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

— John Shelby Spong

The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel.

— John Shelby Spong

Above all, words must be recognized as symbolic pointers to truth, not objective containers of truth.

— John Shelby Spong

If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable.

— John Shelby Spong