23:33), "blind fools" (Matt. "Bishop John Shelby Spong On: The Resurrection" The Christian Faith was born in the experience that we have come to call Easter. He was the Bishop of Newark, New Jersey from 1979 to 2000. window.Mobvious.device_type = 'mobile'; If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterdays terrorists become tomorrows elected officials and theyre part of the system. We must move beyond the now irrelevant dualistic patterns and discover the holy at the heart of the human. We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade. //]]> Paul tried to explain to the Galatians what it meant to put on Christ in the verse that reads, For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.. Terrorism is a real despair. The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years. stylesheet.rel = "stylesheet"; I don't think that's the case. V. Gene Robinson was able to publicly thank the man he said are the shoulders on which (Robinson) stands.. I call this God by different words. JOHN SHELBY SPONG: The first homosexual person that I ordained knowingly was a man named Robert Williams. 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. }("apstag", window, document, "script", "//c.amazon-adsystem.com/aax2/apstag.js"); window.csa("Config", { var node = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; var e = document.createElement("script"); e.src = "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41mrkPcyPwL.js"; document.head.appendChild(e); But before he talked too much about the end, he went back to the Jewish roots of Matthews Gospel. John Shelby Spong Buddhist, Prayer, Believe Praying and living deeply, richly and fully have become for me almost indistinguishab le. John Shelby Spong has been called a heretic and worse. We've collected the best John Shelby Spong Quotes. And that's immoral. All you can do is define the human experience of God, and that might be delusional. He stated that he was a Christian because he believes that Jesus Christ fully expressed the presence of a God of compassion and selfless love and that this is the meaning of the early Christian proclamation, "Jesus is Lord" (Spong, 1994 and Spong, 1991). In [the story of Jesus] I found a center for my being. That's magic, that's not God. Weve murdered them; weve burned them at the stake; weve run them out of town for something over which they have no control. John Shelby "Jack" Spong (June 16, 1931 September 12, 2021) was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church. 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. Then there was Paul. That is not within human competence. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals. throw new Error("could not load device-specific stylesheet : " + err.message); Recipient of many awards, including 1999 Humanist of the Year,[6] Spong was a contributor to the Living the Questions DVD program and was a guest on numerous national television broadcasts (including The Today Show, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Dateline, 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live). It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. if (window.ue && window.ue.tag) { window.ue.tag('author:quotes:signed_out', ue.main_scope);window.ue.tag('author:quotes:signed_out:mobileWeb', ue.main_scope); } " We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery. Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. "[23], Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, described Spong's teaching as constituting the historic definition of heresy, having "denied virtually every major Christian doctrine. Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile. var cookie = cookies[i]; var ue_id = "TXPX0XF032R2WV9SNJQY"; 51. stylesheet.type = "text/css"; In 1991's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, Spong argued that St. Paul was homosexual, a theme that was satirized in Gore Vidal's novel Live from Golgotha. BrainyQuote has been providing inspirational quotes since 2001 to our worldwide community. ", Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life. Later the church followed his lead. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world. He is a liberal Christian theologian, religion commentator and author. It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. John Shelby Spong Quote of the day Teach him to think for himself? return cookiePair[1]; According to Spong, when Matthew said to go and make disciples of all nations, he placed words in the mouth of the risen Jesus. John Shelby Spong Quotes. Although he has been a Christian his entire life, he does not believe it makes him superior to anyone. John Shelby Spong 2 I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. A liberal Christian theologian, religion commentator, and author, he called for a fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines. My religious schizophrenia is at an end. //, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel. It meant to go beyond the boundaries of your religion, to go beyond your security system, to go beyond your fears. Spong proffers a third way, one that involves being "fully human." We are not really separated from God, he asserts. No one can finally say. I believe that God is very real. Kelly assists on a wide variety . [CDATA[ I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication. var useSSL = "https:" == document.location.protocol; John Shelby Spong Quotes. I believe that I live my life every day inside the reality of this God. init: function() { I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God. (function () { 25:30)? var sourcesToHideBuyFeatures = ["ebfg_gr", "ebfg_fb", "ebfg_fbm", "ebfg_tw", I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. 50. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years. if (a[a9]) return; The Christianity of the future cannot live inside the doctrines of the past, Spong said. I mean the kind of love that never stops to calculate, never stops to wonder whether the object of its love is worthy to its recipient. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty. "Events.Namespace": "csa", www.huffingtonpost.com. That is a paradigm shift of the first order. The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. The Bible is full of dreadful things. Above all, words must be recognized as symbolic pointers to truth, not objective containers of truth. "Whatever it was that people experience in Jesus has today come to be identified with medieval doctrines based on premodern assumptions that are no longer believable. An Episcopal court ruled that homosexuality was not counter to its principles in 1996, and the church recognized same-sex marriages in 2015.[4]. John Shelby Spong. I describe God as the source of life and the source of love and the ground of being. var cookiePair = cookie.split('='); If God is a source of love, then the only way I can worship God is by loving, loving wastefully, he said. Spong, Resurrection . var isRetina = window.devicePixelRatio >= 2; // retina display When the Gospel of Luke was being written, the Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples of Jesus and all the world. q("f", arguments) function isShowingBuyableFeatures() { Prayer is entering into the pain or joy of another person. The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue. //

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