JOHN SHELBY SPONG

Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

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.

The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels.

When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.

If I were a child of Tibet or of Arabia, I suspect the path I'd walk would be the Buddhist path or the Muslim path. And I don't mind saying that I don't invalidate any of those paths.

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order.

Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.

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

You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.

Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies.

Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.

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.'

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

The Christians tried to separate themselves from the Jewish crowd so they wouldn't be the recipients of the persecution of the Romans. And the way they did it was to say, the Jews killed our hero too. And so Christians began to define themselves over against the orthodox party of the Jews as a way of surviving against the Roman onslaught.

Religion is a mixed blessing.

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.

I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.

The Christ path is the path I've walked all my life, so it's normal and natural. And I have no reason to abandon it because it leads to where I want to go.

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.

I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church.

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. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. 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.