John Shelby Spong Quotes

I think we try to box and put God in some limited definition, which is impossible.

God exists outside of time, and since we are within time, there is no way we will ever totally grasp that concept.

Man can only describe God in his own poor language.

It's a pretty crazy task to try to describe God "quickly." Everything starts with a healthy fear of Him.

Anyone who knows God cannot describe Him. Anyone who can describe God does not know Him.

We can't say what God is, and until the modern period, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians in the three God religions all knew that. They insisted that we have no idea what we meant when we said that God was good, or wise, or intelligent.

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people.

They’re going to ask what you said. And if I tell Mr. Twindell you said heaven will be like this, he’ll be very disappointed. He’s counting, you know, on gold streets and angels and horses with wings.” “I see where that could be a problem,” Ian agreed, and he tenderly laid his hand against his son’s cheek. “In that case, you can tell him I said this is almost heaven.

Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain's limits, not the universe's.

Is it O.K. that I speak in English? The only thing I know in Dutch is how to order pot.

How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension.

Our senses perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too great distance or proximity hinders ourview. Too great length and too great brevity of discourse tends to obscurity; too much truth is paralyzing.... In short, extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

A God alone can comprehend a God.

Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.

If man should commence by studying himself, he would see how impossible it is to go further.

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

sometimes words are not big enough to contain all the feelings you are trying to pour into them.

To say God spake or appeared as he is in his own nature, is to deny his Infiniteness, Invisibility, Incomprehensibility.

This is a terrible mistake, because I used up all of my English.

Being infinite, God is inexhaustibly interesting. It is therefore impossible that God be boring.

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

All translating seems to me to be simply an attempt to accomplish an impossible task.

The question about who God is is a very public question. We don't have the tools in this kind of political atmosphere to handle that, and maybe politics isn't the best place to answer that. It is a public issue.