John Shelby Spong Quotes

No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

It is only when human beings see themselves simply as human beings, no longer as gods, that they are in a position to perceive the wholly other nature of God.

Your thoughts of God are too human

Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration.

The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.

If you're going to believe in a God, then you also have to equally believe that there's a flip side to this.

Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.

If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in his own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is.

God is Man's greatest invention

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

What is god, what is not god, what is between man and god, who shall say?

When we say we begin with God, we begin with our idea of God, and our idea of God is not God. Instead, we ought to begin with God’s idea of God, and God’s idea of God is Christ

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God

Always the most revealing thing about the church is her idea of God.

Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God.

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is he?

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

As soon as we try to write the simplest sentence about God, we find ourselves in anxious perplexities, but when we stop trying to write about God and talk with God, God is there and we can talk with God.

He is no God who merely satisfies the intellect, if He ever does.

A low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils. A high view of God is the solution to ten thousand temporal problems.

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

Each person is entitled to some version of God that seems real, yet many versions contradict one another. The God of any religion is only a fragment of God. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images--father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe.