Quotes by John Shelby Spong

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. 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.

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.

When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear.  God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens.  We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image.  However, we now recognize that if was the other way around.  The God of theism came into being as a human creation.  As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.

The God content of the past no longer sustains the contemporary spirit.  We sense that our only hope is to journey past those definitions of a God who is external, supernatural, and invasive, which previously defined our belief.  We must discover whether or not the death of the God we worshiped yesterday is the same thing as the death of God.

"I do not believe that Jesus, at the end of his earthly sojourn, returned to God by ascending in any literal sense into a heaven located somewhere in the sky. My knowledge of the size of this universe reduces that concept to nonsense."

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.