Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. John Shelby "Jack" Spong (June 16, 1931 September 12, 2021) was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so. Part 2 of the all things quotations list about every-one and in-its-entirety sayings citing Jay Baruchel, David Frum and David Frum captions. October 13, 2011. " We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery. Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. }, "CacheDetection.RequestID": "TXPX0XF032R2WV9SNJQY", If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter. V. Gene Robinson was able to publicly thank the man he said are the shoulders on which (Robinson) stands.. Showing 1-30 of 46 "God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. Prayer is what I am doing when I love wastefully, passionately and wondrously and invite others to do so. My experience is my ability to perceive God, but the nature of God is beyond my ability to describe., The same thing is true of Christianitys fundamental doctrine, known as the Incarnation., That doctrine makes Jesus not unlike the comic strip character Clark Kent who turned out to be Superman in the skies, he said. It is love that loves not because it has been earned. "[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. In 2005, he wrote: "[I have] immerse[d] myself in contemporary Biblical scholarship at such places as Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Yale Divinity School, Harvard Divinity School and the storied universities in Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. So I ask you where hope is located, and you say, "You can't locate it.". My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway. That is what Jesus meant and thats what the original Christ experience was, before we became Scripture defenders, and before the creeds became the essence of our faith.. If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. Let me try to do just that. I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. " John Shelby Spong 83. I want the traditional family upheld, but I dont want it upheld to the detriment of other people. The Bible tells me that every life is holy; the Bible tells me that every life is loved; the Bible tells me that every life is called to be all that it can be. The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing . } "The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the. I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. He claims he is a Christian yet he champions causes that historic Christianity has often . God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny. window.Mobvious = {}; That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. True religion is not about possessing the truth. } !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)? "The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the. It is simply a fact of his upbringing, along with a personal desire to continue being a disciple of Jesus. }, Are they hopelessly misinformed? I think one of the things we've got to look out for is human beings claiming that they know how God operates. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God." The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history. Rev. Are they people who God just didn't like? [11] Towards these ends, he called for a new Reformation, in which many of Christianity's basic doctrines should be reformulated.[1]. I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. Then there was Paul. Spong was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and educated in public schools there. Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us. That is a paradigm shift of the first order. Spong was born in North Carolina in 1931. If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system. John Shelby Spong is an influential public speaker, writer and media figure. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world. ! For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. God is not a noun, that demands to be defined, God is a verb that invites us to live, to love and to be. "Walking into the Mystery of God" by John Shelby Spong, www.uua.org. In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches. !function(){function n(n,t){var r=i(n);return t&&(r=r("instance",t)),r}var r=[],c=0,i=function(t){return function(){var n=c++;return r.push([t,[].slice.call(arguments,0),n,{time:Date.now()}]),i(n)}};n._s=r,this.csa=n}(); [21], Mark Tooley, a Methodist who is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a think tank noted for its critique of liberal religious groups, criticized Spong in 2010 as "brandishing the stale theologies and ideologies of a half-century ago". A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. No religion does that. Previously, she recapped the Chautauqua Lecture Series in 2019 and the Interfaith Lecture Series in 2018. 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. If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. John Shelby Spong 2 I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. 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); } I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. I want to say something positively, something about the conclusion that I presently hold and bear witness to why I continue to be a member of this community.. In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ's hands and feet and the spear wound in his side. In the way Jesus, whether being praised with flattery or diminished by the threat of death, remained unchanged, Spong was moved to affirm his faith. "Q&A on The Parliament of the World's Religions". }("apstag", window, document, "script", "//c.amazon-adsystem.com/aax2/apstag.js"); (wikipedia) Born On June 16, 1931. "My mind, my integrity, my intellectual questioning, and my God-experience all come together in this new image. There can be no one regarded as unclean, no prejudice allowed to operate inside this vision of Christianity., Since then, he has answered the call to try to transform the world so that every person living in it will have a better opportunity to live fully, love wastefully and be all each of them was created to be.. It is because of that early work that he did and all of the work that built on it that lets me wear a purple shirt today, said Robinson, who currently serves as Chautauquas vice president of religion and senior pastor. // page settings Spong said the only way his mission can be successful is if his mantra is carried out without any set of boundaries. Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and navet? It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church. return null; I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. googletag.pubads().setTargeting("resource", "author_45659"); As a retired bishop, he was a member of the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. John Shelby Spong is an American retired bishop of the Episcopal Church. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty. The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity. Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. Is there a different Bible? I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience. 'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); Copyright 2018 Chautauqua Institution
23:17). Jesus could not have imagined such an idea as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. He was the eleventh Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, New York from 1988 until 2000. John Shelby Spong Quotes. I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books. And thats immoral. Next, was his belief that God is a source of life. [CDATA[ It calls us beyond our limits into the fullness of life - into a capacity to love people we are not taught to love - and into an ability to be who we are. The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. q("i", arguments) Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue. } catch (err) { It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals. From this perspective, all human claims to possess objectivity, certainty, or infallibility are revealed as nothing but the weak and pitiable pleas of frantically insecure people who seek to live in an illusion because reality has proved to be too difficult. Steve is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. As far as we know, a creaturewho can: define life, contemplates its beginning, anticipates its termination and raise the question of its meaning, is a rare thing, he said. There is no longer male nor female. That identification means . All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter. February 7, 2019 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.' John Shelby Spong/ freedom window.Mobvious.device_type = 'mobile'; John Shelby Spong. John Shelby Spong passed away at his home in North Carolina according to an announcement from the Richmond, Virginia parish he once pastored. So who is God? But before he talked too much about the end, he went back to the Jewish roots of Matthews Gospel. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. -- John Shelby Spong #Giving "I go where I'm invited. I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God. He sees himself against nature. John Shelby Spong (16 June 1931 - 12 September 2021) Introduction. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue. Spong claimed that his writings evoked both great support and great condemnation from differing segments of the Christian church. There are passages in the Gospels that portray Jesus of Nazareth as narrow-minded, vindictive, and even hypocritical. " True religion is not about possessing the truth. I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. for(var i=0; i Sf Giants Fan Appreciation Day 2022,
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