Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.

I think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel.

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 thing that intrigues me about Matthew is that I don't believe anybody would read it if they aren't Jewish and understand it. And so to say that publicly as a Christian is kind of interesting.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore.

To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it.