You can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.
John Shelby SpongI grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.
John Shelby SpongOne of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."
John Shelby Spong