John Shelby Spong Humanity Quotations

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.

There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values.

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being."

Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity.

We have a democracy within the bounds of a constitution which provides certain guarantees related to the basic humanity of every person. I think that's the best way to go.

What we now need to see is that human life doesn't need to be rescued from a fall that didn't happen. Human life needs to be empowered. We have to begin to see the work of God as expanding the humanity of people so that they do not have to relate to one another out of the survivor mentality of fallen people.

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.