Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

by John Shelby Spong

One cannot, therefore, literalize the biblical narrative without literalizing a mentality that is both dated and doomed. Biblical literalism thus quickly becomes biblical nonsense.

Therein lies the problem: Christianity, having recorded its first-century explanations of the Jesus experience in scripture, and its fourth-century explanations in creedal statements, then proceeded to make excessive claims for authority of those explanations, essentially freezing them into their first- and fourth-century frames of reference. Literalized words are always doomed words since our perception of truth is constantly expanding and changing.

All theological systems are, therefore, finally nothing but coercive human creations.

Religious honesty requires the admission that certainty in religion is always an illusion, never a real possibility.

Paul never mentions a miracle being connected with Jesus in the entire body of his authentic epistles. An argument from silence is never a strong one, but it is a striking fact that when Paul wrote, miracles were so little identified with the life of Jesus that not even one single hint of a supernatural occurrence is alluded to in the Pauline corpus.

live fully, love wastefully and become all that we are capable of being.

Mythology is always designed to prevent its subject from being discussed, questioned or getting lost in relativity.

The days of claiming to know the ultimate will of the theistic deity on any subject are over.

Prayer is the sharing of being, the sharing of life and the sharing of love.

Experience always trumps explanation.

“live fully, to love wastefully and to have the courage to be all that I can be.”