Biblical Literalism Quotes

“We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“I have become convinced that we must put an end to atonement theology or there will be no future for the Christian faith. This”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“I have seen how in our history, people of color have been enslaved by “Bible-quoting” Christians. When slavery was finally threatened with being relegated to the dustbins of history in America, it was that section of this country known as “the Bible Belt” that rose to defend the enslavement of black people in the bloodiest war of American history. When slavery finally died as a legal option on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Antietam and Appomattox, the Christians of the Bible Belt, once again quoting their scriptures for justification, instituted laws of segregation with the full support of the federal government. When those segregation laws finally began to fall in the 1950s and 1960s, I watched the Bible being quoted to justify the use of lead pipes, police dogs, fire hoses and even the bombing of black churches in which little girls in their Easter finery were killed—all in an attempt to preserve “white supremacy.” I notice that even today the political party in America that most claims to represent what is called “the Christian vote” is still working to impede the political process for black people, to make voting so difficult as to prevent them from casting their ballot.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“When any human group decides that they can define God, the outcome is always predictable. The “true faith,” once defined, must then be defended against all critics, and it must also then be forced upon all people—“for their own good, lest their souls be in jeopardy.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Atonement theology assumes that we were created in some kind of original perfection. We now know that life has emerged from a single cell that evolved into self-conscious complexity over billions of years. There was no original perfection. If there was no original perfection, then there could never have been a fall from perfection. If there was no fall, then there is no such thing as “original sin” and thus no need for the waters of baptism to wash our sins away. If there was no fall into sin, then there is also no need to be rescued. How can one be rescued from a fall that never happened? How can one be restored to a status of perfection that he or she never possessed? So most of our Christology today is bankrupt. Many popular titles that we have applied to Jesus, such as “savior,” “redeemer,” and “rescuer,” no longer make sense, because they assume”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Hallowed be thy name” means that the ultimate, the mystical, the ineffable can never be captured in human words. Perhaps we need to learn from the Jews that if one speaks the name of God, one is pretending that one is able to know and to define God, which is the beginning of human idolatry. That is when we begin to create God in our own image, while pretending it is the other way around. Perhaps”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding.

The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don’t bother to read the text seem to think. It was rather from “the tree of knowledge,” and the primary thing that one gained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the ability to discern good from evil. Gaining that ability did not, in the minds of the Jewish readers of the book of Genesis, corrupt human nature. It simply made people take responsibility for their freely made decisions. A slave has no such freedom. The job of the slave is simply to obey, not to think. The job of the slave-master is to command. Thus the relationship of the master to the slave is a relationship of the strong to the weak, the parent to the child, the king to the serf, the boss to the worker. If human beings were meant to live in that kind of relationship with God, then humanity would have been kept in a perpetual state of irresponsible, childlike immaturity. Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, not because they had disobeyed God’s rules, but because, when self-consciousness was born, they could no longer live in childlike dependency. Adam and Eve discovered, as every child ultimately must discover, that maturity requires that the child leave his or her parents’ home, just as every bird sooner or later must leave its nest and learn to fly on its own. To be forced out of the Garden of Eden was, therefore, not a punishment for sin, so much as it was a step into maturity.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism

“In Yom Kippur, the status of being unclean fades before the divine presence. Yet if one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, if one calls evil good, if one’s religion places limits on the love of God, if one claims that being God’s chosen means that all others are God’s rejected, then there can be no atonement, and Yom Kippur is a failure.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Jonah’s “sin,” as noted above, was that he dared to limit God’s definition of what is holy to his own definition of what is holy. He assumed that God had no ability to love beyond the boundaries of Jonah’s love.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism

“The version of Christianity that is dying today is rooted in the grossly misunderstood concept of atonement”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Baptize these others in the name of the “Father.” That word must not be thought of as the name of some external deity, but rather as the name of the Source of Life that inhabits the universe, calling us all to live fully. Baptize, too, in the name of the “Son.” That word must not be seen as the name of the founder of an exclusive religious system, but the name of the Source of Love, which embraces us all and then frees us to love wastefully, to love beyond every barrier. Baptize them in the name of the “Holy Spirit.” Those two words are not another name for God, but are rather the name of the Ground of Being, in whom we all are related and in which we find not only the courage to be all that we can be, but also, perhaps even more important, the courage to allow others to be all that they can be in the infinite variety of our humanity. The human community contains people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ages, political persuasions and economic statuses. The call of God to us to be all that we can be is also the call to rejoice in the very being of all others. That is what forms the universal community of which the church is but a symbol; indeed, to build the universal community is the ultimate goal of the Christian church, and in the achievement of that goal the church itself will finally be dissolved.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism

“The survival instinct, however, is self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. “Original sin” was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life. Instead it was understood as the result of sinfulness and of disobedience. Atonement theology was born as a way to address this universal flaw in our understanding of human life.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“self-conscious in human beings; and when it consciously motivates our behavior, it defines us as radically self-centered creatures. Our self-centered drive to survive is a universal reality rooted in our biology. It was this aspect of our humanity that led our ancient religious mythmakers to try to describe its origins. “Original sin” was their answer to the question of the source of our universal human self-centeredness. No one understood that survival was an involuntary biological drive in life.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“What we have done is to literalize the DeMille film while thinking that we are literalizing the biblical story!”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Atonement theology is not the pathway to life. The ability to give ourselves away to others in love is. It is not the winners who achieve life’s meaning; it is the givers. That is the basis upon which a new Christianity can be built for a new world. Atonement theology was born in Gentile ignorance of Jewish worship traditions. It was fed over the centuries by literalizing biblical narratives in ways that Jewish worshippers, who knew about storytelling, would never have understood. I say it again: Biblical literalism is nothing less than a Gentile heresy. Its results are now revealed in the fact that Christianity has been transformed into a religion of victimization. For centuries we have practiced our faith by building up ourselves as winners, survivors, the holders of ultimate truth, while we have denigrated the humanity of others. That is the source of evil. That is why Christianity has given birth to anti-Semitism. That is why the crusades were initiated to kill “infidels.” That is why we gave our blessing to such things as the divine right of kings, slavery, segregation, and apartheid. That is why we defined women as sub-human, childlike, and dependent. That is why we became homophobic. That is why we became child abusers and ideological killers. What human life needs is not a theology of human denigration. That is what atonement theology gives us. What we need is a theology of human fulfillment.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism

“And so God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven” (Gen. 1:6–8). When Jesus was baptized, Matthew says, God opened the firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below. That is, the heavenly waters were parted. All Moses could do was to part the waters of the Red Sea. All Joshua, Elijah and Elisha could do was to part the waters of the Jordan River. The “new and greater Moses,” as Matthew seeks to portray Jesus, could part the heavenly waters, which”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Mark provides us, for example, with the first mention in Christian history of the figure we call John the Baptist. Mark is the first to relate the story of Jesus’ baptism and the account of his temptation in the wilderness. He is the first to suggest that the betrayal was by the hand of one of “the twelve.” He is the first New Testament writer to associate miracles with the memory of Jesus. He is the first to assert that Jesus taught in parables.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“we do not possess a single scriptural document written any less than twenty-one years after the crucifixion that purports to tell us anything about the historical life of Jesus of Nazareth! We then have to face the fact that, at the very least, there is absolute silence for twenty-one years.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Lawrence Meredith”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology

“I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as “a priest forever” (Ps. 110:4).”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel – Recovering Jewish Scripture Through Progressive Theology