Unbelievable Quotes

“God is. Because God is, I live, I love, I am. Does that mean that God exists? I do not know what that question means. I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“I also learned that most clergy are either unable or unwilling to engage the great theological issues of the day because of their perception that to do so will “disturb the faith and beliefs” of their people.”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“We then tried other coping devices, drugs, alcohol and even suicide. As the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “God is dead and modern men (and women) gather nightly around the divine grave to weep.”*”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“So the first step that those of us who wish to explore the meaning of resurrection must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“is to live into the future, it must recover its original meaning and identity. It must shed those aspects of its past that are divisive, condemning and authoritarian. It must abandon creeds and tribal oneness in favor of universal inclusiveness; it must use its formulas to include, never to ban. In short, to live into”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“Prayer to me is the practice of the presence of God, the act of embracing transcendence and the discipline of sharing with another the gifts of living, loving and being. Can that understanding of prayer,”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“sharing of love. That hospital experience became a starting place for me in regard to the meaning of prayer. Prayer understood this new way became profoundly real for me, while the form that prayer had traditionally taken began to shift dramatically. From that day to this, prayer has been far more about “being” than it has been about “doing.” This”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“the meaning of prayer, rather than just to “pray,” became the goal of my lifetime and indeed the goal of my priesthood. Prayer is the sharing of being, the sharing of life and the”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“prayed for our daughter because that is what love does. We held her in our hearts before God as we do all those we love when they are in “trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity,” as the Book of Common Prayer advises, but that does not solve or illumine the question of prayer.”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

“arena in which good must ultimately be separated from evil. Our”
― John Shelby Spong, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today