John Shelby Spong Quotes About Humanity
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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.
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My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways.
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I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being.
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I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive.
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Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one's neighbor.... The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think if you're convinced that you're evil, and that God has had to rescue you, then the best you can be is grateful. But nobody ever loves the person they have to be perpetually grateful to. That's just not the way it works in humanity. You need to be set free. You need to be loved just as you are so that you can become all that you can be. That's the direction we have to turn the Christian message; when we do, it becomes universal.
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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."
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