ojovivo
tannertan36
★
Origami Around
occasionally subtle
noise dept.
roma★
Kiana Khansmith
Mike Driver
izzy's playlists!
Keni
The Bowery Presents
Monterey Bay Aquarium
titsay
Cosmic Funnies
Jimmy Eat World
Doug Jones
PR's Tumblrdome
RMH
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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@hope-full-lee
They are the ones who know that the heart cannot finally worship what the mind has already rejected. They know ... that literalization guarantees death. They also ... know ... that to abandon the historic symbols is to abandon the doorway through which our ancestors in faith found the meaning by which they lived. Those symbols must be taken seriously, but they cannot be taken literally.
Born of a Woman, John Shelby Spong
Can the church get out of the behavior-control business and into the business of calling people into being the holy and complete selves God has created them to be.
Born of a Woman, John Shelby Spong
A literalized myth is a doomed myth. Its truth cannot be rescued.
Born of a Woman, John Shelby Spong
Faith does not, cannot and will not give us peace of mind, security and certainty. Faith gives us only the courage to put one foot in front of the other and to walk into tomorrow with integrity even though we know that in this world there is no peace of mind, no security and no safety. Faith calls us to recognize that we are all in this quest we call life and that our human defense barriers of tribe, race, ethnicity and even gender and sexual identity cannot finally separate us from one another. Faith calls us to understand that to be human is to be part of who and what God is and in the oneness of this God presence to find that our understanding of life is enhanced and all human barriers fall into insignificance.
John Shelby Spong, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic
Literalism suggests that words, which are only pointers, can in fact be made concrete, thus establishing assumptions that can never be demonstrated. Literalism commits us to the presumption that any religious form can not only capture truth, but also explain it fully. It is out of the distortions that literalism inevitably creates that most religious violence originates. Religious literalism requires infallible leaders and inerrant scriptures. Literalism is thus always the enemy of faith, which is ultimately the opposite of certainty.
John Shelby Spong, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic
The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to 'the beyond in our midst,' to the Christ in the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending a act of worship is that Christian worship rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress. That is what is implied in Jesus' saying that 'the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath'.
John A T Robinson, “Honest to God”
If happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.
Tillich (continued), as quoted John T A Robinson in “Honest to God”
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: 'You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simple accept that you are accepted.
Tilliach (continued), quoted by John T A Robinson in “Honest to God”
It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, of from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Tillich quoted by John T A Robinson in ‘Honest to God”
in making God an object besides other objects, the existence and nature of which are matters of argument, theology supports the escape to atheism. It encourages those who are interested in denying the threatening Witness of their existence. The first step to atheism is always a theology which drags God down to the level of doubtful things. The game of the atheist is the very easy. For he is perfectly justified in destroying such a phantom and all its ghostly qualities. And because the theoretical atheist is just in his destruction, the practical atheists (all of us) are willing to use his argument to support out own attempt to flee God.
Paul Tillich, quoted in “Honest to God” by John A T Robinson
This attack by Christian apologetic on the adulthood of the world I consider to be in the first place pointless, in the second ignoble, and in the third un-Christian. Pointless, because it looks to me like an attempt to put a grown-up man back into adolescence, i.e. to make him dependent on things on which he is not in fact dependent any more, thrusting him back into the midst of problems that are in fact not problems for him any more. Ignoble, because this amounts to an effort to exploit the weakness of man for purposes alien to him and not freely subscribed to by him. Un-Christian, because for Christ himself is being substituted one particular stage in the religiousness of man.
Bonhoeffer, quoted by John A.T. Robinson in “Honest to God”
We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.
John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy
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 lesser view of faith wants to protect God, to shield him against hard questions or unsavory press. God doesn't share the concern. Confident in his own reality , he doesn't fret over humanity's God dilemma of whether to believe or not.
restless faith, Winn Collier
Our histories, the stories that have shaped us, are a way of diving in. They stir something deep within us. They remind us that we are not the first to believe, the first to doubt, or the first to wonder who we are or what God could possibly be up to.
restless faith, Winn Collier
Embracing mystery demands that we refuse to stand over our history, examining it and judging it with aloof, sterile detachment. Mystery takes it in like a child's first step onto the vast expanse of the white sands of the beach. Surrendering to the smells, the cool spray from the incoming tide, the warm sun, and the grainy coolness shifting under his feet, he simply enters into the ocean's world. The young heart has no way to know what it is he is dealing with; he simply has to dive in and feel it for himself.
restless faith, Winn Collier
To be fully loved, but not fully known will always allow us to buy the lie that "if they only knew the real, me they wouldn't want me anymore." And to be fully known but not fully loved feels sharp, painful, at a level of rejection that hurts so bad.
It’s Not What You Think, Jefferson Bethke