"I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by ..." — John Shelby Spong

I spend my life studying that book, and every book I've written has in some sense been a book about the Bible, and that's what I mean by reclaiming its value and its essence for a world that no longer treats it literally and no longer reads it traditionally.

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them.

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of Heaven to play golf.