A Quote by John Shelby Spong

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.
One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the spread of knowledge outside them... Even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.
If the Christian church is to move responsibly towards the future, it must restore or renew its ties with its past. Contemporary Catholic and Protestant radicals want to claim that Christianity means whatever Christian today happen to believe and practice, be it pantheism, unitarianism, or sodomy. The Christian faith has suffered immeasurable harm because of the tendency of people to use the word Christian in a careless and non-historical way. Nothing in this argument would preclude liberal Protestants and Catholics from developing and practicing any religion they like.
The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights.
At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.
When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.
I was baptized a Baptist, but I'm just Christian, as far as I'm concerned. I could go in any church, doesn't matter if it's Baptist, Protestant, Episcopal, or Catholic.
What we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.
We all have views on what our Irishness means to us. Two members of the band were born in England and were raised in the Protestant faith. Bono's mother was Protestant and his father was Catholic. I was brought up Catholic. U2 are a living example of the kind of unity of faith and tradition that is possible in Northern Ireland.
The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial.
It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.
Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church, as it is right they should ... With you, where there is none of these things to attract or keep me... No one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion... For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.
If Jesus remained dead, how can you explain the reality of the Christian church and its phenomenal growth in the first three centuries of the Christian era? Christ's church covered the Western world by the fourth century. A religious movement built on a lie could not have accomplished that....All the power of Rome and of the religious establishment in Jerusalem was geared to stop the Christian faith. All they had to do was to dig up the grave and to present the corpse. They didn't.
I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
In the eyes of the Associated Press, American Christianity, which springs from the Protestant Reformation, is fundamentalist. And Christian Fundamentalists, radical Muslims, Hindu extremists, and fanatical Zionists are all the same - bloodthirsty lunatics.
The first Western attempt to save Africa from itself was in the late 19th century. It was led by Christian missionaries who claimed to be seeking to end poverty, disease and the slave trade.
I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an Atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.
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