Daily Inspiration Quote by John Shelby Spong

Spong’s line is a Christian grenade tossed into the tidy rooms of Christian moral certainty. By defining “good” and “evil” in terms of what enhances or diminishes life, he shifts ethics from rule-keeping to vitality. That’s not a vague self-help mantra; it’s a deliberate re-centering of religion around human flourishing, aimed at traditions that have too often treated suffering as spiritually admirable and repression as righteousness.

The intent is pastoral but also insurgent. Spong spent his career challenging biblical literalism, church-sanctioned shame around sexuality, and the use of doctrine as a gatekeeping tool. In that context, “life” becomes a diagnostic: if a teaching produces fear, self-loathing, exclusion, or violence, it fails the moral test no matter how many proof-texts can be marshaled in its defense. The subtext is a critique of a faith that confuses obedience with virtue. He’s asking believers to judge outcomes, not just intentions, and to admit that “tradition” can be a euphemism for harm.

It works rhetorically because it’s both disarmingly simple and quietly radical. Spong borrows the moral clarity of religious language (“evil,” “good”) while emptying it of its usual supernatural bookkeeping. No demons, no cosmic scorecard, just an ethical barometer calibrated to real bodies and real lives. That also exposes a risk he’s willing to take: “life-enhancing” can be contested, slippery, even co-opted. Spong’s wager is that a faith worth keeping should be sturdy enough to make that argument in the open.