(from The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic by John Shelby Spong)
". . . How difficult it is for religious people to embrace an unbounded God. We have through our history sought to define God as a particular being, albeit one possessing supernatural power. With God defined as a being, we then had to locate God in a place. Ultimately that place was thought to be somewhere above the sky in a three-tiered universe. Then we had to build for this God earthly dwelling places that we called "houses of worship."
Next, we began to assert that God's very words were captured in the words of our sacred scriptures. Then we convinced ourselves that God's very nature could be defined in our creeds, doctrines and dogmas. We then built mythologies around each of these human creations, assuring ourselves that God was content to live within our developed theological and liturgical limits.
When these "sacred idols" began to be destroyed by the expansion of human knowledge, we acted as if God had died. The God who lived above the sky was rendered homeless when we began to embrace the infinity of space; yet we continued to address God as "our Father who art in heaven." Next, the scriptures, which we once thought of as God's literal words, began to be understood as tribal tales and as human interpretations; but when we read then in public worship, we still asserted that "this is the word of the Lord." Then the creeds, the doctrines and the dogmas-which, we asserted, had captured God's revelation-began to be understood as political and cultural compromises; but we, in our fear, had in the past invested these human forms with such authority that those who questioned them were burned at the stake as heretics, and we claimed the word "orthodox" for our own human formulations. . ."
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