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36de258
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to use language from Frederick Buechner, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out.24 Our fall into exile is very deep. The biblical picture of the human condition is bleak. Separated and self-concerned, the self becomes blind, self-preoccupied, prideful; worry-filled, grasping, miserable; insensitive, angry, violent; somebody great, or only okay, or "not much." In the dark, we are blind and don't see."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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9327bfa
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The biblical vision of our amazing contradiction is that we are created in the image of God, but we live our lives outside of paradise, "east of Eden," in a world of estrangement and self-preoccupation. It is the inevitable result of growing up, of becoming selves. None of us, whether success or failure, escapes it. Thus we need to be born again. It is the road of return from our exile, the way to recover our true self, the path to beginnin..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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9b9abf3
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being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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190cf76
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For some people, the central life issue is not sin and guilt, but bondage to or victimization by one Pharaoh or another. For them, what does the message of sin and forgiveness mean? Unfortunately, it often comes to mean "You should forgive the person who is victimizing you," when what the victim needs to hear is "It is not God's will that you be in bondage to that (or any) Pharaoh." Or if the central problem is alienation and meaninglessnes..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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2dae5f0
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the Bible--human in origin, sacred in status and function--is both metaphor and sacrament. As metaphor, it is a way of seeing--a way of seeing God and our life with God. As sacrament, it is a way that God speaks to us and comes to us.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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d36c4f1
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Many Christians basically accept the modern worldview's image of reality and then add God onto it. God is the one who created the space-time world of matter and energy as a self-contained system, set it in motion, and perhaps sometimes intervenes in it. God becomes a supernatural being "out there" who created a universe from which God is normally absent. This is, as we shall see, a serious distortion of the meaning of the word "God."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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82da7ae
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Rather than imagining God as a personlike being "out there," this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God, but in God. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek roots of the word "panentheism": pan means "everything," en means "in," and theism comes from the Greek word for "God," theos."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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5125161
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God is the one in whom "we live and move and have our being."6 Notice how the language works. Where are we in relation to God? We are in God; we live in God, move in God, have our being in God. God is not "out there," but "right here," all around us."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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078630e
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The Bible's function as sacrament is familiar to many Christians in its private devotional use. This common Christian practice involves spending time with a passage from the Bible and lingering over it. The passage is not read rapidly or for information, but space is left around it in the hope that a phrase or sentence will become the means for the Spirit to speak to us as individuals in the particularity of our lives, in the dailiness of o..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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c636ad2
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52. See Sandra M. Schneiders's interview on the multiplicity and metaphoricity of images for God in the Bible: "God Is More than Two Men and a Bird," U.S. Catholic, May 1990, pp. 20-27. I find her title especially illuminating." --
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Marcus J. Borg |
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a012ed5
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Beginning in the seventeenth century, the universe was increasingly thought of as a natural system separate from God. God was thus removed from nature, creating a thorough "disenchantment of nature."8Separated from the universe, God came increasingly to be thought of as only "out there." The dominance of supernatural theism in modern Western Christianity has had serious consequences. When "out there" is emphasized and separated from "right ..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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5af7fd9
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if, when you think of the word "God," you are thinking of a reality that may or may not exist, you are not thinking of God. Tillich's point is that the word "God" does not refer to a particular existing being (that's the God of supernatural theism). Rather, the word "God" is the most common Western name for "what is," for "ultimate reality," for "the ground of being," for "Being itself," for "isness."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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4568113
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The contemporary author Frederick Buechner writes powerfully about the way God speaks to us in the events of our lives: Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. . . . It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.14
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Marcus J. Borg |
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8bfcec5
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Moreover, the longer I studied the Christian tradition, the more transparent its human origins became. Religions in general (including Christianity), it seemed to me, were manifestly cultural products.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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8ae6baf
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the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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2c3ae00
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The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. To be Christian does not mean believing in Christianity, but a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a metaph..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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How can it be that God is known in only one religion--and then perhaps only in the "right" form of that religion?7"
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Marcus J. Borg |
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That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads--as if "believing the right things" is what God is most looking for, as if having "correct beliefs" is what will save us. And if you have "incorrect beliefs," you may be in trouble. It's remarkable to think that God cares so much about "beliefs."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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3eca79d
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Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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0db1e59
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Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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396d86d
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In this life, a radical centering in God leads to a deepening trust that transforms the way we see and live our lives. Seeing, living, trusting, and centering are all related in complex ways. They are all matters of the heart, and not primarily of the head. And in our deaths, dying means trusting in the buoyancy of God, that the one who has carried us in this life is the one into whom we die.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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0080e86
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I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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9e4d46d
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metaphor means "to see as." Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought of as a "giant" metaphor. The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship. And the point is not to "believe" in a metaphor--but to "see" wit..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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6c0a22e
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The human products of bread and wine become a means of grace, earthen vessels whereby the sacred becomes present to us. So also the Bible is sacrament, a human product whereby God becomes present to us. Its words become a means whereby the Spirit speaks to us in the present.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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1ccf42d
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The image of Jesus I have sketched in the preceding chapters is quite different from the popular image of Jesus, the Jesus many of us have met before. His own self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about believing in him. Rather, he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and moveme..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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e176e09
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Jesus, then, was not just a prophet announcing the kingdom. He believed that the kingdom was breaking in to Israel's history in and through his own presence and work. This is the third layer of my historical portrait of his mission and message.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, out there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God. Call Jesus a "social prophet" if you will; but his social prophecy grew directly out of his sense of what time it was. His critique of, and warning to, his contemporaries, and his challenge to a different way of being Israel, were based on his firm belief th..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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de9a24e
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All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God's kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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6d0831a
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Many have traditionally read Jesus' sayings about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century context of the language in question, however, indicates otherwise. Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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8e14cf0
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Thus, a fifth stroke in the sketch. Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God, believing that this kingdom was inaugurated with his own work, summoning others to join him in his kingdom movement, and warning of dire consequences for the nation, for Jerusalem, and for the temple, if his summons was ignored.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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8999b09
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Jesus was not "attacking Judaism" but telling his fellow Jews that their moment had come and that they were in danger of missing it. He was not criticizing Jewish religion and offering a different variety, but appealing to Israel's own story and foundation texts to criticize what he saw as deep corruption both within the Jewish society of his day and in widespread Jewish attitudes toward the rest of the world. He stood, in other words, with..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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8ab6ff2
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He was not, then, in any shape or form, anti-Jewish. Jesus clearly knew that there was a wide spectrum of belief and practice among his contemporaries; nevertheless, like the biblical prophets before him, he denounced "the nation" for its widespread rejection of what he saw as God's will, and its embracing of ways of being Jewish which he regarded as unwarranted, disloyal to YHWH, and disastrous. The prophets had spoken out against the nati..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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In particular, Jesus' clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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5da71d7
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The sixth stroke of my sketch is therefore as follows: Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not. His agendas led him into a symbolic clash with those who embraced other ones, and this, together with the positive symbols of his own kingdom agenda, point to the way in which he saw his inaugurated kingdom moving toward acco..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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68d6223
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As I follow this path, I discover a Jesus who was not simply an example, even the supreme example, of a mystic or Spirit person, such as one might meet, in principle, in other cultures. I find, rather, the Jesus I have just been describing: Jesus as a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and ..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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a2ff190
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This picture, I believe, makes very good sense historically. Jesus' critique of his contemporaries was critique from within; his summons was not to abandon Judaism and try something else, but to become the true, returned-from-exile people of the one true God. He aimed to be the means of God's reconstitution of Israel. He would call into being the true, returned-from-exile Israel. He would challenge, and deal with, the evil that had infected..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter.
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Marcus J. Borg |
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5b21b3e
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Our culture's secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the Spirit; the only reality about which it is certain is the visible world of our ordinary experience. Accordingly, it looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what I call the three A's-achievement, affluence, and appearance. We live our lives in accord with these values, with both our self-worth and level of satisfaction dependent upon how..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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79a76b1
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The phrase "kingdom of God" (and such similar reverential phrases as "kingdom of heaven") denoted, not a place where God ruled, but rather the fact that God ruled--or, rather, that he soon would rule, because he certainly was not doing so at present in the way he intended to do."
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Marcus J. Borg |
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96cbe2c
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The coming kingdom of God was not, then, a matter of abstract ideas or timeless truths. It was not about a new sort of religion, a new spiritual experience, a new moral code (or new strength to observe existing ones). It was not a doctrine or a soteriology (a systematic scheme for individual salvation or a general statement about how one might go to heaven after death). It was not a new sociological analysis, critique, or agenda. It was abo..
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Marcus J. Borg |
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Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected.
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Marcus J. Borg |