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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 89e4065 | it is important that children not be taught in such a way that they will later need to unlearn many things. We | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| be9f18b | Taking the God of love and justice and the God of grace seriously has immediate implications for the Christian message. It becomes: God loves us already and has from our very beginning. The Christian life is not about believing or doing what we need to believe or do so that we can be saved. Rather, it's about seeing what is already true--that God loves us already--and then beginning to live in this relationship. It is about becoming conscio.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| d5b4b50 | The "bad news" version is the saving of some from the devouring fire that will consume the rest. The "good news" version is a vision of transformed people and a transformed earth filled with the glory of God. What's at stake in the question of God's character is our image of the Christian life. Is Christianity about requirements? Here's what you must do to be saved. Or is Christianity about relationship and transformation? Here's the path: .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| b4de518 | individual responsibility matters, but none of us is really self-made. We are also the product of many factors beyond our control. These include genetic inheritance, affecting both health and intelligence; the family into which we're born and our upbringing; the quality of education we receive; and a whole host of "accidents" along life's way--good breaks and bad breaks. To think we are primarily the product of our own individual effort is .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| cdb9255 | Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. In him we see God's passion. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| eb5ca77 | We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 78efb2d | Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart" (Deut. 6:6). "Serve the Lord your God with all your heart" (Deut. 10:12). "Incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel" (Josh. 24:23). "Return to the Lord with all your heart" (1 Sam. 7:3). "The Lord looks on the heart" (1 Sam. 16:7). "I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart" (Ps. 9:1). "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 40b962b | Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences. So we do not think Jesus saw his purpose as dying for the sins of the world. Rather, this interpretation, like the others in the New Testament, is post-Easter and thus retrospective. Looking back on the execution of Jesus, the early movement sought to see a providential purpose in this horrendous event.12 | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 289f167 | the domination system, understood as something much larger than the Roman governor and the temple aristocracy, is responsible for the death of Jesus. In words attributed to Paul, God through Jesus "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross."17 The domination system killed Jesus and thereby disclosed its moral bankruptcy and ultimate defeat." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| f3d8025 | to affirm "Jesus is the sacrifice for sin" was to deny the temple's claim to have a monopoly on forgiveness and access to God. It was an antitemple statement. Using the metaphor of sacrifice, it subverted the sacrificial system. It meant: God in Jesus has already provided the sacrifice and has thus taken care of whatever you think separates you from God; you have access to God apart from the temple and its system of sacrifice. It is a metap.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 5949c47 | Do you mean, do I believe that Jesus died for our sins?" She said, "Yes." I then explained, as I have here, that historically, no, I don't think that Jesus literally died for our sins. I don't think he thought of his life and purpose that way; I don't think he thought of that as his divinely given vocation. And then I continued. But I do have faith in the cross as a trustworthy disclosure of the evil of domination systems, as the exposure o.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 3a1beab | Thus Jesus is a metaphor of God. Indeed, for us as Christians, he is the metaphor of God. Of course, he was also a real person. As metaphor of God, Jesus discloses what God is like. We see God through Jesus. We are accustomed to speaking of the death of Jesus as the "passion" of Jesus, and the stories of his death as the "passion narratives." When we do so, we typically think of "passion" as meaning "suffering." And it does mean that. But i.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| c85bff9 | I think Jesus would have said, "It's not about me." During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as "Good Teacher," Jesus responded with, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."22" | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 183f304 | The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties. If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological schem.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 30c8e36 | A poem by Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, captures the ache of loss at the end of childhood. Its title is significant: "On Turning Ten": The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chickenpox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 36de258 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 9327bfa | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 9b9abf3 | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 190cf76 | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 2dae5f0 | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| d36c4f1 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 82da7ae | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 5125161 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 078630e | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| c636ad2 | 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." -- | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 788b732 | special preference to "an automobile manufacturer incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916." That would be General Motors, although the name of the firm does not appear." | T.R. Reid | ||
| f28aebd | tottered | David Walliams | ||
| a012ed5 | 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 .. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 5af7fd9 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 4568113 | 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 | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8bfcec5 | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 8ae6baf | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 2c3ae00 | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| e01dd9b | How can it be that God is known in only one religion--and then perhaps only in the "right" form of that religion?7" | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| c5e7538 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 3eca79d | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 0db1e59 | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 396d86d | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 0080e86 | 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." | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 9e4d46d | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 6c0a22e | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 1ccf42d | 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.. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| e176e09 | 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. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| acc939b | 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. | Marcus J. Borg |