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The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith
How to have faith—or even think about God—without having to stifle modern rational thought is one of the most vital challenges facing many of us today. Marcus J. Borg, author of the bestselling Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time , traces his personal spiritual journey to the discovery of an authentic yet fully contemporary understanding of God. In a compelling, readable way, he leads us from the distant, authoritarian God of our childhood to an equally powerful, dynamic adult image of God—"the beyond in our midst," the life spirit that is within us and all around us—that reconciles faith with science, history, critical thinking, and religious pluralism.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Marcus J. Borg
43 books343 followersBorg was born into a Lutheran family of Swedish and Norwegian descent, the youngest of four children. He grew up in the 1940s in North Dakota and attended Concordia College, Moorhead, a small liberal arts school in Moorhead, Minnesota. While at Moorhead he was a columnist for the school paper and held forth as a conservative. After a close reading of the Book of Amos and its overt message of social equality he immediately began writing with an increasingly liberal stance and was eventually invited to discontinue writing his articles due to his new-found liberalism. He did graduate work at Union Theological Seminary and obtained masters and DPhil degrees at Oxford under G. B. Caird. Anglican bishop N.T. Wright had studied under the same professor and many years later Borg and Wright were to share in co-authoring The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, an amicable study in contrast. Following a period of religious questioning in his mid-thirties, and numinous experiences similar to those described by Rudolf Otto, Borg became active in the Episcopal Church, in which his wife, the Reverend Canon Marianne Wells-Borg, serves as a priest and directs a spiritual development program at the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, Oregon. On May 31, 2009, Borg was installed as the first canon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.
Marcus J. Borg is Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, OR. Internationally known in both academic and church circles as a biblical and Jesus scholar, he was Hundere Chair of Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University until his retirement in 2007.
Described by The New York Times as "a leading figure in his generation of Jesus scholars," he has appeared on NBC's "Today Show" and “Dateline,” PBS's "Newshour," ABC’s “Evening News” and “Prime Time” with Peter Jennings, NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, and several National Geographic programs. A Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, he has been national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature and co-chair of its International New Testament Program Committee, and is past president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. His work has been translated into eleven languages: German, Dutch, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Russian, and French. His doctor's degree is from Oxford University, and he has lectured widely overseas (England, Scotland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Israel and South Africa) and in North America, including the Chautauqua and Smithsonian Institutions.
Marcus J. Borg is Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, OR. Internationally known in both academic and church circles as a biblical and Jesus scholar, he was Hundere Chair of Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University until his retirement in 2007.
Described by The New York Times as "a leading figure in his generation of Jesus scholars," he has appeared on NBC's "Today Show" and “Dateline,” PBS's "Newshour," ABC’s “Evening News” and “Prime Time” with Peter Jennings, NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, and several National Geographic programs. A Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, he has been national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature and co-chair of its International New Testament Program Committee, and is past president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. His work has been translated into eleven languages: German, Dutch, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Russian, and French. His doctor's degree is from Oxford University, and he has lectured widely overseas (England, Scotland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Israel and South Africa) and in North America, including the Chautauqua and Smithsonian Institutions.
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April 27, 2008
Thoughtful, informative, and accessible, this book was exactly what I was seeking as I'm exploring my Christian beliefs and questioning what I had been taught about Christianity starting in my childhood. The author, Marcus Borg, deconstructs Christianity as both he and I had first learned it (e.g., God as distant, "out there"; God as judge, "finger-shaker"; salvation as an outcome to motivate beliefs and behaviors). He then proposes a historically- and scripture-based framework for Christianity in which God is immediate, imaged in multiple manners, and compassionate. As I was reading the book, I experienced a strange and wonderful juxtaposition of reactions as I felt simultaneously shocked (that his assertions completely called into question almost everything I had been taught about Christianity for most of my life) and contented (that the perspective he presented made such sense and fit with what I've believed for some time but haven't been able to express in words). As a result of reading this book, I am grateful to have the beginnings of a new perspective for my Christian faith and am eager to read and learn more.
June 23, 2008
Marcus Borg makes the case for a panentheistic concept of God, panentheism being a way of conveiving God's relation to the material universe.
Borg contrasts his concept with other ways of thinking about God:
- Theism (or supernatural theism) assumes a God that is entirely separate from nature, but who occasionally intervenes in miraculous ways (the "old man in the sky").
- Pantheism assumes that God and nature are one, that God is not separate from the universe.
- Deism assumes God created the universe, is separate from it, and does not intervene in it.
- Atheism, of course, assumes there is no God.
Borg finds these epistemes, ways of thinking, unsatisfactory. He argues that theism devalues God's creation, tempting us to place less emphasis on living life as fully as possible. Pantheism, while recognizing a sacred quality of the natural world (divine immanence), denies the transcendent quality of spirit. Deism makes God mostly irrelevant and acts as a stepping stone to atheism, which takes us into an opposing paradigm, altogether.
Borg offers the opinion that many people who consider themselves atheists may well be rejecting the concept of supernatural theism, without considering other ideas. I suspect this may well be true, to some extent.
Borg's preferred way to think of God is panentheism, which he arrived at after struggling with doubts over the religious ideas with which he was raised. Panenetheism conceives God as both immanent and transcendent, being both a part of the natural universe and beyond it. This concept has a long history: it is the concept of God that J.G. Herder, the German philosopher and philologist, presents is his theological writings. In more recent times, both the American theologian Paul Tillich and the Anglican writer John Robinson have argued in favor of it. Most importantly, panentheism is strongly indicated in Jewish and Christian scripture and seems also to be Jesus's own concept of God.
For Borg, the strength of panentheism lies in its implications for how we live life in relation to God. It is not enough to hope for salvation after we die; rather, we must seek salvation in the here and now. Borg advocates that this pursuit be through what he calls a politics of compassion based in the dream of God and Jesus's concept of the Kingdom of Heaven. All of these are based in and expressed by an open and inclusive social order that is non-exploitative.
As the rhetorical question in the book of the prophet Micah asks:
God has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Borg contrasts his concept with other ways of thinking about God:
- Theism (or supernatural theism) assumes a God that is entirely separate from nature, but who occasionally intervenes in miraculous ways (the "old man in the sky").
- Pantheism assumes that God and nature are one, that God is not separate from the universe.
- Deism assumes God created the universe, is separate from it, and does not intervene in it.
- Atheism, of course, assumes there is no God.
Borg finds these epistemes, ways of thinking, unsatisfactory. He argues that theism devalues God's creation, tempting us to place less emphasis on living life as fully as possible. Pantheism, while recognizing a sacred quality of the natural world (divine immanence), denies the transcendent quality of spirit. Deism makes God mostly irrelevant and acts as a stepping stone to atheism, which takes us into an opposing paradigm, altogether.
Borg offers the opinion that many people who consider themselves atheists may well be rejecting the concept of supernatural theism, without considering other ideas. I suspect this may well be true, to some extent.
Borg's preferred way to think of God is panentheism, which he arrived at after struggling with doubts over the religious ideas with which he was raised. Panenetheism conceives God as both immanent and transcendent, being both a part of the natural universe and beyond it. This concept has a long history: it is the concept of God that J.G. Herder, the German philosopher and philologist, presents is his theological writings. In more recent times, both the American theologian Paul Tillich and the Anglican writer John Robinson have argued in favor of it. Most importantly, panentheism is strongly indicated in Jewish and Christian scripture and seems also to be Jesus's own concept of God.
For Borg, the strength of panentheism lies in its implications for how we live life in relation to God. It is not enough to hope for salvation after we die; rather, we must seek salvation in the here and now. Borg advocates that this pursuit be through what he calls a politics of compassion based in the dream of God and Jesus's concept of the Kingdom of Heaven. All of these are based in and expressed by an open and inclusive social order that is non-exploitative.
As the rhetorical question in the book of the prophet Micah asks:
God has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
February 24, 2017
This title, like the book, is both confusing and exclusive. I, for one, encountered God, in much the same way that Borg describes toward the beginning of this book, when I was fifteen, so to say I “never knew” this image of God is the first of several inaccuracies I would like to address. I just want to say, before I get too deep into my review of this book, that if you have had similar experiences with the supernatural that you have struggled to explain or describe to your Christian friends and family, and if you are not sure if you have truly experienced God or just another deception from the devil (which is what you’ve probably already been told), this book may help to validate your experiences.
I should point out that my experience with the personal God, though it began as a teenager, grew distant after enduring many years of criticism and condemnation from the church as well as several very difficult situations in my life. Later in my life, however, I had a profound reunion with that spiritual communion and realized that God had been trying to show me something, even as a kid, that was incredibly important in both my life and the lives of those around me. The perspective I gained in the years since then has changed the way I see the world and how I read the writings of other theologians and scholars.
That being said, however, and having accepted the fact that, for the past 25 years, I have been trying to learn from my own personal—and rarely in agreement with accepted doctrine—experiences with God, I am about to note a few things I find incongruent with Mr. Borg’s teachings in this book. I do not hold these incongruences against Borg personally, as I understand that his bread and butter comes from one of the most powerful and ambitious religious organizations in the world: the cult of Higher Education. I feel that my criticism needs to be noted, though, because there is enough truth in these pages to lead others who are seeking it into accepting the falsehoods as well.
Before I go any farther, I need to say that I really like Marcus Borg’s personal perspective on God and the Kingdom of Heaven. For the most part, I understand what he is trying to describe, and I share his vision in many ways. Unfortunately, there is a lot in this book that is obviously not his personal perspective, and there is an obvious invasion into his vision that has come from somewhere else. To say that he was not, to some degree, forced to say some of the things would be to pretend I didn’t notice some very obvious problems with his teachings. Like I always say, the pen is not mightier than the publisher. In the case of this book, none of it would have ever made it to ink on paper were it not approved by an organization that seeks to dominate and control just as much as the social organizations Borg indicts within these pages.
Foremost:
Several times in this book, Borg sidesteps the subject of demons and the conspicuous need for blood sacrifices that is found in so many cultures and religions around the world. So obviously does he sidestep this aspect of religion that I must wonder how he could not have been aware of it. There are several reasons why this flagrant omission is a bad idea. For starters, to leave out any mention of demons and lying, deceiving spirits is to imply that ALL spiritual experience, no matter how incompatible or uncompassionate, are of God. As a result of re-interpreting so many passages of scripture to ignore the discussion of demonic activity and spiritual warfare, Borg has managed to lump shamanism, Satanism, drug-induced hallucinations, and spiritual channeling into the same category as what he describes as “experiencing the sacred”. While I am not one to outright condemn as “Witchcraft” anything I don’t understand, I have had enough personal experiences with the demonic realm to know that Borg’s avoidance of the subject presents a danger to those who are struggling against seduction by the prince of lies.
When it comes to the discussion of rituals and images, Borg neglects to see the very real possibility that some of these are not meant to show us God, but are meant to set us free from the lies of the demonic realm. The wine and bread, for example, are first encountered in Genesis when Abraham has communion with Melchizedek. A short time later, a second “substitution” for human sacrifice is manifested in Abraham’s life when God provides a ram so that Isaac may live. These are not symbols of God’s will for us. They are ways for us to deny the demonic realm its claim to our blood and the blood of our children.
Borg describes a Post Easter Jesus that has become the “god” of modern Christianity, and I do agree with much of what he has to say against this idea. However, this point needs to also factor in the demonic aspect of our world. The main reason why Jesus, in Spirit form, cannot be worshipped and obeyed as God is that his Spirit can too easily be imitated by the deceiver. We can use the Spirit to guide us back to the pre-Easter teachings or even to our own personal spiritual walk, but if we allow just any “resurrected” spirit to take on an authority in our lives, we are in danger of being led astray. I have seen this even in my own life with friends and family, and I dread what Christianity could become when we put a demon on the throne simply because it has learned to look like Jesus.
But enough about the supernatural.
One of Borg’s chapters, and indeed, one of his main points in this book, is called “The Dream of God.” Of course, this is not God’s dream; it’s what Borg thinks God’s dream is. More accurately put, it is what the publisher will allow Borg to say God’s dream is. This dream, according to the liberals in control of the printing press, is one of undiscerning compassion for all of mankind. The kind of compassion that prompts Christians to hand out clean needles to drug addicts so they can die of an overdose in a cold alley or fly face-first through the windshield when their compassion-enabled drinking habit catches up with that unyielding light pole. In my own experience, I have come to learn from God that, more important than the fruit of compassion is the fruit of discernment—the fruit of knowing when to correctly apply all other fruits, and when not to.
Let me just take this moment to speak for God a little myself, based on my own spiritual experiences. The image of justice that Borg (and his publishers) tries to paint is based on human values with no desire to see through God’s eyes. Poverty and wealth distribution matter very little to God. My own story of both riches and rags is enough to convince me that people don’t need wealth or equality to experience God. I’ve known barefoot hippies who were happy and I’ve known arrogant yuppies whose wealth only served to destroy them; it is impossible for me to believe Borg when he advocates for distribution of wealth as a synonym for justice. Yes, God uses money to discuss issues with people in the Bible, but that is not because God wants us to have it or to “share the wealth.” God wants our attention, and money gets it, so that’s what God’s teachers have had to talk about—kind of like how Borg had to advocate “gender equality” and egalitarianism in order to get the publisher to accept the rest of his message.
Borg identifies as God’s enemy this evil imbalance between the wealthy elite and the “peasants” of history. This is a very sheltered way of seeing the world. Consider the quality of life for rural “peasants” compared to those who live in the stench of the cities. True, the metropolitans are closer to the golden palaces, the splendid temples, the marketplaces full of finery, but are they closer to God? How many of the Bible’s authors—or even the heroes of the Enlightenment—were inspired in the rural forests and pastures instead of the dank, smog-infested cities? Why is there no consideration for the possibility that those who live the peasant life are the ones who are truly blessed? Maybe that tenth commandment is more about God wanting us to be happy than it is about us not making God angry.
At several points in the book, Borg returns to the suggestion that God embraces all differences. Time and again, however, closer consideration of some of the differences he lists show an incompatibility that even “grace” cannot gloss over. Borg speaks of God having feminine qualities, and I agree with him to the point of applause; however, the feminine aspects he hints at are in no way the pro-choice, LGBT ways that modern feminism wants God to embrace. It’s not compatible. Within the modern liberal campus that surrounded the author as he penned these pages, feminism had little to do with compassion and nurturing, and very much to do with wild, irresponsible sex, rage, and self-destructive behaviors that no child would ever want from their Mother. Considering what has happened in just the last year, the marriage of God’s feminine side to the liberal message his publishers wanted to print tends to render this book irrelevant and its truths non-eternal.
One thing Borg indirectly advocates is something I call “Messianic Government”. He has gone to great lengths to describe what he calls the “domination system” where kings and rulers lord over the peasants and slaves, but his own solution is simply a redistribution of power to a different set of kings and rulers—the “educated” elite—that will supposedly fix everything and usher in a new age of peace and happiness. This is not God’s dream. It’s just another man-made power struggle, a group of a few who insist that theirs is the more enlightened, progressive system of doing things. To imply that “government” is the new progressive fix to all modern social problems, while railing against the “government domination system” of the past, is pure hypocrisy.
What is God’s social structure, then, if it is not what Borg and his puppeteers advocate? It is not this egalitarianism that also implies individuality. Individuality without structure is a chaos that can never sustain a metropolitan-sized community (as we are beginning to see for ourselves). Surely there is a foundation on which we can begin to piece together what God really wants. Without a founding principle, theologians and social advocates could pick any social reform and argue it as “God’s desire”. We could just as easily argue that God wants wives to submit to husbands or masters to assert their authority over slaves. A more universal understanding is needed. Unfortunately, Borg’s publishers seem to have denied him the ability to do so in this book.
Let me then present my own vision of what God wants from us. Going back to the many things I have come to understand in my own walk with God, I have established a central foundation of God’s dream as something I call the “Design” or the “Path of Becoming”. This is not a path to “Heaven” or a collection of laws to avoid making God angry. It is not a license to go feral with unadulterated freedoms, nor an appeal to those of us who are more responsible to clean up after those who are not. The path God wants us to follow is not one of individual compassion or equality, but one in which we set aside the desires of our self and join in union with a larger congregation—the family, the church, the Kingdom of God. This desire for us to become part of something bigger—and to no longer place ourselves at the center of that being—is the foundation of all that God has meant for us to be. Once that foundation is applied, many of these “man-made” values that are applied to God fall away.
God is not universally opposed to wealth or poverty or even inequality amongst individuals. God desires community, congregation, and compassion but these things can only come about from a DEATH OF THE SELF! In his writing, Borg has also done well to identify this path, but his work is visibly overshadowed by the agenda of the liberal establishment that holds his leash. Those who cry out for equality still measure equality by standards that elevate the self above God’s community. This is incompatible with his message, and inevitably, it has helped to discredit his simple attempt to point the reader to this God that most people have never known.
Finally, let me say this: What I see, as one who comes to this book having already met this “God we never knew”, is an attempt to hijack this revelation in much the same way it was hijacked 1500 years ago by what we now call “Christianity”. Into this “God we never knew”, Borg’s puppeteers have attempted to insert another set of doctrinal teachings and values in which love and freedom begets irresponsible behavior and civic breakdown, and in which a new societal system of messianic government is tasked with cleaning up the messes that result. This is not the Kingdom of God that I have come to understand through my own spiritual journey. The Kingdom of God, as I know it, is built from the bottom up. Not from a mass of chanting protesters, nor a lecture hall of mindless, nodding heads. God wants us to all have the “king’s heart”—a heart for all people both inside our authority and those outside of it as well. We must all do our part. We cannot sit on our hands and insist that messianic figures in government will fix all our problems. We cannot accept the teachings that God wants a new set of kings and rulers to govern us simply by redistributing wealth or guaranteeing freedoms. No, the dream of God cannot come from a metropolitan elite perspective—be it academic or industrial—or it becomes just another domination system full of winners, losers, and a priesthood arguing that God has willed it to be this way.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a democracy. It’s not. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to point this out. There may be a field of both wheat and weeds, but no majority vote from the wheat is going to change the weeds into something the Master will gather up and store in the barn. Weeds are weeds. It doesn’t matter if they have a 100% approval rating. It doesn’t matter if the weeds have control of the media and the movie industry and every newspaper says they’re cool and the Master is an intolerant hater. They’re still weeds, and the Master is right to separate them at harvest and dispose of them how He sees fit. Since I’m not the master, all I can do is to separate the two star’s worth of weeds from the rest of this otherwise five-star book.
I should point out that my experience with the personal God, though it began as a teenager, grew distant after enduring many years of criticism and condemnation from the church as well as several very difficult situations in my life. Later in my life, however, I had a profound reunion with that spiritual communion and realized that God had been trying to show me something, even as a kid, that was incredibly important in both my life and the lives of those around me. The perspective I gained in the years since then has changed the way I see the world and how I read the writings of other theologians and scholars.
That being said, however, and having accepted the fact that, for the past 25 years, I have been trying to learn from my own personal—and rarely in agreement with accepted doctrine—experiences with God, I am about to note a few things I find incongruent with Mr. Borg’s teachings in this book. I do not hold these incongruences against Borg personally, as I understand that his bread and butter comes from one of the most powerful and ambitious religious organizations in the world: the cult of Higher Education. I feel that my criticism needs to be noted, though, because there is enough truth in these pages to lead others who are seeking it into accepting the falsehoods as well.
Before I go any farther, I need to say that I really like Marcus Borg’s personal perspective on God and the Kingdom of Heaven. For the most part, I understand what he is trying to describe, and I share his vision in many ways. Unfortunately, there is a lot in this book that is obviously not his personal perspective, and there is an obvious invasion into his vision that has come from somewhere else. To say that he was not, to some degree, forced to say some of the things would be to pretend I didn’t notice some very obvious problems with his teachings. Like I always say, the pen is not mightier than the publisher. In the case of this book, none of it would have ever made it to ink on paper were it not approved by an organization that seeks to dominate and control just as much as the social organizations Borg indicts within these pages.
Foremost:
Several times in this book, Borg sidesteps the subject of demons and the conspicuous need for blood sacrifices that is found in so many cultures and religions around the world. So obviously does he sidestep this aspect of religion that I must wonder how he could not have been aware of it. There are several reasons why this flagrant omission is a bad idea. For starters, to leave out any mention of demons and lying, deceiving spirits is to imply that ALL spiritual experience, no matter how incompatible or uncompassionate, are of God. As a result of re-interpreting so many passages of scripture to ignore the discussion of demonic activity and spiritual warfare, Borg has managed to lump shamanism, Satanism, drug-induced hallucinations, and spiritual channeling into the same category as what he describes as “experiencing the sacred”. While I am not one to outright condemn as “Witchcraft” anything I don’t understand, I have had enough personal experiences with the demonic realm to know that Borg’s avoidance of the subject presents a danger to those who are struggling against seduction by the prince of lies.
When it comes to the discussion of rituals and images, Borg neglects to see the very real possibility that some of these are not meant to show us God, but are meant to set us free from the lies of the demonic realm. The wine and bread, for example, are first encountered in Genesis when Abraham has communion with Melchizedek. A short time later, a second “substitution” for human sacrifice is manifested in Abraham’s life when God provides a ram so that Isaac may live. These are not symbols of God’s will for us. They are ways for us to deny the demonic realm its claim to our blood and the blood of our children.
Borg describes a Post Easter Jesus that has become the “god” of modern Christianity, and I do agree with much of what he has to say against this idea. However, this point needs to also factor in the demonic aspect of our world. The main reason why Jesus, in Spirit form, cannot be worshipped and obeyed as God is that his Spirit can too easily be imitated by the deceiver. We can use the Spirit to guide us back to the pre-Easter teachings or even to our own personal spiritual walk, but if we allow just any “resurrected” spirit to take on an authority in our lives, we are in danger of being led astray. I have seen this even in my own life with friends and family, and I dread what Christianity could become when we put a demon on the throne simply because it has learned to look like Jesus.
But enough about the supernatural.
One of Borg’s chapters, and indeed, one of his main points in this book, is called “The Dream of God.” Of course, this is not God’s dream; it’s what Borg thinks God’s dream is. More accurately put, it is what the publisher will allow Borg to say God’s dream is. This dream, according to the liberals in control of the printing press, is one of undiscerning compassion for all of mankind. The kind of compassion that prompts Christians to hand out clean needles to drug addicts so they can die of an overdose in a cold alley or fly face-first through the windshield when their compassion-enabled drinking habit catches up with that unyielding light pole. In my own experience, I have come to learn from God that, more important than the fruit of compassion is the fruit of discernment—the fruit of knowing when to correctly apply all other fruits, and when not to.
Let me just take this moment to speak for God a little myself, based on my own spiritual experiences. The image of justice that Borg (and his publishers) tries to paint is based on human values with no desire to see through God’s eyes. Poverty and wealth distribution matter very little to God. My own story of both riches and rags is enough to convince me that people don’t need wealth or equality to experience God. I’ve known barefoot hippies who were happy and I’ve known arrogant yuppies whose wealth only served to destroy them; it is impossible for me to believe Borg when he advocates for distribution of wealth as a synonym for justice. Yes, God uses money to discuss issues with people in the Bible, but that is not because God wants us to have it or to “share the wealth.” God wants our attention, and money gets it, so that’s what God’s teachers have had to talk about—kind of like how Borg had to advocate “gender equality” and egalitarianism in order to get the publisher to accept the rest of his message.
Borg identifies as God’s enemy this evil imbalance between the wealthy elite and the “peasants” of history. This is a very sheltered way of seeing the world. Consider the quality of life for rural “peasants” compared to those who live in the stench of the cities. True, the metropolitans are closer to the golden palaces, the splendid temples, the marketplaces full of finery, but are they closer to God? How many of the Bible’s authors—or even the heroes of the Enlightenment—were inspired in the rural forests and pastures instead of the dank, smog-infested cities? Why is there no consideration for the possibility that those who live the peasant life are the ones who are truly blessed? Maybe that tenth commandment is more about God wanting us to be happy than it is about us not making God angry.
At several points in the book, Borg returns to the suggestion that God embraces all differences. Time and again, however, closer consideration of some of the differences he lists show an incompatibility that even “grace” cannot gloss over. Borg speaks of God having feminine qualities, and I agree with him to the point of applause; however, the feminine aspects he hints at are in no way the pro-choice, LGBT ways that modern feminism wants God to embrace. It’s not compatible. Within the modern liberal campus that surrounded the author as he penned these pages, feminism had little to do with compassion and nurturing, and very much to do with wild, irresponsible sex, rage, and self-destructive behaviors that no child would ever want from their Mother. Considering what has happened in just the last year, the marriage of God’s feminine side to the liberal message his publishers wanted to print tends to render this book irrelevant and its truths non-eternal.
One thing Borg indirectly advocates is something I call “Messianic Government”. He has gone to great lengths to describe what he calls the “domination system” where kings and rulers lord over the peasants and slaves, but his own solution is simply a redistribution of power to a different set of kings and rulers—the “educated” elite—that will supposedly fix everything and usher in a new age of peace and happiness. This is not God’s dream. It’s just another man-made power struggle, a group of a few who insist that theirs is the more enlightened, progressive system of doing things. To imply that “government” is the new progressive fix to all modern social problems, while railing against the “government domination system” of the past, is pure hypocrisy.
What is God’s social structure, then, if it is not what Borg and his puppeteers advocate? It is not this egalitarianism that also implies individuality. Individuality without structure is a chaos that can never sustain a metropolitan-sized community (as we are beginning to see for ourselves). Surely there is a foundation on which we can begin to piece together what God really wants. Without a founding principle, theologians and social advocates could pick any social reform and argue it as “God’s desire”. We could just as easily argue that God wants wives to submit to husbands or masters to assert their authority over slaves. A more universal understanding is needed. Unfortunately, Borg’s publishers seem to have denied him the ability to do so in this book.
Let me then present my own vision of what God wants from us. Going back to the many things I have come to understand in my own walk with God, I have established a central foundation of God’s dream as something I call the “Design” or the “Path of Becoming”. This is not a path to “Heaven” or a collection of laws to avoid making God angry. It is not a license to go feral with unadulterated freedoms, nor an appeal to those of us who are more responsible to clean up after those who are not. The path God wants us to follow is not one of individual compassion or equality, but one in which we set aside the desires of our self and join in union with a larger congregation—the family, the church, the Kingdom of God. This desire for us to become part of something bigger—and to no longer place ourselves at the center of that being—is the foundation of all that God has meant for us to be. Once that foundation is applied, many of these “man-made” values that are applied to God fall away.
God is not universally opposed to wealth or poverty or even inequality amongst individuals. God desires community, congregation, and compassion but these things can only come about from a DEATH OF THE SELF! In his writing, Borg has also done well to identify this path, but his work is visibly overshadowed by the agenda of the liberal establishment that holds his leash. Those who cry out for equality still measure equality by standards that elevate the self above God’s community. This is incompatible with his message, and inevitably, it has helped to discredit his simple attempt to point the reader to this God that most people have never known.
Finally, let me say this: What I see, as one who comes to this book having already met this “God we never knew”, is an attempt to hijack this revelation in much the same way it was hijacked 1500 years ago by what we now call “Christianity”. Into this “God we never knew”, Borg’s puppeteers have attempted to insert another set of doctrinal teachings and values in which love and freedom begets irresponsible behavior and civic breakdown, and in which a new societal system of messianic government is tasked with cleaning up the messes that result. This is not the Kingdom of God that I have come to understand through my own spiritual journey. The Kingdom of God, as I know it, is built from the bottom up. Not from a mass of chanting protesters, nor a lecture hall of mindless, nodding heads. God wants us to all have the “king’s heart”—a heart for all people both inside our authority and those outside of it as well. We must all do our part. We cannot sit on our hands and insist that messianic figures in government will fix all our problems. We cannot accept the teachings that God wants a new set of kings and rulers to govern us simply by redistributing wealth or guaranteeing freedoms. No, the dream of God cannot come from a metropolitan elite perspective—be it academic or industrial—or it becomes just another domination system full of winners, losers, and a priesthood arguing that God has willed it to be this way.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not a democracy. It’s not. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to point this out. There may be a field of both wheat and weeds, but no majority vote from the wheat is going to change the weeds into something the Master will gather up and store in the barn. Weeds are weeds. It doesn’t matter if they have a 100% approval rating. It doesn’t matter if the weeds have control of the media and the movie industry and every newspaper says they’re cool and the Master is an intolerant hater. They’re still weeds, and the Master is right to separate them at harvest and dispose of them how He sees fit. Since I’m not the master, all I can do is to separate the two star’s worth of weeds from the rest of this otherwise five-star book.
April 22, 2023
I wish 4.5 stars were an option, but I'll just round up since it isn't. Not a mind-blowing book, per se, but the most direct and clear statement of the case for a panentheistic conception of the Christian God I know of, and it does well to illustrate the repercussions adopting such a view has. Insofar as that is concerned, Borg comes close to here producing a Communist Manifesto of modern, progressive theology. The important part that distinguishes Borg from many of his fellow progressives is that he rightly emphasizes the importance of spiritual life: his Christianity serves more purpose than merely legitimating his progressive politics. It's a fantastic summary of the thinking of one of Christianity's best modern popularizers; well, well worth the read for anyone looking to explore this side of Christian thought.
August 17, 2019
I found this remarkable book both challenging and comforting. Many of Borg's conclusions about God and our relationship with God are familiar to me. Faith is the trusting relationship we form with a God who already and completely loves and accepts us. Jesus is speaking to the individual's personal experience but, equally important, is critiquing systemic evil and of conversion to a world built on compassion and justice.
Borg considers much of current Christian beliefs to come down to a set of requirements by which we can earn the acceptance of God and enjoy a heavenly afterlife. He seems to dismiss the idea of requirements and the focus on salvation as an experience we enjoy after we die. For him, salvation is in the present and how we are living our life now. The gifts of a trusting relationship with god include joy, love, freedom, and peace and the fruits of this relationship are justice and compassion.
I was challenged by Borg's description of a pre-Easter Jesus (a man who experienced God's presence but did not consider himself God) and the post-Easter Jesus, a risen Christ whose life and faith is radically confirmed by God. It is difficult for me to let go of the concept of Jesus as God, both pre- and post- the resurrection. However, I found Borg's argument for the metaphorical meaning of resurrection persuasive. I also was interested (although again challenged) by the idea that events such as the bread and fishes and Jesus walking on water as spiritual community experiences that occurred after Jesus' death.
There is much to think about in Borg's book but I felt comforted by his bottom line affirmation of faith as a trusting relationship with God that we work towards but is ultimately a gift from God. We make ourselves ready for this gift but cannot control when (or, I guess, if) it comes. I found this insight frightening but also liberating. I think I will carry it into my own faith life--both in prayer and meditation. Currently, I tend to demand the experience of God in my life, rather than open to it. My way has not been working; maybe letting go of the desire to control will be, at least, more comfortable and comforting.
This book is of interest to everyone who is interested in a life infused with spirituality, a life that is spiritual. It challenges traditional Christian views of God and religion, placing the ultimate value on relationship and trust.
Borg considers much of current Christian beliefs to come down to a set of requirements by which we can earn the acceptance of God and enjoy a heavenly afterlife. He seems to dismiss the idea of requirements and the focus on salvation as an experience we enjoy after we die. For him, salvation is in the present and how we are living our life now. The gifts of a trusting relationship with god include joy, love, freedom, and peace and the fruits of this relationship are justice and compassion.
I was challenged by Borg's description of a pre-Easter Jesus (a man who experienced God's presence but did not consider himself God) and the post-Easter Jesus, a risen Christ whose life and faith is radically confirmed by God. It is difficult for me to let go of the concept of Jesus as God, both pre- and post- the resurrection. However, I found Borg's argument for the metaphorical meaning of resurrection persuasive. I also was interested (although again challenged) by the idea that events such as the bread and fishes and Jesus walking on water as spiritual community experiences that occurred after Jesus' death.
There is much to think about in Borg's book but I felt comforted by his bottom line affirmation of faith as a trusting relationship with God that we work towards but is ultimately a gift from God. We make ourselves ready for this gift but cannot control when (or, I guess, if) it comes. I found this insight frightening but also liberating. I think I will carry it into my own faith life--both in prayer and meditation. Currently, I tend to demand the experience of God in my life, rather than open to it. My way has not been working; maybe letting go of the desire to control will be, at least, more comfortable and comforting.
This book is of interest to everyone who is interested in a life infused with spirituality, a life that is spiritual. It challenges traditional Christian views of God and religion, placing the ultimate value on relationship and trust.
November 16, 2015
They'll know we are Christians by our love.
Liberation theology at it's finest and the exodus has to start with oneself, another follows and another and the world is being re-born. Here is where the author leaves us but not without discernment and guidance.
The God we never knew in our childhood, rises above tradition, does not come to destroy tradition but to enhance our relationship with God, our relationship with self, others and the world.
Who is this God of relationship? Where did he come from? Where were we? Did we miss the good news?
Marcus Borg leads us step by step from childhood , adolescence to spiritual maturity. Either we choose to stay stagnant and refuse to open our eyes to the possibilities or accept the challenge.
Borg leaves us with the desire for union with the world and with the one in whom we live and have our being. "Give me your love and your grace Lord, that's enough for me." This grace, this love is very radical and there are no strings attached. We only have to detach ourselves from trying to earn our way because the way has already been earned for all.
It is not self-righteous, not self-made, not judgmental but acceptance in humility and gratitude.
To be faithful to the relationship with God, one has to give their trust, heart, mind to God's fidelity. Letting go and letting be. Trusting in the Lord, He has your back.
As your relationship grows, your faith and trust grows. This is a lifetime process, leading you into eternity which is NOW.
Ultimately, faith, trust and love is a gift of God. It is all grace and this relationship flows from God to you, to others, it is the purpose of the Christian life.
Liberation theology at it's finest and the exodus has to start with oneself, another follows and another and the world is being re-born. Here is where the author leaves us but not without discernment and guidance.
The God we never knew in our childhood, rises above tradition, does not come to destroy tradition but to enhance our relationship with God, our relationship with self, others and the world.
Who is this God of relationship? Where did he come from? Where were we? Did we miss the good news?
Marcus Borg leads us step by step from childhood , adolescence to spiritual maturity. Either we choose to stay stagnant and refuse to open our eyes to the possibilities or accept the challenge.
Borg leaves us with the desire for union with the world and with the one in whom we live and have our being. "Give me your love and your grace Lord, that's enough for me." This grace, this love is very radical and there are no strings attached. We only have to detach ourselves from trying to earn our way because the way has already been earned for all.
It is not self-righteous, not self-made, not judgmental but acceptance in humility and gratitude.
To be faithful to the relationship with God, one has to give their trust, heart, mind to God's fidelity. Letting go and letting be. Trusting in the Lord, He has your back.
As your relationship grows, your faith and trust grows. This is a lifetime process, leading you into eternity which is NOW.
Ultimately, faith, trust and love is a gift of God. It is all grace and this relationship flows from God to you, to others, it is the purpose of the Christian life.
July 30, 2018
Borg is a modern day prophet. I learned so much about how to think about God and the role of a Christian in modern life. He speaks at length about compassion and our political structures. As Christians, we are called to the politics of compassion which "is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures. It leads to minimizing social boundaries, whatever the basis for drawing them (status, wealth, gender, race, sexual orientation, and so forth). Positively, it seeks to create social structures that are stewards of nourishment for the society as a whole, rather than channels funneling benefits to a relatively few." p. 151. His thoughts on prayer are the first words about the topic that make sense to me. This book deserves to be read more than once!
July 15, 2009
Describes the Biblical basis for a panentheistic understanding of God. Explains clearly how our images of God influence how we relate to God, one another, and the natural world. Argues for a plurality of images of God and for a "new" understanding of Christianity that is less exclusivist and more focused on individual relationship with God, one another, and the world.
May 14, 2008
Excellent for those who have outgrown the idea of the Old Feller in the Sky, but who still want "God".
October 29, 2023
This is a short, but overall well-written, read. For me, this book isn't bad, nor is it great; it's just a somewhat interesting perspective on the ways of imaging God, experiencing God, and how that integrates into a modern Christian belief and ideas about salvation. Overall, it's not a bad presentation, but I do have a few critiques.
When Borg is describing the various ways of imaging God, namely in describing and comparing the Monarchical and Spirit models of God, I think he's definitely letting his experience and some bias through. As one brought up in the Baptist tradition then moving into the nondenominational evangelical tradition, I don't recognize some of the features of the models he describes. And at other times I find he has placed characteristics as distinctly in one or the other model as opposites, when in fact they typically span across both models in an significant overlap. This is because there isn't really as much between the two models that is actually at odds, and many--if not most--believers, have no issue reconciling the two models into a coherent unified model of God.
I also find his use of "God as lover" and God as female or feminine, to be problematic. He seems to be taking liberties with scriptures without consideration for the metaphorical and idiomatic nature of their use in context. It is overwhelming demonstrable that in the Bible, God is strictly masculine, even if some attributes of, not God Himself but of the divine broadly, are feminine, such as Wisdom (Sofia). God gives His imaging right from the beginning. He created *man* is His image, according to His likeness. Man, or more specifically Adam, was created in God's image, Eve was not, but was rather created *from* man. To be created in God's image according to His likeness, literally means to be modeled upon the likeness and appearance of God, as an approximate copy of His likeness. Ergo, since Adam was male and masculine, therefore being in the very image/likeness of God, God also is male and masculine. Of course, part of the problem with Borg's perspective here, is that he admittedly is a fan of Feminist Theology, considering it one of the most important theological developments of his time. However, Feminist Theology is little more than a subversive movement started in the 1960s, rooted in both Marxist Frankfort School ideology and Critical Theory, that seeks to undermine the majority of Christian scriptures, manipulating, changing and ignoring that which doesn't fit the goals of the Feminist Theology movement. It's purpose is the subversive deconstruction of anything patriarchal (which it considers innately "wrong") within Christendom, the blurring of traditional family structure, and of course, a re-imaging of God that favors (or is) the feminine. Honestly, Borg's embrace of Feminist Theology probably poisons the entire book a bit, because the fact he considers it so important and pivotal, means it inevitably colors his perspective across his entire conceptual framework of God and how to think about God. So that's something to consider.
One other criticism I have is when Borg is discussing Jesus. Now, I realize Borg is a Jesus scholar and I am not, however, I see this mistake so often that I have to address it. When he begins discussing what he calls the "Pre-Easter Jesus," that being the man Jesus who walked, taught, and lived prior to His death, he gets into the "Jesus was deeply Jewish" canard. Why do I call this a canard? Because we have to understand what being Jewish meant in the 1st century. It must be understood that Judaism always has, and always will be a syncretic pagan religion. Most people think of Judaism as the religion of the Hebrews/Israelites, involving Torah observance, the priesthood, and the Holy days. But Judaism did not exist in the time of the Torah establishment, and was not, and is not, the original religion of the Hebrews/Israelites. Judaism was developed during the time of the Babylonian captivity. It was then that the captive Israelites began incorporating the Babylonian mysteries into the Torah based system they inherited. They began the early development of Gematria (based on the Milesian system), the early foundations of Kabbalah magic and mysticism, and started adopting the beliefs, rituals, legalism, and even the language of the Babylonian mystery religions. This is when they first adopted the so-called Babylonian Hebrew alphabet, which was merely the Imperial Aramaic alphabet that was used in Babylon. They abandoned their original Paleo-Hebrew script. They then "rediscovered" some ancient texts and re-wrote the ones they had into the new Babylonian Hebrew script, which was eventually passed down to us in the surviving manuscripts. Thus, from this syncretism of Babylonian religion and mysticism, adoption of the new (to them) Babylonian Hebrew script alphabet, and re-writing the texts with the developing magical Gematria in mind, mixed with old Torah traditions and teachings, the religion of Judaism was born; it was a new religion that the captive and idolatrous Israelites developed. This new religion of Judaism was primarily found in the priesthood of the tribes from the southern kingdom of Judah, hence the name, Juda-ism.
Evidence shows the new syncretic religion of Judaism largely remained a Judahite phenomenon, with very little adoption by the tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel. After the captivity, the 10 northern tribes migrated north into southern Europe and southwest Asia, then headed westward according to contemporary historians and written accounts, settling in areas like Galatia, Corinth, Rome, and up through Gaul and beyond. The southern kingdom tribes however, namely that of Judah and Benjamin, largely stayed within the levant region, settling in Judea, Samaria, and other nearby areas. Between the time of the end of the captivity and the 1st century, there was a large influx of non-Israelite Canaanites and Idumaeans (Edomites) into Judea, most of them having converted to Judaism by force thanks to the Hasmonean dynasty. In fact, by the time of the 1st century, the majority of the Judahites (Judeans aka Jews) in the Judean sphere, as well as the Pharisee and Sadducee orders, were actually of Idumaean descent and not from the Israelite stock of the tribe of Judah. The Idumaean King, Herod the Great, ruled over them, the religion of Judaism reigned, and the Jewish Sanhedrin was a largely Idumaean Jewish governing body.
The previous two paragraphs are to lay the foundation for this: Jesus was an Israelite via the tribe of Judah (some scholars say Levi), but he was not actually Jewish at all. In fact, over and over again He rails against and curses the Jewish leaders, people, and practices. Him not being Jewish, condemning and spurning that pagan syncretic religion of Judaism and its traditions of men, is precisely why the Jewish leaders kept accusing Him of heresy and blasphemy and seeking to have Him punished. He followed the Torah and not the traditions Judaism added from Babylonian mysticism, and He was calling out the followers of Judaism and the Jewish practices as evil and demanding they repent from their ways. And keep in mind, he only did that because of the remnant of Judah that was still there, as he came only to go to the lost sheep of Israel, not to the non-Israelite Idumaeans that made up the majority of Judea's Jewish population at that time. Unfortunately, because many people these days do not understand syncretism, they believe that since the Jews of the city celebrated the Holy days and festivals, that surely they must have been practicing the Godly religion of their ancient forefathers. But that's just how syncretism works. It's bits and pieces of different religions, rituals, and traditions, mashed together. The Jewish leaders still ordered the observance of Holy days, Sabbath days, etc, but they also utilized the mysticism and traditions passed down from the adoption of the Babylonian mysteries during the captivity in the form of Judaism. And Jesus was far from "deeply Jewish" as Borg claims - He was virulently anti-Jewish (as in, anti-Judaism). Sure, He was Torah observant, because that was the religion as proscribed by God to the ancient Hebrews. But He was a crusader against the relatively new Jewish syncretic religion of Judaism and its man-made traditions. Is it any wonder the Jews wanted to kill him?
Lastly, I just wanted to briefly mention that Borg also espouses the erroneous view that the "responsibility for His execution rests with Roman authority." (p.89) The execution of Jesus has long been erroneously attributed to mean-old Roman soldiers, but in fact, it was the Jewish authorities that carried out the execution. In Matthew 27:24, we see that Pilot washes his hands of the situation, declaring Jesus innocent. Jesus had broken no Roman law, and we have numerous historical documents attesting that, per Roman law, they absolutely would not carry out the execution of someone they found to be innocent. Being that Jesus had only "violated" the religious law of Jewish authorities, Rome could not carry out an execution on their behalf, especially on someone they themselves found innocent of violating any Roman law. In short, this was a local religious matter, not a Roman state matter, so Pilate washed his hands of it. For some reason, people think this means he was simply declaring himself clear of Jesus' innocent blood while then proceeding to execute Him. But Pilate's own words show exactly who carried out the execution. Addressing the Jewish leaders and angry Jewish crowd after declaring Jesus innocent, he said, "See to it yourselves." In other words, he told the Jewish leaders and crowd, if you want him dead, then you'll have to do it. Furthermore, in Mark 14-15 (which is our oldest gospel) the scriptures state that Pilate "handed him over to be crucified." He handed--delivered to, surrendered--Jesus over to be crucified. To whom? Who did Pilate surrender Jesus to, to be crucified? To the Jews demanding it, so that they could carry out their own law and penalty. And they did. John 19:16 makes it even more clear that Pilate handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. Mark also tells us who beat and mocked Jesus - it was the same Jewish Chief priests and their officers that arrested Jesus. When Matthew calls them the "governor's soldiers" it is an interpolation, a creative altering, and is not found in the earlier gospel of Mark. They were the Sanhedrin's own soldiers.
Many people don't realize the Chief Priests and Jewish leaders had their own soldiers and guards, like a police force. How else do you think they arrested Jesus? And it is these soldiers to whom Pilate hands Jesus over to for crucifixion, and who mock him, beat him, and cast lots for his clothes. All of this is attested to in Mark, our earliest gospel. Roman soldiers were merely present to maintain order as always, but the execution itself was carried out by the Jewish authorities, their soldiers, and the Jewish crowd who wanted Jesus dead. So this idea that the responsibility for Jesus' execution rested upon Roman authority is complete bunk. Pilate's wife warned him not to condemn Jesus, Pilate found no guilt in Jesus and no violation of Roman law, Romans did not carry out executions for violations of Jewish religious law, and Rome simply would not care enough about a religious sectarian dispute to intervene. But they would hand the accused back over to the Jewish authorities so that they could carry out their own law and punishment. And that's exactly what happened as attested in the Gospels. I will give Borg credit however, because he does acknowledge that the Jewish ruling elites shared some responsibility. In reality they bear full responsibility. Likewise, Borg's attempt to suggest the average Jewish people jeering and demanding Jesus' death weren't also responsible, makes no sense either. If one understands that the majority of the Jews in Judea at the time were descendants of Edom (Idumaeans), ergo descendants of Esau, while Jesus was a descendant of Israelites, ergo descendant of Jacob, it will make sense why they hated him because scripture indicates that Esau (as a people) will carry a grudge against Jacob (as a people) for all generations because Jacob received Esau's blessing.
Moving on ...
When you get to chapter five, you'll find Borg's strongest chapter. His perspective on the Heart of Spirituality is well written and makes a lot of sense. That's followed by the chapter titled the Politics of Compassion. I found this mostly sensible and relatable, however, I sense a slight Foucauldian influence that I think skews some of the conclusions in the wrong direction. But overall, it isn't bad info to chew on. The final chapter discusses both the perceptions of salvation and what we may mean when we talk of salvation. This was a decent chapter and I actually wish that it were twice the length it is. There was some missed opportunity here to flesh out some concepts and interpretations more deeply. All in all, a pretty good chapter though. My overall impression of the book is that is was a good read, but not something that wowed me. It was a decent summary view in some respects, but sometimes the parts that I disagreed with felt left unchallenged in the book. But a nice little book nonetheless, that will at least prompt some thinking about the topics, and encourage some deeper digging.
When Borg is describing the various ways of imaging God, namely in describing and comparing the Monarchical and Spirit models of God, I think he's definitely letting his experience and some bias through. As one brought up in the Baptist tradition then moving into the nondenominational evangelical tradition, I don't recognize some of the features of the models he describes. And at other times I find he has placed characteristics as distinctly in one or the other model as opposites, when in fact they typically span across both models in an significant overlap. This is because there isn't really as much between the two models that is actually at odds, and many--if not most--believers, have no issue reconciling the two models into a coherent unified model of God.
I also find his use of "God as lover" and God as female or feminine, to be problematic. He seems to be taking liberties with scriptures without consideration for the metaphorical and idiomatic nature of their use in context. It is overwhelming demonstrable that in the Bible, God is strictly masculine, even if some attributes of, not God Himself but of the divine broadly, are feminine, such as Wisdom (Sofia). God gives His imaging right from the beginning. He created *man* is His image, according to His likeness. Man, or more specifically Adam, was created in God's image, Eve was not, but was rather created *from* man. To be created in God's image according to His likeness, literally means to be modeled upon the likeness and appearance of God, as an approximate copy of His likeness. Ergo, since Adam was male and masculine, therefore being in the very image/likeness of God, God also is male and masculine. Of course, part of the problem with Borg's perspective here, is that he admittedly is a fan of Feminist Theology, considering it one of the most important theological developments of his time. However, Feminist Theology is little more than a subversive movement started in the 1960s, rooted in both Marxist Frankfort School ideology and Critical Theory, that seeks to undermine the majority of Christian scriptures, manipulating, changing and ignoring that which doesn't fit the goals of the Feminist Theology movement. It's purpose is the subversive deconstruction of anything patriarchal (which it considers innately "wrong") within Christendom, the blurring of traditional family structure, and of course, a re-imaging of God that favors (or is) the feminine. Honestly, Borg's embrace of Feminist Theology probably poisons the entire book a bit, because the fact he considers it so important and pivotal, means it inevitably colors his perspective across his entire conceptual framework of God and how to think about God. So that's something to consider.
One other criticism I have is when Borg is discussing Jesus. Now, I realize Borg is a Jesus scholar and I am not, however, I see this mistake so often that I have to address it. When he begins discussing what he calls the "Pre-Easter Jesus," that being the man Jesus who walked, taught, and lived prior to His death, he gets into the "Jesus was deeply Jewish" canard. Why do I call this a canard? Because we have to understand what being Jewish meant in the 1st century. It must be understood that Judaism always has, and always will be a syncretic pagan religion. Most people think of Judaism as the religion of the Hebrews/Israelites, involving Torah observance, the priesthood, and the Holy days. But Judaism did not exist in the time of the Torah establishment, and was not, and is not, the original religion of the Hebrews/Israelites. Judaism was developed during the time of the Babylonian captivity. It was then that the captive Israelites began incorporating the Babylonian mysteries into the Torah based system they inherited. They began the early development of Gematria (based on the Milesian system), the early foundations of Kabbalah magic and mysticism, and started adopting the beliefs, rituals, legalism, and even the language of the Babylonian mystery religions. This is when they first adopted the so-called Babylonian Hebrew alphabet, which was merely the Imperial Aramaic alphabet that was used in Babylon. They abandoned their original Paleo-Hebrew script. They then "rediscovered" some ancient texts and re-wrote the ones they had into the new Babylonian Hebrew script, which was eventually passed down to us in the surviving manuscripts. Thus, from this syncretism of Babylonian religion and mysticism, adoption of the new (to them) Babylonian Hebrew script alphabet, and re-writing the texts with the developing magical Gematria in mind, mixed with old Torah traditions and teachings, the religion of Judaism was born; it was a new religion that the captive and idolatrous Israelites developed. This new religion of Judaism was primarily found in the priesthood of the tribes from the southern kingdom of Judah, hence the name, Juda-ism.
Evidence shows the new syncretic religion of Judaism largely remained a Judahite phenomenon, with very little adoption by the tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel. After the captivity, the 10 northern tribes migrated north into southern Europe and southwest Asia, then headed westward according to contemporary historians and written accounts, settling in areas like Galatia, Corinth, Rome, and up through Gaul and beyond. The southern kingdom tribes however, namely that of Judah and Benjamin, largely stayed within the levant region, settling in Judea, Samaria, and other nearby areas. Between the time of the end of the captivity and the 1st century, there was a large influx of non-Israelite Canaanites and Idumaeans (Edomites) into Judea, most of them having converted to Judaism by force thanks to the Hasmonean dynasty. In fact, by the time of the 1st century, the majority of the Judahites (Judeans aka Jews) in the Judean sphere, as well as the Pharisee and Sadducee orders, were actually of Idumaean descent and not from the Israelite stock of the tribe of Judah. The Idumaean King, Herod the Great, ruled over them, the religion of Judaism reigned, and the Jewish Sanhedrin was a largely Idumaean Jewish governing body.
The previous two paragraphs are to lay the foundation for this: Jesus was an Israelite via the tribe of Judah (some scholars say Levi), but he was not actually Jewish at all. In fact, over and over again He rails against and curses the Jewish leaders, people, and practices. Him not being Jewish, condemning and spurning that pagan syncretic religion of Judaism and its traditions of men, is precisely why the Jewish leaders kept accusing Him of heresy and blasphemy and seeking to have Him punished. He followed the Torah and not the traditions Judaism added from Babylonian mysticism, and He was calling out the followers of Judaism and the Jewish practices as evil and demanding they repent from their ways. And keep in mind, he only did that because of the remnant of Judah that was still there, as he came only to go to the lost sheep of Israel, not to the non-Israelite Idumaeans that made up the majority of Judea's Jewish population at that time. Unfortunately, because many people these days do not understand syncretism, they believe that since the Jews of the city celebrated the Holy days and festivals, that surely they must have been practicing the Godly religion of their ancient forefathers. But that's just how syncretism works. It's bits and pieces of different religions, rituals, and traditions, mashed together. The Jewish leaders still ordered the observance of Holy days, Sabbath days, etc, but they also utilized the mysticism and traditions passed down from the adoption of the Babylonian mysteries during the captivity in the form of Judaism. And Jesus was far from "deeply Jewish" as Borg claims - He was virulently anti-Jewish (as in, anti-Judaism). Sure, He was Torah observant, because that was the religion as proscribed by God to the ancient Hebrews. But He was a crusader against the relatively new Jewish syncretic religion of Judaism and its man-made traditions. Is it any wonder the Jews wanted to kill him?
Lastly, I just wanted to briefly mention that Borg also espouses the erroneous view that the "responsibility for His execution rests with Roman authority." (p.89) The execution of Jesus has long been erroneously attributed to mean-old Roman soldiers, but in fact, it was the Jewish authorities that carried out the execution. In Matthew 27:24, we see that Pilot washes his hands of the situation, declaring Jesus innocent. Jesus had broken no Roman law, and we have numerous historical documents attesting that, per Roman law, they absolutely would not carry out the execution of someone they found to be innocent. Being that Jesus had only "violated" the religious law of Jewish authorities, Rome could not carry out an execution on their behalf, especially on someone they themselves found innocent of violating any Roman law. In short, this was a local religious matter, not a Roman state matter, so Pilate washed his hands of it. For some reason, people think this means he was simply declaring himself clear of Jesus' innocent blood while then proceeding to execute Him. But Pilate's own words show exactly who carried out the execution. Addressing the Jewish leaders and angry Jewish crowd after declaring Jesus innocent, he said, "See to it yourselves." In other words, he told the Jewish leaders and crowd, if you want him dead, then you'll have to do it. Furthermore, in Mark 14-15 (which is our oldest gospel) the scriptures state that Pilate "handed him over to be crucified." He handed--delivered to, surrendered--Jesus over to be crucified. To whom? Who did Pilate surrender Jesus to, to be crucified? To the Jews demanding it, so that they could carry out their own law and penalty. And they did. John 19:16 makes it even more clear that Pilate handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. Mark also tells us who beat and mocked Jesus - it was the same Jewish Chief priests and their officers that arrested Jesus. When Matthew calls them the "governor's soldiers" it is an interpolation, a creative altering, and is not found in the earlier gospel of Mark. They were the Sanhedrin's own soldiers.
Many people don't realize the Chief Priests and Jewish leaders had their own soldiers and guards, like a police force. How else do you think they arrested Jesus? And it is these soldiers to whom Pilate hands Jesus over to for crucifixion, and who mock him, beat him, and cast lots for his clothes. All of this is attested to in Mark, our earliest gospel. Roman soldiers were merely present to maintain order as always, but the execution itself was carried out by the Jewish authorities, their soldiers, and the Jewish crowd who wanted Jesus dead. So this idea that the responsibility for Jesus' execution rested upon Roman authority is complete bunk. Pilate's wife warned him not to condemn Jesus, Pilate found no guilt in Jesus and no violation of Roman law, Romans did not carry out executions for violations of Jewish religious law, and Rome simply would not care enough about a religious sectarian dispute to intervene. But they would hand the accused back over to the Jewish authorities so that they could carry out their own law and punishment. And that's exactly what happened as attested in the Gospels. I will give Borg credit however, because he does acknowledge that the Jewish ruling elites shared some responsibility. In reality they bear full responsibility. Likewise, Borg's attempt to suggest the average Jewish people jeering and demanding Jesus' death weren't also responsible, makes no sense either. If one understands that the majority of the Jews in Judea at the time were descendants of Edom (Idumaeans), ergo descendants of Esau, while Jesus was a descendant of Israelites, ergo descendant of Jacob, it will make sense why they hated him because scripture indicates that Esau (as a people) will carry a grudge against Jacob (as a people) for all generations because Jacob received Esau's blessing.
Moving on ...
When you get to chapter five, you'll find Borg's strongest chapter. His perspective on the Heart of Spirituality is well written and makes a lot of sense. That's followed by the chapter titled the Politics of Compassion. I found this mostly sensible and relatable, however, I sense a slight Foucauldian influence that I think skews some of the conclusions in the wrong direction. But overall, it isn't bad info to chew on. The final chapter discusses both the perceptions of salvation and what we may mean when we talk of salvation. This was a decent chapter and I actually wish that it were twice the length it is. There was some missed opportunity here to flesh out some concepts and interpretations more deeply. All in all, a pretty good chapter though. My overall impression of the book is that is was a good read, but not something that wowed me. It was a decent summary view in some respects, but sometimes the parts that I disagreed with felt left unchallenged in the book. But a nice little book nonetheless, that will at least prompt some thinking about the topics, and encourage some deeper digging.
October 20, 2014
I'm grateful that someone recommended this book to me. I've been reading the Bible as The Message Remix translation the past year or so, and so much of what I've read just didn't fit with the traditional theology I'd been taught, nor did that theology fit with the world I saw around me. The God We Never Knew introduced me to entirely new ways of thinking about God and about Jesus that made far more sense to me than anything I'd previously been taught.
Using Scripture along with a historical perspective of its writing, Borg shows the problems with some ways of thinking that have become entrenched in Christianity, such as God as a king who is "out there" being lawmaker and judge, as opposed to being in close relationship with us. He talks about the wide variety of ways that people throughout time have experienced God, and how we as Christians have narrowed these down so that spoken and written words within the Christian tradition are seen with the most legitimacy. He presents a case for how faith should inform our politics, not as a way of enshrining Christian morals in the law but as a way of creating a more just system that leads us toward the "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke about. Borg also presents a compelling argument for salvation as something experienced here and now rather than something primarily concerned with the afterlife, ending with a brief discussion of the many questions surrounding the afterlife and how he does not think answering those questions is necessary for our current understanding of faith and relationship with God.
There are a few parts where he went too fast for me, saying one thing and then "thus" another thing that I didn't think necessarily followed. I'm not sure this book will convince any Christians who are strongly committed to a legalistic, individualistic, afterlife-focused faith. But for those who have rejected such a faith but haven't had their own beliefs clearly articulated, and perhaps for some who have rejected the idea of God altogether because of the way faith is generally presented, this book is a fantastic resource. I highly recommend it.
Using Scripture along with a historical perspective of its writing, Borg shows the problems with some ways of thinking that have become entrenched in Christianity, such as God as a king who is "out there" being lawmaker and judge, as opposed to being in close relationship with us. He talks about the wide variety of ways that people throughout time have experienced God, and how we as Christians have narrowed these down so that spoken and written words within the Christian tradition are seen with the most legitimacy. He presents a case for how faith should inform our politics, not as a way of enshrining Christian morals in the law but as a way of creating a more just system that leads us toward the "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke about. Borg also presents a compelling argument for salvation as something experienced here and now rather than something primarily concerned with the afterlife, ending with a brief discussion of the many questions surrounding the afterlife and how he does not think answering those questions is necessary for our current understanding of faith and relationship with God.
There are a few parts where he went too fast for me, saying one thing and then "thus" another thing that I didn't think necessarily followed. I'm not sure this book will convince any Christians who are strongly committed to a legalistic, individualistic, afterlife-focused faith. But for those who have rejected such a faith but haven't had their own beliefs clearly articulated, and perhaps for some who have rejected the idea of God altogether because of the way faith is generally presented, this book is a fantastic resource. I highly recommend it.
July 25, 2016
By and large, I found this to be a nice approach to dogmatism. I feel like being averse to dogmatism is often one of those things we tend to say without necessarily internalizing or applying it. "Yeah. I've been trying to move away from all the biblical rules and have a deeper relationship with Christ..." as "yeah, I'm going to try and drop a few pounds next year..." It feels more authentic and meaningful coming from Borg.
I did take a slight issue with some of Borg's statements, although even there I tend to be mostly in agreement. One that stuck out was his belief that orthodox Christologies are docetic merely in considering a "pre-Easter" divinity of Jesus. His argument seems to center on an assumption that the disciples/early Christians simply over-exalted their human teacher; I find that quite difficult to reconcile without putting scripture itself into question (leaving us with what?) as well as a bad understanding of docetism. I stand by him in thinking Jesus' humanity is way too ignored, creating the image of an "out there" god, but I find Borg's Christology and panentheism overcompensate too much in the opposite direction.
Also didn't fully agree with his belief that sin/guilt are a superego complex and Christians should abandon such ideas beyond a simple mode of interpersonal relationships. Again, I think Borg is issuing a challenge to a real problem in faith and overshooting the mark. A proper faith should move us away from guilt obsession, yes; but, that does not make repentence necessarily pathological. As parents will be loving and devoted to their children no matter how they act, it's not the same to say children should feel indiffernt whether they act good or bad.
I did take a slight issue with some of Borg's statements, although even there I tend to be mostly in agreement. One that stuck out was his belief that orthodox Christologies are docetic merely in considering a "pre-Easter" divinity of Jesus. His argument seems to center on an assumption that the disciples/early Christians simply over-exalted their human teacher; I find that quite difficult to reconcile without putting scripture itself into question (leaving us with what?) as well as a bad understanding of docetism. I stand by him in thinking Jesus' humanity is way too ignored, creating the image of an "out there" god, but I find Borg's Christology and panentheism overcompensate too much in the opposite direction.
Also didn't fully agree with his belief that sin/guilt are a superego complex and Christians should abandon such ideas beyond a simple mode of interpersonal relationships. Again, I think Borg is issuing a challenge to a real problem in faith and overshooting the mark. A proper faith should move us away from guilt obsession, yes; but, that does not make repentence necessarily pathological. As parents will be loving and devoted to their children no matter how they act, it's not the same to say children should feel indiffernt whether they act good or bad.
May 23, 2013
Borg presents a God all would hope for (which is why we never knew him), but his vision simply wishes the terrible, vindictive, jealous, genocidal, and even infantile God portrayed in many books of the Old Testament away. Like all apologists, his vision of Jehovah does not include the blood thirsty tribal deity of the 1st 5 books of the Bible. There is much to wish for in Borg's portrayal, but one cannot take all of the good and positive traits of something and say the other traits are simply the wishes of a small tribe for a warrior God who destroys all of its enemies. If you do this, you are not following an existing religion created by an individual (Jesus) who believed that God actually acted as described in the Old Testament. You are creating a new religion and a new God. I have no problem with this, my only stand is that, if one does this, one must admit that their religion is a new one built on pieces of the old religion.
November 2, 2012
This book updates Paul Tillich for the twenty-first century. Borg speaks comprehensively to those who are attracted by religion, especially Christianity, but who don't know how to participate while maintaining their integrity. Borg uses Tillich's updating of traditional Christian terms in a sweeping way, showing how his "new" understanding of God impacts all areas of the Christian life, ending with some thoughts on the afterlife. I bought his The Heart of Christianity at a used book sale this week and that looks to be a more in-depth digestion of some of the ideas here.
November 24, 2019
This book was read for a group discussion. I've always been skeptical about Christianity but Borg posits a Christianity closer to the core beliefs of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, etc. etc. In other words, you don't have to believe in a King of Heaven or the so-called miracles or even in the resurrection to accept Christianity on its most basic level. I found myself surprised by Borg's POV and much more accepting of the practices of religion in general and Christianity in particular while remaining an atheist.
July 31, 2018
Difficult reading but thought-provoking and inspiring. Borg explores biblical text, Jesus, and God in historical context. One of the better quotes from Borg is "I am agnostic about the details of an afterlife. I can't imagine knowing the answers to these questions, and choosing to believe one way or the other has nothing to do with how things might really be. We cannot solve not-knowing by believing."
October 13, 2021
Fantastic book for those interested in building a personal faith grounded in history and scholarship. In Borg's faith you do not have to turn off your power of reasoning. You do have to accept that the Bible is library of books written by men (not God) and that those books reflect different perspectives and audiences. And also that the Bible versions we have today are riddled with errors due to how they were copied and translated.
November 23, 2020
It had been decades since I read this book, and I wish I'd re-read it sooner. It is quite simply Marcus Borg at his best. And the book is compellingly needed for our times. It is written with clarity, balance, and erudition, from a man who was able to combine experience, heart, and mind in his own life. It needs to be widely read.
December 19, 2021
This book made so many things suddenly make sense to me. Marcus Borg explains the biblical context that aligns with my desire for social justice and love that is in great contrast to so many religious teachings. If you are a progressive Christian or just want a more loving approach to the bible and God, read this book.
January 6, 2024
Along with his books Speaking Christian and Convictions, this earlier work of his is one of my favourites. I couldn't put it down. Borg offers a compelling argument on what it means to believe in God and be a Christian in contemporary times.
July 6, 2019
Great book
This book helps me put a lot of my personal struggles with Faith into words. It offers a lot of spiritual and theological insight.
This book helps me put a lot of my personal struggles with Faith into words. It offers a lot of spiritual and theological insight.
May 16, 2021
This was an absolutely wonderful book. Borg discusses many issues within dogmatic religion (particularly Christianity, but also touching on other faiths) and, as the title suggests, how to move beyond these.
The most poignant message of the book is the belief of panentheism, defined very eloquently by Borg within the book, and less eloquently by myself as “God is everything, and more than everything”.
However, Borg then goes on to completely redefine “God” in opposition to the “God” one who has grown up in a Christian faith might have “met the first time”. Through this he deconstructs the “monarchical model” (implications that God is distant, male, lawgiver/judge) and transforms it into a “spirit model” (implication that God is nonanthropomorphic, mother, intimate father, Wisdom, lover, companion).
I also found Borg’s interpretation of collective and individual practices, again mainly focusing on a Christian perspective but occasionally branching out into other major world religions, very intriguing.
In this short book, Borg is touching on something I have never seen put into words before, and I am very interested in reading anything similar to this (recommendations welcome!)
I have only rated it as 4 stars rather than 5 as I found the style of keeping the footnotes at the end of the chapter, rather than in the footer, rather distracting for the first half on the book, and in order to actually get the book finished rather than get bogged down in the foot notes had to decide to ignore them altogether.
I will definitely be giving this book a second read, this time with a pen & pencil to make notes!
The most poignant message of the book is the belief of panentheism, defined very eloquently by Borg within the book, and less eloquently by myself as “God is everything, and more than everything”.
However, Borg then goes on to completely redefine “God” in opposition to the “God” one who has grown up in a Christian faith might have “met the first time”. Through this he deconstructs the “monarchical model” (implications that God is distant, male, lawgiver/judge) and transforms it into a “spirit model” (implication that God is nonanthropomorphic, mother, intimate father, Wisdom, lover, companion).
I also found Borg’s interpretation of collective and individual practices, again mainly focusing on a Christian perspective but occasionally branching out into other major world religions, very intriguing.
In this short book, Borg is touching on something I have never seen put into words before, and I am very interested in reading anything similar to this (recommendations welcome!)
I have only rated it as 4 stars rather than 5 as I found the style of keeping the footnotes at the end of the chapter, rather than in the footer, rather distracting for the first half on the book, and in order to actually get the book finished rather than get bogged down in the foot notes had to decide to ignore them altogether.
I will definitely be giving this book a second read, this time with a pen & pencil to make notes!
July 13, 2024
This is quite possibly my favorite of Marcus Borg’s books that I have read. Borg was a contemporary progressive Christian scholar, an ordained Episcopal minister, and university professor. I’ve read quite a few books on theology written for lay persons by several authors. This was by far the clearest easiest to understand nearly completely devoid of the technical language of theology and philosophy which has me searching through the dictionary finding definitions that often only make meaning more obscure. I also appreciated that he was even handed, I thought, in comparing and contrasting the two dominate Christian understandings and ways of thinking about God. He is clear about his preference, of course. His arguments are Biblically based avoiding or disguising the often tedious convoluted philosophical arguments that dominate theological discourse. I found it very helpful in understanding the thinking of this way of understanding the Devine. I also think a conservative Christian curious about how and why a liberal Christian thinks the way they do would understand his explanation without feeling criticized or attacked. Such a one would likely not agree, but they may find more common ground than they might have suspected existed. My one disappointment was what I thought was his very brief, inadequate explanation of how and why his progressive view persistently retained the language of personification when it rejects the understanding of God as a Devine person/being.
January 20, 2013
I bought the book, but had been avoiding it for fear of being irritated at all the Christian theology. But I haven’t been at all. There have only been one or two times in this book where I’ve rolled my eyes internally.
No, this author gets it. He knows the point of faith, and that it has nothing to do with the afterlife. Sure, I find it a little annoying that he states that he uses the terms “God,” “Spirit” and “the Divine” interchageably, but the Christianity he proposes solves many of the same problems with traditional Christianity and Christian culture that made me leave it in the first place. Plus, he’s working from the same kind of place I am as a pseudo-reconstructionist. He really knows the history of the Bible, and has studied what the words would have meant at the time they were written. And sometimes they mean very different things than the meaning generally given them in modern times. Those other meanings clarify Christian theology and his knowledge of history gives him the space to really find God, the way that I think knowing of the history of the Heathen faith clarifies and allows for my worship of Freyja.
I even found a few chapters very thought-provoking when viewed from the lens of a pagan.
Christianity as Superego
One of the problems he sees with mainstream Christianity is its complicated relationship to the superego. Because of all the focus on sin, the religion actively reinforces the superego of its followers, who are then seeking a closer relationship with the religion in order to escape their overactive superegos.
This reminded me of my days as a Christian, when I had (I still do) a quite overactive superego. I was afraid of doing anything against the rules, going so far as to basically make up nonexistent rules that I was afraid of breaking. And I remember that snake of the superego leaving me the moment I decided to convert.
I still don’t want to break rules, but I’m much more reasonable about it now.
In any case, I was thinking about how wonderful paganism is in that it has helped me becomes friends with my id. Most of the people in this culture are too enculturated, we are all too big of friends with our egos and superegos, interested in what we can do or have and what we should or shouldn’t do or have. But in pagan rituals, I take a step back from all that and just be in the animal part of my brain, my ego, utterly at awe and surrendered to the flesh and the gods and the cosmos. And that tempers the ego and the superego that act so much of the time, and that balances me out and makes me much happier.
Images Relating to Values
One of the sections in this book talks about the different metaphors or images of God that have been written about throughout the centuries. He explores God as king, as lover, as rock, as mother, as wisdom, as journey companion, as father. And the he makes a very good point–the values of a Christian are directly related to his or her image of God. “For the monarchical model, sin is primarily disloyalty to the king, seen especially as disobedience to the laws…For the metaphor of God as lover, sin is unfaithfulness–that is, sin is going after other lovers. This is a classic image for idolatry…For the metaphor of God as the compassionate one who cares for all her children, sin is failure in compassion” (Borg 77-78).
That got me thinking about how my images of the divine (that being, multiple deities but primarily Freyja) influence what I think of as right action and ideas. Polytheism (that there are multiple deities with multiple ideas about the world) shows me that there is no ultimate truth and that everything is viewed from different lenses. Thor and Odin will take very different approaches to an encounter with a giant, but neither is wrong. And neither is morality so specific. But, given my image of the divine as being primarily Freyja, as she who I am closest to, I think that my ideas about values have a specific lens. For me, shunning beauty would be bad, though for many ascentics it is the correct thing to do. I want to fully enjoy life and sex, and I want to learn magic. I want to spread beauty wherever I go. That is what I learn from Freyja.
God(s) as doing, leading, or giving examples
I thought about the different relationships people have to gods while he was quoting a psalm that says “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” This suggests to me a relationship with God wherein God in doing your life for you. All spirituality is acted within the person through the actions of god, leaving the worshiper to be a pawn. I don’t like this model of relationship to the divine. It’s not a real relationship. There is no free will, no give and take, no gifts in exchange for gifts. It is simply as if God is living millions of lives simultaneously instead of anyone living their own.
Then I thought about other relationships to the divine, and I think the other two primary ones are leading and giving example. Many Christians I know follow by example–the WWJD bracelets everyone had when I was a kid are a good example of that. They look to how their god lived and follow that example. Some heathens do that, but not many, I think. I certainly look to Freyja for inspiration, but wouldn’t exactly say I live my life by her example. I don’t have multiple sex partners, for one thing.
My relationship to Freyja, and the one I perceive most pagans as having, is the gods leading us in our lives. They give us hints about where to go, but it is ultimately us doing the living and making the choices.
To finish, I’m just going to say that I’ve enjoyed reading this book. I feel much more at ease with Christian theology after understanding where it came from. I think the theology in this book answers many of the same questions pagans have, and therefore sheds some light onto what kinds of questions we’re asking. And it’s always fun to read a book by a person with a relationship with a god who really gets it. His chapter on mysticism was particularly helpful in that regard–a reminder that sacred story and reenacting and dancing (ok, maybe he doesn’t really talk about dancing) are a way to the gods, and that any tradition can get you there.
No, this author gets it. He knows the point of faith, and that it has nothing to do with the afterlife. Sure, I find it a little annoying that he states that he uses the terms “God,” “Spirit” and “the Divine” interchageably, but the Christianity he proposes solves many of the same problems with traditional Christianity and Christian culture that made me leave it in the first place. Plus, he’s working from the same kind of place I am as a pseudo-reconstructionist. He really knows the history of the Bible, and has studied what the words would have meant at the time they were written. And sometimes they mean very different things than the meaning generally given them in modern times. Those other meanings clarify Christian theology and his knowledge of history gives him the space to really find God, the way that I think knowing of the history of the Heathen faith clarifies and allows for my worship of Freyja.
I even found a few chapters very thought-provoking when viewed from the lens of a pagan.
Christianity as Superego
One of the problems he sees with mainstream Christianity is its complicated relationship to the superego. Because of all the focus on sin, the religion actively reinforces the superego of its followers, who are then seeking a closer relationship with the religion in order to escape their overactive superegos.
This reminded me of my days as a Christian, when I had (I still do) a quite overactive superego. I was afraid of doing anything against the rules, going so far as to basically make up nonexistent rules that I was afraid of breaking. And I remember that snake of the superego leaving me the moment I decided to convert.
I still don’t want to break rules, but I’m much more reasonable about it now.
In any case, I was thinking about how wonderful paganism is in that it has helped me becomes friends with my id. Most of the people in this culture are too enculturated, we are all too big of friends with our egos and superegos, interested in what we can do or have and what we should or shouldn’t do or have. But in pagan rituals, I take a step back from all that and just be in the animal part of my brain, my ego, utterly at awe and surrendered to the flesh and the gods and the cosmos. And that tempers the ego and the superego that act so much of the time, and that balances me out and makes me much happier.
Images Relating to Values
One of the sections in this book talks about the different metaphors or images of God that have been written about throughout the centuries. He explores God as king, as lover, as rock, as mother, as wisdom, as journey companion, as father. And the he makes a very good point–the values of a Christian are directly related to his or her image of God. “For the monarchical model, sin is primarily disloyalty to the king, seen especially as disobedience to the laws…For the metaphor of God as lover, sin is unfaithfulness–that is, sin is going after other lovers. This is a classic image for idolatry…For the metaphor of God as the compassionate one who cares for all her children, sin is failure in compassion” (Borg 77-78).
That got me thinking about how my images of the divine (that being, multiple deities but primarily Freyja) influence what I think of as right action and ideas. Polytheism (that there are multiple deities with multiple ideas about the world) shows me that there is no ultimate truth and that everything is viewed from different lenses. Thor and Odin will take very different approaches to an encounter with a giant, but neither is wrong. And neither is morality so specific. But, given my image of the divine as being primarily Freyja, as she who I am closest to, I think that my ideas about values have a specific lens. For me, shunning beauty would be bad, though for many ascentics it is the correct thing to do. I want to fully enjoy life and sex, and I want to learn magic. I want to spread beauty wherever I go. That is what I learn from Freyja.
God(s) as doing, leading, or giving examples
I thought about the different relationships people have to gods while he was quoting a psalm that says “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” This suggests to me a relationship with God wherein God in doing your life for you. All spirituality is acted within the person through the actions of god, leaving the worshiper to be a pawn. I don’t like this model of relationship to the divine. It’s not a real relationship. There is no free will, no give and take, no gifts in exchange for gifts. It is simply as if God is living millions of lives simultaneously instead of anyone living their own.
Then I thought about other relationships to the divine, and I think the other two primary ones are leading and giving example. Many Christians I know follow by example–the WWJD bracelets everyone had when I was a kid are a good example of that. They look to how their god lived and follow that example. Some heathens do that, but not many, I think. I certainly look to Freyja for inspiration, but wouldn’t exactly say I live my life by her example. I don’t have multiple sex partners, for one thing.
My relationship to Freyja, and the one I perceive most pagans as having, is the gods leading us in our lives. They give us hints about where to go, but it is ultimately us doing the living and making the choices.
To finish, I’m just going to say that I’ve enjoyed reading this book. I feel much more at ease with Christian theology after understanding where it came from. I think the theology in this book answers many of the same questions pagans have, and therefore sheds some light onto what kinds of questions we’re asking. And it’s always fun to read a book by a person with a relationship with a god who really gets it. His chapter on mysticism was particularly helpful in that regard–a reminder that sacred story and reenacting and dancing (ok, maybe he doesn’t really talk about dancing) are a way to the gods, and that any tradition can get you there.
February 6, 2022
I found this to be a worthy, challenging, and interesting book. It isn’t long (175 pages) but it took me some time to read, as each page was dense with thoughts I needed to process. Written to a popular audience, so not difficult reading for the non-expert (me), but it is thick with thought. Essentially, Borg asserts that Americans grew up with a God who is “out there.” Our language is replete with language of God being elsewhere, looking down on us or occasionally checking in on us with sufficient prayer. Instead, Borg presents God as “panentheism,” as being here and everywhere and in everything, acknowledging God as immanent and transcendent. (NOT “pantheism”, which is that everything is God; panenthism is that God is in everything). He goes on to discuss how we imagine God, the image of God, for many of us (most of us?) the “finger-wagging” God of his youth. One of the more interesting chapters to me focuses on Jesus “pre-Easter” being different than Jesus “post-Easter,” (pre-crucifixion/post-resurrection) a concept I’d never given any thought to. A book chuck-full of thoughts I’d not previously considered.
June 24, 2024
I had a mixed reaction to this book by Progressive Biblical scholar, professor and author Marcus Borg. The early chapters dealt with his early views of God, Jesus and the Bible, and how they changed over time. I found these chapters very interesting and somewhat parallel to my journey. However, as the book progresses, he gets much more philosophical. His attempts to explain his views and understanding of God become much more difficult to understand and grasp. I read and re-read many paragraphs and chapters in hopes of gaining a better understanding of his concepts. I am fairly certain that I still do not fully understand his ideas.
March 17, 2015
Marcus Borg is a distinguished scholar, and author of many books on the historical Jesus. His best writing, however, is saved for teaching lay readers his conception of God. This book in particular is very personal for him. “The story of my own Christian and spiritual journey thus involves the movement from supernatural theism through doubt and disbelief to panentheism. The God I have met as an adult is the God I never knew growing up in the church.” (12) John Robinson strongly influenced Borg. He “argued for an alternative way of thinking about God, which he as a Christian and bishop affirmed: rather than God being “out there” in the heights, God is known in the depths of personal experience.” (24) Borg affirms a way of thinking about God called panentheism. “Supernatural theism emphasizes only God’s transcendence and essentially denies the immanence of God. God is other than the world and separate from the world. God is ‘out there’ and not here. Panentheism affirms both the transcendence and immanence of God. It does not deny or subordinate one in order to affirm the other. For panentheism, God is both more than the universe and yet everywhere present in the universe.” (26)
Borg sees the central message of Jesus as one of radical compassion and the teaching of the very real presence of the kingdom of God. He shows how this thinking actually originated in the Old Testament. “Though the author of the book of Job uses the language of seeing rather than knowing, he clearly speaks of direct experience of God rather than beliefs about God. In the climactic exchange between God and Job at the close of the book, Job says, ‘I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.’ The New Testament also speaks of knowing God. The author of John’s gospel wrote, ‘This is eternal life: to know God.’ According to the verse, eternal life is a present reality, not simply a future one, and the content of eternal life is the experience of knowing God in the present. If God can be ‘seen’ and ‘known,’ then God is accessible to human experience and cannot simply be transcendent but must also be thought of as here.” (36)
Borg goes on to describe the experience of the presence of God. “One of the finest conceptual expressions of how the sacred is experienced in the everyday is Martin Buber’s description of I-It and I-You ways of being in his famous book I and Thou. Buber argues that we as humans have two fundamentally different ways of being in relationship to the world (by which he means the totality of things, including nature, culture, and persons): the way of I-It and the way of I-You.” (41) “Martin Buber’s understanding of the origin of the divine name Yahweh is suggestive. Buber argues that it originated in an exclamation drawn forth by ecstatic religious experience and means roughly, ‘O the One!’ The most sacred name of God is an exclamation uttered in a moment of religious ecstasy. God cannot be named, only exclaimed.” (48)
“Joy is central to an ecstatic experience that the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had over three hundred years ago:
In the year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November…from about half-past ten in the evening till about half an hour after midnight:
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Emotion. Joy…Joy! Joy! Joy! Tears of Joy…My God…let me not be separated from thee for ever.
Pascal carried this description of his experience under a drawing of a blazing cross with him the rest of his life, perhaps suggesting that what he had seen was a cross that (like Moses’ experience at the bush) burned without being consumed. The description was found on his body when he died.” (44)
Finally, Borg warns us against the impacts of different conceptions of God. “The monarchical model of God commonly reinforces the superego. The internal dynamics of the model and the superego are the same: the superego functions in our minds as a little king, an internal lawgiver and judge. It is thus easy to confuse the voice of the superego with the voice of God, especially when the voice of the superego has Christian content. God becomes ‘the internalized overseer, the policeman who never sleeps.’ More lightheartedly, it is God imaged as a high school principal unhappily leafing through our records. When this happens, the Christian life becomes confused with life under the punitive superego. We are never good enough.” (66) “People struggle with the internal dynamics generated by this model. It is not a comfortable model. It generates guilt. It may also reinforce guilt that is already present for other reasons. Historically, some Christians have broken through it to an experience of a God of grace behind it. Indeed, for some, intensification of law and guilt to the breaking point has been the means of breaking through. This has been a classic pattern, and because of Martin Luther’s own religious experience, it is the classic Lutheran and more broadly Protestant approach. But the intensification of guilt is a dangerous tiger to ride. It can easily leave one simply feeling sinful and guilty with no release, no breakthrough into a world of grace.” (67)
Overall, this is a wonderful book, and one to which I return to from time to time.
See my other reviews here!
Borg sees the central message of Jesus as one of radical compassion and the teaching of the very real presence of the kingdom of God. He shows how this thinking actually originated in the Old Testament. “Though the author of the book of Job uses the language of seeing rather than knowing, he clearly speaks of direct experience of God rather than beliefs about God. In the climactic exchange between God and Job at the close of the book, Job says, ‘I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.’ The New Testament also speaks of knowing God. The author of John’s gospel wrote, ‘This is eternal life: to know God.’ According to the verse, eternal life is a present reality, not simply a future one, and the content of eternal life is the experience of knowing God in the present. If God can be ‘seen’ and ‘known,’ then God is accessible to human experience and cannot simply be transcendent but must also be thought of as here.” (36)
Borg goes on to describe the experience of the presence of God. “One of the finest conceptual expressions of how the sacred is experienced in the everyday is Martin Buber’s description of I-It and I-You ways of being in his famous book I and Thou. Buber argues that we as humans have two fundamentally different ways of being in relationship to the world (by which he means the totality of things, including nature, culture, and persons): the way of I-It and the way of I-You.” (41) “Martin Buber’s understanding of the origin of the divine name Yahweh is suggestive. Buber argues that it originated in an exclamation drawn forth by ecstatic religious experience and means roughly, ‘O the One!’ The most sacred name of God is an exclamation uttered in a moment of religious ecstasy. God cannot be named, only exclaimed.” (48)
“Joy is central to an ecstatic experience that the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had over three hundred years ago:
In the year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November…from about half-past ten in the evening till about half an hour after midnight:
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Emotion. Joy…Joy! Joy! Joy! Tears of Joy…My God…let me not be separated from thee for ever.
Pascal carried this description of his experience under a drawing of a blazing cross with him the rest of his life, perhaps suggesting that what he had seen was a cross that (like Moses’ experience at the bush) burned without being consumed. The description was found on his body when he died.” (44)
Finally, Borg warns us against the impacts of different conceptions of God. “The monarchical model of God commonly reinforces the superego. The internal dynamics of the model and the superego are the same: the superego functions in our minds as a little king, an internal lawgiver and judge. It is thus easy to confuse the voice of the superego with the voice of God, especially when the voice of the superego has Christian content. God becomes ‘the internalized overseer, the policeman who never sleeps.’ More lightheartedly, it is God imaged as a high school principal unhappily leafing through our records. When this happens, the Christian life becomes confused with life under the punitive superego. We are never good enough.” (66) “People struggle with the internal dynamics generated by this model. It is not a comfortable model. It generates guilt. It may also reinforce guilt that is already present for other reasons. Historically, some Christians have broken through it to an experience of a God of grace behind it. Indeed, for some, intensification of law and guilt to the breaking point has been the means of breaking through. This has been a classic pattern, and because of Martin Luther’s own religious experience, it is the classic Lutheran and more broadly Protestant approach. But the intensification of guilt is a dangerous tiger to ride. It can easily leave one simply feeling sinful and guilty with no release, no breakthrough into a world of grace.” (67)
Overall, this is a wonderful book, and one to which I return to from time to time.
See my other reviews here!
June 1, 2019
Marcus Borg's writing changed my life forever. His book The Heart of Christianity offered a different vision for a Christian ethic of living, and a more generous theology than that which I had received. It is at the base of rebuilding a life in relationship with deity.
This book tells largely the same story as many of Borg's other works for general audiences. I recommend any and all of them, buy he doesn't cover new ground very often.
This book tells largely the same story as many of Borg's other works for general audiences. I recommend any and all of them, buy he doesn't cover new ground very often.
August 21, 2022
I read in the Psych online newsletter an article about religion without beliefs. The concept intrigued me. The source was the subject book. The most significant point that I absorbed from the book was on page 124, as follows: "I cannot believe that God could have stopped the Holocaust but chose not to, just as I cannot believe that God responds to some prayers for healing and protection but not others....I don't think of God as an interventionist."
February 9, 2019
Hardly an exaggeration to say every page brought revelations worth further thought and prayer. Marcus Borg points to a way of belief often sketched in metaphor and human longing. Even when critical of warped traditions, he is respectful of the past because it is the path he himself traveled. One of the best books I ever read! Marcus Borg died recently, be blessed.
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