Quotes from Marcus J. Borg

This book might also be seen as "a Christian primer." A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them. This book's purpose is to help us to read, hear, and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way.

The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)

How we think about God matters. It affects the credibility of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Our concept of God can make God seem real or unreal, just as it can also make God seem remote or near.

Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.

By the time I began college, anxiety about hell had disappeared—not because I was confident that I was "saved," but because the whole package had become sufficiently uncertain that I didn't worry about it.

a worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge—from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more.

The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. To be Christian does not mean believing in Christianity, but a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a metaphor and sacrament of the sacred

Being Christian doesn't mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord.

But "having dominion over" meant something very different from what it has often been understood to mean. It refers to the relationship between shepherd and sheep.

One must die to an old way of being in order to enter a new way of being... salvation is resurrection to a new way of being here and now.

The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

God may or may not be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the cultural context in which we speak about God does change.

Humanity's universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization's drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself.

Indeed, for Christians, the unending conversation about Jesus is the most important conversation there is. He is for us the decisive revelation of God—of what can be seen of God's character and passion in a human life. There are other important conversations. But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most.

For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.

The first phrase affirms "God so loved the world"—not Christians in particular, or the elect, or the church, but the world. God's passion is the world. Christians have often been fearful of loving the world, for they have sometimes confused it with "worldliness." But loving the world doesn't mean getting lost in the world. It means loving the world—the creation—as God loves the world.

The focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.

Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one. It is the pragmatic test suggested by William James, quoting Jesus: "By their fruits you shall know them." The fruit is love. Indeed, such fruit is the purpose of the Christian life.

In function, Jesus's aphorisms are very much like his parables—provocative and invitational forms of speech. They provoke thought, lead people to reconsider their taken-for-granted assumptions, and invite them to see life differently.

being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

it is important that children not be taught in such a way that they will later need to unlearn many things. We

To state the obvious, how we see is to a large extent the product of what we have seen.

Christians also speak of the Bible as the revelation of God, indeed as the "Word of God." Yet orthodox Christian theology from ancient times has affirmed that the decisive revelation of God is Jesus. The Bible is "the Word" become words, God's revelation in human words; Jesus is "the Word" become flesh, God's revelation in a human life. Thus Jesus is more decisive than the Bible.