Quotes from Marcus J. Borg

Being Christian, I will argue, is not about believing in the Bible or about believing in Christianity. Rather, it is about a deepening relationship with the God to whom the Bible points, lived within the Christian tradition as a sacrament of the sacred.

We learned, in the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, that God is "in heaven." But we also learned that God is everywhere—that is, omnipresent. When one combines the two, the result is panentheism. It is orthodox Christian theology.

Paying attention to our relationship with God matters because we ourselves are ultimately relational. It is not that wr first become selves and then have relationships. Rather, we are constituted by our relationships; they shape and form us. So also paying attention to our relationship with God will shape us.

But then something went terribly, terribly wrong. Athens had invented a democracy, but learned that you could have a democracy or an empire, but not both at the same time for long. Rome was now about to relearn that lesson. It had invented a republic, but was now to learn that you could have a republic or an empire, but not both at the same time for long.

The possibility that Jesus didn't think he was the messiah has often seemed to threaten the truth of Christianity itself. Could Jesus be the messiah if he didn't think he was?

Faithfulness leads us to pay attention to our relationship to God—through such attention, we become even more deeply centered in God. Trust is the fruit of that deeper centering. It grows as we center more and more in God.

Thus much is at stake in whether we see the Bible as a human or a divine product. When we are not completely clear and candid about the Bible being a human and not a divine product, we create the possibility of enormous confusion.

Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences. So we do not think Jesus saw his purpose as dying for the sins of the world. Rather, this interpretation, like the others in the New Testament, is post-Easter and thus retrospective. Looking back on the execution of Jesus, the early movement sought to see a providential purpose in this horrendous event.12

Within the framework of justification by grace, the Christian life is about becoming conscious of and entering more deeply into an already existing relationship with God as known in Jesus. It is not about meeting requirements for salvation later but about newness of life in the present. And living by grace produces the same qualities as life "in Christ": freedom, joy, peace, and love.

I need both of these words, "compassion" and "justice," for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

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.

First, the healings and exorcisms of Jesus are associated with the coming of the kingdom of God and a time of deliverance.

Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.

Another Q saying uses language from the prophet Isaiah to signal that the activity of Jesus points to a time of deliverance.

In particular, healing as practiced by Jesus and his itinerant followers pointed to an unbrokered relationship to God, apart from institutional mediation.38 In short, Jesus' healing activity flowed out of and affirmed the immediacy of access to God.

Mutually incompatible theories abound as to where, when, and why the synoptic gospels came to final form.

Among the world's religions, perhaps the best-known examples are Lao Tzu in China and the Buddha in India. Within the tradition of Israel, the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes are voices of an alternative wisdom that challenged the conventional wisdom of their day.

Jesus also offers an alternative wisdom. As a wisdom teacher, he is more like Lao Tzu or the Buddha than he is like a teacher of conventional wisdom.39 The basis for my judgment is twofold. The first is the sheer weight of wisdom teaching attributed to Jesus. Most of his teaching is in the form of memorable short sayings (aphorisms) and provocative short stories (parables), both classic wisdom forms.

I am convinced that salvation in the biblical tradition has to do primarily with this life.

But "redemption" in the Bible and in Paul is not about the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is a metaphor of liberation from bondage—from life in Egypt, from a life of slavery. "The redemption that is in Christ Jesus" would be better translated "the liberation that is in Christ Jesus." We are liberated through him.

Rather, the language of divine agency here emphasizes the theme of God's grace: God provided the sacrifice.

These questions can be used by individual readers and also in reading groups in which participants are invited to share their memories and thoughts. Many of them invite reflection on previous or current understandings and are best used before treating the content of the relevant chapter. Some invite reflection about material in a particular chapter.

In this life, a radical centering in God leads to a deepening trust that transforms the way we see and live our lives. Seeing, living, trusting, and centering are all related in complex ways. They are all matters of the heart, and not primarily of the head. And in our deaths, dying means trusting in the buoyancy of God, that the one who has carried us in this life is the one into whom we die.

He points beyond himself to God—to God's character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our credal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God.