Quotes from Marcus J. Borg

The foundation of this way of seeing the Bible begins with the conviction that it is not the inerrant and infallible revelation of God, but the product of our religious ancestors in two ancient communities. The Old Testament comes to us from our ancestors in biblical Israel. The New Testament comes to us from our ancestors in early Christian communities. As such, the Bible is a human product: it tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things.

The core value of Jesus' ethic was compassion

spoke of the coming of the kingdom of God, he meant that "the end" was at hand. In the near future, God would dramatically intervene in the world, bring ordinary history to a close, and establish the everlasting kingdom. Scholarly opinion about this has changed in the last twenty years or so. Along with probably a majority of contemporary scholars, both Tom and I (for somewhat different reasons) reject this understanding.51

William Sloane Coffin said when his son Alex died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-four. Ten days later, Coffin delivered Alex's eulogy at Riverside Church in New York City, where he was senior minister. Among many other things, he said this:

But I do see the phrase "kingdom of God" as central to Jesus. As I have argued elsewhere, I see it as a metaphor or symbol with a range of meanings rather than as a concept with a single meaning. In the message and activity of Jesus, its meanings include the following.

It never occurred to me that spiritual practices might not be requirements for salvation, a "to do" list, but practical means for loving God. But that's what they are.

The Roman vision incarnated in the divine Augustus was peace through victory. The Christian vision incarnated in the divine Jesus was peace through justice. It is those alternatives that are at stake behind all the titles and countertitles, the claims and counterclaims.

and mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare. He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God's will. And he knew all of this most foundationally because he knew God.

It is a life of deep commitment and gentle certitude. Deep commitment, because it involves one's whole being. Gentle certitude, because it is gentle, soft, regarding particular verbal formulations of Christianity, including precise doctrinal statements. These are always human products. They are to be valued as such and to be reformulated when necessary. Depth of commitment and dogmatic certainty about a particular set of beliefs are not the same thing.

We can now see that the fundamental difference between those divergent visions of earth's final kingdom is not about ends, but about means. The imperial kingdom of Rome—and this may indeed apply to any other empire as well—had as its program peace through victory. The eschatological kingdom of God has as its program peace through justice. Both intend peace—one by violence, the other by nonviolence. And still those tectonic plates grind against one another.

to use language from Frederick Buechner, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out.24 Our fall into exile is very deep. The biblical picture of the human condition is bleak. Separated and self-concerned, the self becomes blind, self-preoccupied, prideful; worry-filled, grasping, miserable; insensitive, angry, violent; somebody great, or only okay, or "not much." In the dark, we are blind and don't see.

the Bible as a human response to God, the Bible as sacred scripture, the Bible as sacrament of the sacred, and the Bible as the Word of God.

Its meanings include: The risen Christ journeys with us, is with us, whether we know it or not. Sometimes there are moments when we do recognize this.

how we see reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other.

This claim is also the central theme of Abraham Heschel's The Prophets. Heschel

Here are the three main strands of second-temple hope. YHWH becomes king, Israel will return from exile, evil will be defeated, and YHWH himself will return to Zion.

Cumulatively, taking the pre-Easter Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God suggests a massive subversion of the monarchical model of God and the way of life (individually and socially) to which it leads. God is not a distant being but is near at hand. God is not primarily a lawgiver and judge but the compassionate one. The religious life is not about requirements but about relationship.

The explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and infallible by fundamentalists and some conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional voice of the church.

What, then, did Jesus mean by his kingdom announcement? Let me anticipate my conclusion. Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected.

First, invitation. Jesus invited his hearers to "repent and believe the gospel." In our world, telling people to repent and believe is likely to be heard as a summons to give up personal sins and accept a body of dogma or a scheme of religious salvation.

As we see in Josephus, the phrase means, basically, "Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.

All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God's kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his. But what would happen if they refused?

Many have traditionally read Jesus' sayings about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century context of the language in question, however, indicates otherwise.

Does it make sense that the creator of the whole universe would be known in only one religious tradition, which (fortunately) just happens to be our own?