56 Quotes by Marcus J. Borg

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.

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.

God has always been in relationship to us, journeying with us, and yearning to be known by us.

The point: only a small minority of Christians and for only a brief period of time have taught biblical inerrancy and the sole authority of the Bible. So how and why has it become “orthodox” Christianity for about half of American Protestants?

When somebody says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” my first response is, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Almost always, it’s the God of supernatural theism.

To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true.

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.

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.