The Poor Need a God of Freedom

Perhaps the minority community of slaves and midwives [in Moses' Israel] was able to affirm the freedom of God just because there was no other legitimated way to stand over against static triumphal religion, for every other less-free God had already been co-opted. Perhaps the minority community of slaves is able to affirm the politics of justice and compassion because there is no other social vision in which to stand in protest against the oppression of the situation. As George Mendenhall has urged, the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us. Thus a truly free God is essential to marginal people if they are to have a legitimate standing ground against the oppressive orders of the day. But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessary, desirable, or perhaps even possible.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, pg. 22-23

One True Church and Christian Exclusivity

Each of the enduring religions is a mediator of "the absolute," but not the absolute itself. Applying this understanding to being Christian, the point is not to believe in Christianity as the only absolute and adequate revelation of God. Rather, the point is to live within the Christian tradition as a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the absolute, whom we name "God" and who for us is known decisively in Jesus. Christianity is not absolute, but points to and mediates the absolute.

Within this framework, what happens to the passages in the New Testament that proclaim Jesus to be "the only way"? We should remember that they are relatively few. Moreover, passages in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament suggest a larger view of God's presence and accessibility. But the "only way" passages are there, most famously John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to God except through me." Also well known is Acts 4:12, which says about Jesus, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." We can understand these as expressions of both truth and devotion.

Truth: the path seen in Jesus is the way--the path of death and resurrection, that path of dying to an old identity and way of being and being born into a new identity and way of being that lies at the heart of Christianity and the other religions. This is "the way" expressed in Christian form. For us as Christians, Jesus is the way, even though not the only expression of the way.

Devotion: to say Jesus is the "only way" is also the language of devotion. It is the language of gratitude and love. It is like language used by lovers, as when we say to our beloved, "You're the most beautiful person in the world." Literally? Most beautiful? Really? Such language is "the poetry of devotion and the hyperbole of the heart." Poetry can express the truth of the heart, but it is not doctrine. And such language, when not hardened into doctrine can continue to express Christian devotion. To echo Krister Stendahl again, we can sing our love songs to Jesus with wild abandon without needing to demean other religions.

When a Christian seeker asked the Dalai Lama whether she should become a Buddhist, his response, which I paraphrase was: "No, become more deeply Christian; live more deeply into your own tradition." Huston Smith makes the same point with the metaphor of digging a well: if what you're looking for is water, better to dig one well sixty feet deep than to dig six wells ten feet deep. By living more deeply into our own tradition as a sacrament of the sacred, we become more centered in the one to who the tradition points an in whom we live and move an have our being."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 215

Eternal Life Now

Though [John's gospel] affirms life after death, his phrase "eternal life" does not mean primarily that. The English phrase translates to a Greek phrase that in turn expresses a Jewish notion: "the life of the age to come." "Eternal life" means "the life of the age to come." Thus, for example, John 3:16 could be translated

For God so loved the world that God gave God's only begotten Son; whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have the life of the age to come.

[Importantly] in John, "eternal life" is often spoken of in the present tense. "The life of the age to come" has come. It is here. Eternal life does not refer to the unending time beyond death, but to something that can be known now. "This is eternal life," John affirms, and then adds, "to Know God." To know God in the present is to experience the life of the age to come. It is a present reality for John, even as it also involves a future destiny. We can know it now, experience it now. The point is that even John's language about "eternal life" has a strong present dimension.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 175

God's Justice vs. God's Mercy?

[One reason we have overlooked God's passion for justice] is because of a common misunderstanding of "God's Justice." Theologically, we have often seen its opposite as "God's mercy." "God's justice" is understood as God's deserved punishment of us for our sins, "God's mercy" as God's loving forgiveness of us in spite of our guilt. Given this choice, we would all prefer God's mercy and hope to escape God's justice. But seeing the opposite of justice as mercy distorts what the Bible means by justice. Most often in the bible, the opposite of God's justice is not God's mercy, but human injustice. The issue is the shape of our life together as societies, not whether the mercy of God will supersede the justice of God in the final judgement."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 127

On being born again and Spirituality

Being born again is the work of the Spirit...Spirituality is midwifery.

Spirituality combines awareness, intention, and practice. I define it as becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God. The words are very carefully chosen. Becoming conscious of our relationship with God: I am convinced that we are all already in relationship to God and have been from our birth. God is in relationship with us: spirituality is about becoming aware of a relationship that already exists.

Becoming intentional about our relationship to God: spirituality is about paying attention to the relationship. Though God is "Mystery," there is nothing mysterious about paying attention to our relationship with God. We do so in the ways we pay attention in a human relationship: by spending time in it, attending to it, being thoughtful about it. We pay attention to our relationship with God through practice, both corporate and individual: worship, community, prayer, scripture, devotion...

A deepening relationship with God: in what is now a familiar theme, the Christian life is not very much about believing a set of beliefs, but about a deepening relationship with the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Paying attention to this relationship transforms us. This is what our lives are to be about: a transforming relationship to "what is," the "More."

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 120

Grace, Transformation, Life, Heaven

Unconditional grace is not about how we get to heaven or who goes to heaven. The notion that salvation is primarily about "going to heaven" is a distortion; and when it is seen as primary, the notion of unconditional grace leads to the notion that everybody gets to go to heaven, regardless of their life and faith. However, unconditional grace is not about the afterlife, but the basis for our relationship with god in this life. Is the basis for our life with God law or grace, requirements and rewards or relationship and transformation? Grace affirms the latter.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 77

God: Dimensions of Meaning

To echo a comment made...by Paul Tillich, one of the twentieth century's two most important Prostestant theologians: if, when you think of the word "God," you are thinking of a reality that may or may not exist, you are not thinking of God. Tillich's point is that the word "God" does not refer to a particular existing being (that's the God of supernatural theism). Rather, the word "God" is the most common Western name for "what is," for "ultimate reality," for "the ground of being," for "Being itself," for "isness."

So, what meaning or content can we give to personal language for God? Thus far I have been able to see three dimensions of meaning:

Whatever God is ultimately like, our relationship to God is personal. This relationship engages us as persons at our deepest and most passionate level.

I am persuaded that God has more the quality of a "presence" than of a nonpersonal "energy" or "force." To use language Martin Buber used, I am persuaded that God has more the quality of a "you" than of an "it," more the quality of a person than the quality of an impersonal "source." I see this sense of God as a presence, as a "you," as grounded in experience.  I also see it reflected int he centrality of the notion of covenant in the Jewish and Christian traditions. We are in a covenantal relationship with "what is" and covenant is an intrinsically relational model of reality.

Moreover, I think God "speaks" to us.  I don't mean oral or aural revelation or divine dictation. But I think God "speaks" to us--sometimes dramatically in visions, less dramatically in some of our dreams, in internal "proddings" or "leadings," through people, and through the devotional practices and scriptures of our tradition. We sometimes have a sense--I sometimes have a sens of being addressed.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 72-73

God, Divine Intentionality, and Interventionism

Rather than speaking of divine intervention, panentheism speaks of divine intention and divine interaction.  Or, to use sacramental language, it sees the presence of God "in, with, and under" everything--not as the direct cause of events, but as a presence beneath and within our everyday lives.

[This framework] allows for prayers to have effects, including prayers for healing.  It does not rule out extraordinary events.  But it refuses to see efficacious prayer or extraordinary events as the result of divine intervention.

From  [the panentheism] point of view, interventionism not only has insurmountable difficulties, but claims to know too much; namely, it claims to know that "intervention" is the explanatory mechanism for God's relation to the world.  Except in the very general sense of "divine intentionality" and "divine interactivity," panentheism does not claim to have an explanation of the God-world relation. It is content not to know.

-Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 66-69

The Truth of Metaphor

As I use the word, "metaphor" is a large umbrella category.  It has both a negative and positive meaning.  Negatively, it means nonliteral.  Positively, it means the more-than-literal meaning of language. Thus metaphorical meaning is not inferior to literal meaning, but is more than literal meaning.

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

A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, "The Bible is true, and some of it happened."

I say to my students, "Believe whatever you want about whether it happened this way; now let's talk about what the story means."  The statement applies to the Genesis stories of creation, the gospel birth stories of the Bible generally: a preoccupation with factuality can obscure the metaphorical meanings and the truth of the stories as metaphor.

The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship.  And the point is not to "believe" in a metaphor--but to "see" with it.  Thus the point is not to believe in the Bible--but to see our lives with God through it.

Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 49-54

Faith is Faithfulness to our relationship to God

If one thinks that "belief" is what God wants from us, then doubt and disbelief are experienced as sinful.

Faith is faithfulness to our relationship to God.  It means what faithfulness does ina  committed human relationship...Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether bibilical, credal, or doctrinal.  Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the bible and creeds and doctrines point.  Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God

...when the prophets indict Israel as adulterous or Jesus speaks of "and evil and adulterous generation" they are not saying that there is a lot of wife swapping going on.  Rather, they are referring to unfaithfulness to God and God's covenant.

Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pgs. 30, 32-33

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Rainer Maria Rilke

My Bright Abyss - Christian Wiman

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:

Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

Adam S. Miller - God Suffers Grace

The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing...God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him.

...to be is to be passible.  God is no exception to this rule.  God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects.  Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.

This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering.  To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering.  Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.

However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged.  To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility.  Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects.  Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence.  And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.

This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace.  Without exception, grace comes.  Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81

While suffering may indeed be a soul-making process (some psychological research indicates this to be true), it is not inflicted for this “greater good.” Perhaps it is not that God allows our hearts to broken, but, in many cases, He simply cannot prevent it. But because of the love He has and the at-one-ment He seeks with us, His own heart is broken and yearns to heal both ours and His. Atonement is about unity, unity is about love, and love is about vulnerability.

Walker Wright, Mourn With Those Who Mourn: The Weeping God and Me

[A]s soon as it is recognized, as in modern revelation it is, that there is more than one eternal will in the universe--indeed, an infinity of such wills or autonomous intelligences--we have cut the thread that supposes God can “do anything.” In all-important ways even He, the greatest of all, can only do with us what we will permit Him to do. Our center selves can agree or disagree, assent or resent, cooperate or oppose. To say, as the scriptures do, that God has all power and that He is almighty and that with Him all things are possible is to say that He has all the power and might it is possible to have in this universe of multiple selves. And as soon as it is recognized, as in modern revelation it is, that there are eternal inanimate things which are subject to laws, to “bounds and conditions” which God did not create but Himself has mastered, we have cut another thread of illusory omnipotence…[God] can do only what our wills and eternal laws will permit. In short, He did not make us from nothing and what He makes of us depends on us and the ultimate nature of a co-eternal universe.

Truman G. Madsen, "Human Anguish and Divine Love," Four Essays on Love, 57-58

The great healing of the universe is centered on the breach in our relationship with our God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character...What we are worshipping we are becoming.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87