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FOR PAST REVIEWS and PowerPoint presentation and seminar notes see the bottom of this page.... JEFF ASTLEY - Christ of the Everyday - to down load a review by Paul Wilson click here: Jeff Astley Review MARCUS BORG This review owes its existence, at least in part, to the very first of our galilee speakers. Following our first and very well attended event at which Dave Tomlinson shared some of his spiritual journey with us the founders of galilee spent a further fruitful evening with Dave exploring some of our own questions and inner challenges. During that evening I asked Dave what books he would most recommend to those, like me, who were struggling to find a way of living the Christian faith which made sense and did not require the abandoning of one’s intellectual integrity. As part of his answer he pointed me towards Marcus Borg and over the past year I have read, and come to value deeply, much that he has written. For me he probably encapsulates, more than any other, a vision of the Christian faith that resonates with the one I have evolved over many years of struggling and exploring. I suspected that this might be the case when early in my reading I came across his definition of himself as a ‘nonliteralistic and nonexclusivistic Christian.’ (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time). This was exactly what I wanted to be! I could no longer adopt the simple, literalistic view of the Bible that I had grown up with but I did still see it was having great value as a collection of the writings of those who had known and experienced deeply the God who really does exist. I recognised that in order to express their experiences such writers often resorted to the use of metaphor as the only way of seeking to capture experiences that could not be conveyed in any other way and that metaphor cannot be taken literally. Nor could I live comfortably with the exclusive view of the Christian faith that I had grown up with. I could not imagine that the God of love who the writers of the Bible had experienced bore no relationship to the God that the authors of other religious writings had experienced. Nor could I dismiss the reality and validity of the spiritual experiences of other people I met, some who belonged to different faiths and some who described their spirituality in non-religious terms. But, I had grown up in the Christian faith and, as a ‘map of the world’, it continued to work well for me. I did not wish to give it up, but if I was to keep it I needed to find a way of doing so that enabled me to see the Bible and other faiths in new ways. I identified closely with Marcus when he writes of the Christian tradition: ‘For me it mediates the good, the true, and the beautiful; and through all these, it mediates the sacred. It is for me a sacrament of the sacred. And it is home. It is familiar to me in a way that no other religion could ever become…..And we do not need to feel that our home is superior to every other home in order to love it.’ Perhaps the greatest service Marcus Borg has done me is to help me see that there is a way that I can continue to value my Christian understanding of my relationship with the divine whilst retaining my non literalistic view of sacred writings and my open minded approach to the spiritual experiences of others who may not share my Christian framework. For those who would like to explore his writings I would suggest starting, perhaps, with “THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY – Rediscovering a Life of Faith”. It is actually the book that I came to last but it is a very useful summary of other books and covers a wide range of topics including the Bible, how we see God, what we make of Jesus, our approach to other religions and the value of religious practices. In it Marcus contrasts an ‘earlier’ with an ‘emerging’ way of approaching Christianity. The earlier way, which corresponds to the way I was brought up thinking about Christianity, saw the Bible as a divine product with divine authority which should be interpreted in a literal-factual fashion. It saw the Bible as revealing doctrine and rules about how we should live and it placed a considerable emphasis on the afterlife and on what we needed to do or to believe in order to be saved. Part of this included the belief that only by believing certain things about Jesus could one be saved. The emerging way sees the Bible much more in terms of its being a human response to a real God. It was not written to us, or for us, but for the ancient communities that produced it. To interpret it one needs to recognise the importance of reading the ancient documents in their historical contexts. The emerging approach also sees the centrality of metaphor in the Bible. It recognises the difficulty of communicating what we experience of God using words. At one point Marcus quotes from Augustine who said “Before experiencing God you thought you could talk about God; when you begin to experience God you realise that what you are experiencing you cannot put into words.” We can only use metaphor to seek to say "it was something like this." For the emerging way, therefore, the meaning that the writer seeks to convey through the Bible’s stories and accounts is more central than their factuality. And so the emerging way focuses on the ability of the Bible and the wider Christian traditions and practices to act as a sacrament, mediating the sacred, recognising that in other religions their scriptures and practices may do similar things. And finally it places the emphasis, not on the afterlife, but on transformation in this life through relationship with God who is really there. Below are a few quotations you may like to ponder on:
Put very simply and directly, the course of my own Christian journey….. has led me, experientially and intellectually, to three central convictions:
All of our thinking about God – our concepts, as well as our images…are attempts to express the ineffable. The ineffable – one in whom we live and move and have our being – is beyond all our concepts, even this one. The point is not to believe in the Bible or the Christian tradition, but to live within them as a metaphor and sacrament of the sacred, as a means whereby the spirit continues to speak to us today….. 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 a 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. When a Christian seeker asked the Dalai Lama whether she should be come a Buddhist, his response, which I paraphrase, was: ”No, become more deeply Christian; live more deeply into your own tradition.” Houston 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 centred in the one to whom the tradition points and in whom we live and move and have our being. A Christian is one who does this within the framework of the Christian tradition, just as a Jew is one who does this within the framework of the Jewish tradition, a Muslim within the framework of the Muslim tradition, and so forth. I cannot believe that God cares which of these we are. All are paths of relationship and transformation. Some say, “The religions are all the same – just different roads to the same place. It doesn’t matter what you are.” Rightly understood the statement contains some truth. But as commonly understood it is too simple. ….Based on his study of religions experience he (William James) concludes that the religions of the world are most similar in the experiences they report, the paths they teach, the practices they commend and the behaviour they produce, the “fruit” of compassion. …They are most different, he concludes, in their beliefs and doctrines. When one thinks about it this is only what one would expect, for beliefs and doctrines are what are most affected by the particularities of culture and language. What is most affected is what is put into words. To use the metaphor of paths going up a mountainside, the enduring religions are all paths up the same mountain. Envision a mountain, broad at the bottom, narrow at the top, the peak finally disappearing into air, space, emptiness. At the bottom, the paths are farthest apart (the external forms). But as the paths lead higher, they become closer together until they converge at the mountain top. And then, of course, they disappear. And the place to which they lead, the mountain top, is not "heaven", but "the sacred." The religions are not primarily about the next life, not about paths to an afterlife, but to life centred in the sacred in the here and now. If that wets your appetite for more, or if you want to explore one aspect in more depth, then try: • “THE GOD WE NEVER KNEW – Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith,” or • “MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME – The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith,” or
• “READING THE BIBLE AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME – Taking the Bible
Seriously but not Literally.”
John
For past reviews see the links below:
BRIAN
McLAREN: A New Kind of Christian
ALAN JAMIESON: A churchless faith
The Bible - what do we
make of it: A PowerPoint presentation from John and Paul's
seminar.
NOTE: it takes several minutes to download.
Humane Christianity - notes from Alan Bartlett's evening
based on his recent book
Cohabitation - notes in WORD document from Paul's
seminar
The Uniqueness of Jesus
- what do we make of it: A PowerPoint Presentation from
Paul's seminar. NOTE: it may take several minutes to download.
Universalism - is there a case for it?
2 PowerPoint presentations, notes and "A very surprising quiz".
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