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Marcus
J. Borg is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture
at Oregon State University. He is author of Meeting
Jesus Again for the First Time and Reading
the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but
Not Literally.
Liza Hetherington:
In your book, The God We Never Knew,
you describe "God" in terms which are different from the popular
perception of God. Before we talk about this "new definition" for
"God," would you share your favorite image of God?
Marcus
Borg: I probably have two aesthetically and emotionally satisfying
ways of thinking about God. I mean there are more than these that
I would affirm, but these are the two that probably matter most to
me. One is a quite personal image: it's the image of God as lover.
One of the reasons I like the image so well is because some of the
most powerful Biblical passages for me are ones that speak of God
as lover: Isaiah 43, for example, "You are precious in my eyes and
I love you." The reason the image is so powerful to me is because
of who we are in relationship to God as lover: we are of course the
beloved. And the image suggests that the religious life is about turning
and being in relationship to that sacred reality which is the source
of our life and which has loved us and sought us long before we knew
that or believed that. The contemporary author and theologian Roberta
Bondi from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta
in her most recent book, In
Ordinary Time speaks of God as being "besotted" with us. That
image is so different from the finger shaking image of the God of
my childhood. My childhood image of God was shaped to some extent
by the pastor of the Lutheran church in North Dakota where I grew
up. When I thought of God, I thought of Pastor Thorson, [who] was
not only a gray haired man in a black robe--which made him a perfect
image for God as the old man in the sky--but he was also a finger
shaker, quite literally he would shake his finger at us when he preached.
Now the finger shaking God is the God of requirements. It's God seen
primarily as the law giver and judge. It's God seen through the framework
of the law and we are disobedient and disloyal subjects who have violated
God's law. Well, in contrast to that, the image of God as lover is
so powerful.
The other image
of God I suppose would be an image of light. What I have in mind
there is moments which I have experienced myself--but others also
report experiencing them, so I know this is part of the history
of religious experience--moments when I see the same world I always
see, but it's as if there is light shining through everything. One
of them even happened on an airplane flight, so it was the inside
of the airliner where the light changed and everything looked exquisitely
beautiful. I knew both that if I were to die in the next five minutes
it would be just fine, but also that I would really miss this because
I had never seen just ordinary things look so beautiful. There is
that sensation of light shining through everything. Biblically this
is expressed in the Hebrew Bible with expressions like, "the whole
Earth is full of the glory of God." I think the radiant presence
of God is shining through everything all the time, it's just that
most of the time we don't see that. For me those moments are also
accompanied by a momentary falling away of that dome of the ego
within which we walk around and spend most of our waking moments
anyway, that sense that I'm in here and the world and everything
else is out there. In these extraordinary moments that [ego] simply
drops away and I feel this connectedness, even as I sense the presence
of the glory of God in that light that is shining through everything.
How
would you describe this "God we never knew."
"God"
is one of those words that means so many different things to different
people. Some fifty years ago the theologian Paul Tillich said that
we perhaps should declare a moratorium on the use of the word "God"
because it had become virtually a meaningless notion. What I do in
the book is to contrast two primary meanings of God. The one is the
understanding of God that I grew with, which I call the God of supernatural
theism. This way of thinking about God sees the word "God" as referring
to a supernatural being out there, separate from the universe, who
created the universe a long time ago and perhaps occasionally has
intervened in the eons since--for Christians, of course, that means
intervened especially in the events reported in the Biblical tradition.
So that older model
of God is not only God as a being out there, but an interventionist
model as well. I argue in the book for a different foundational
concept for God, a different root concept for thinking about God,
which I call "panentheism"--the middle syllable "en" is crucial
to distinguish it from "pantheism" with which it's sometimes confused.
This way of thinking about God, or the sacred, or the spirit--which
are terms I use interchangeably--sees God not as a supernatural
being out there, but as a non-material presence and reality which
is right here and all around us. And I also argue that panentheism--which
literally means "everything is in God"--is faithful to the Biblical
tradition and indeed the theological tradition of the Church. One
of the best shorthand ways I know of explaining that is with the
two semi-technical terms "the transcendence" of God and the "immanence"
of God. To say that God is transcendent means that God is more than
everything, is beyond everything. To say that God is "immanent"
means that God is present in everything. So the immanence of God
means that the sacred is right here, and the transcendence of God
means that the sacred is more than right here. The Christian tradition
as well as the Jewish tradition--and for that matter virtually every
religious tradition we can name: Islam, Hinduism, and so forth--have
traditionally said that God is both transcendent and immanent. So
I argue that thinking of God with a panentheistic model as right
here and not as out there is a very ancient, even though it is a
way of thinking about God that's not all that familiar to many people
in our culture. I think many people who say they're not sure whether
they believe in God, or who actively say they don't believe in God,
are thinking of the God of supernatural theism.
How
did the "supernatural" idea of God become the cultural role model?
Well,
you know much of the language of the Bible about God and much of the
language of the Church's liturgies about God, speak of God as if God
were a supernatural being out there: the opening line of the Lord's
Prayer "Our Father who art in heaven." Speaking of God in personal
terms as a being like us, except an extraordinary being, is also the
natural language of worship, prayer, and devotion. The problem arises
only when that language is literalized. There is nothing wrong with
that language when it is understood to be metaphorical. It's like
what happens to religious myths when they are taken literally. I f
you literalize a myth, it simply become silly. But if you recognize
it as metaphorical, then myths can be powerfully true, and so also
the metaphorical language for God as a person can be very appropriate
as long as it's not literalized.
How
do we teach children about this understanding of God, or do they
need to go through a developmental process.
I know very little
about early childhood education. The few things I do have to say
are, first it's important to keep at a minimum things [children]
have to unlearn. Secondly, I think it's important that they know
what I call the stories of the tribe. It would be great if we looked
at the stories of our own tradition as the stories of the tribe.
I mean it's not as if these [stories] dropped from the sky, or are
directly written by God. No, these are the stories of our tribe,
and I think it's important that our children growing up know them.
I also think it's important that when the stage of questioning does
begin, that it not be cut off by inappropriate responses like "you'll
understand when you get older," or "God's ways are not our ways,"
or "it's not supposed to make sense, you're just supposed to believe
it." And then a further comment I make, is that it's really important
to see what very young children have to say, because they have some
fascinating things to say about this. One of my favorite stories
concerns a young married couple who had a three year old daughter
and the mom was about to give birth to the second child. The little
three year old girl was really excited about having a new baby brother
or sister, and when the new baby got home, the three-year old girl
was absolutely insistent that she be permitted to be in the baby's
room with the baby alone with the door shut. The parents were a
little bit nervous about this, and then they remembered that they
had an intercom system. So they let the little girl go into the
room; the door was shut; they ran to the intercom, and then they
heard the little girl say to the baby, "Tell me about God. I've
almost forgotten." I think it's a haunting story because it suggests
not only that we come from God, but that we have a memory of that.
And that the process of growing up, being socialized, learning language,
all of that, is to a large extent, a process of forgetting. My point
being that I don't know when we can start teaching kids about panentheism,
but we should do a fair amount of listening with young children,
as well as being concerned about teaching the right way.
How
does evil fit into this "new" way of thinking about God?
Let
me start by talking about evil in relationship to that supernatural
interventionist model of God. A major problem that I and other theologians
have had with the supernaturalist, interventionist model of God is
that it makes it very difficult to explain how things like the Holocaust,
or TWA 800 exploding in the sky, or the individual and random tragedies
that people experience all the time, can happen. If we think that
God can intervene when God chooses to, then it become incomprehensible
how God could have let the Holocaust happen. If we think that God
sometimes intervenes to heal people of catastrophic and life threatening
illness, then it becomes incomprehensible why God doesn't do that
for everybody who's got premature cancer, let's say. All of those
problems become utterly insoluble it seems to me with the interventionist
model of God. Some 30 years ago, Bishop John Robinson, who wrote Honest
to God listed three reason why atheism is the only attractive
modern option--and he was thinking of atheism in relationship to the
supernatural model of God. One of those [reasons was that] God is
morally intolerable. His point is the one I'm just making. If God
could intervene but chooses not to, then God is morally intolerable.
For the panentheistic model of God, the notion of God as a being outside
of the process, who sometimes intervenes, simply disappears. With
a panentheistic model, God is present in everything and God is the
source of everything--that doesn't mean God is the source of everything
that happens, but God is present in everything. I think most of the
suffering that occurs in the world is not because of natural disasters
or even because of illness or, let's say, natural causes of death,
most of the suffering in the world comes from structural or systemic
evil, from social structure, political structures, that function to
oppress millions of people, deprive them of adequate nourishment,
deprive them of adequate medical care, and add to that all the wars
in human history that are caused by evil social structure, or unjust
social structures. So I think most of the evil--in the sense of suffering
that occurs in the world--is because of humanly created social structures.
The
humans aren't evil, the structures are.
Yes,
though humans will tolerate and defend those structures, so we're
not off the hook.
You
don't see evil as a separate force out there in the world?
People
ask me sometimes "where do you think evil comes from?" I'm a complete
agnostic about whether there's a personified power of evil, and ultimately
very skeptical that there is something like Satan. But I don't think
God is the source of evil if there's no Satan. I think the primary
source of evil is the social structures that human beings create in
their own interests.
Does
this "new" understanding of God help Christians in their faith?
One
of the premises of the book is that over the last 30 to 40 years an
older way of understanding Christianity has come undone for many people.
It was literalistic, doctrinal, moralistic, exclusivistic--meaning
by that that it was taken for granted that Christianity was the only
way of salvation--and afterlife oriented. (I sum up that older way
of understanding Christianity now on the popular level--I don't mean
that the sophisticated traditions said this.) I think that that understanding
of Christianity has become very unpersuasive especially amongst the
demographic groups from whom mainline denominations have drawn their
membership. I think it's no accident that over the same 30 to 40 years,
mainline denominations, as everybody knows, have suffered a severe
decline in membership. My book is really intended to be a revisioning
of Christian theology for people for whom that older understanding
doesn't work. I think it is one of the most critical theological needs
of mainline denominations in our time: to take seriously a re-thinking
of the Christian tradition that is faithful to its ancient roots,
and also take seriously who we have become in the last half of the
twentieth century: people who are aware of religious pluralism, and
therefore can't believe that Christianity is the only way; people
who are aware of the historical relativity and cultural conditionedness
of all doctrinal formulations and therefore [can't believe] the claim
of any set of scriptures or creeds [as having] absolute truth for
all time. Many educated people simply can't make sense of that, and
it would be a real mistake for us to let our Fundamentalist and conservative
brothers and sisters have the Bible and have the tradition, with a
literalistic understanding and all of that. Indeed literalism is to
a large extent a modern phenomenon. So this is really an attempt to
reclaim the ancient tradition for our time and expressed in a way
that takes seriously what we have come authentically to know.
Spirituality
seems to be on the rise in America, but in forms outside of churches.
This leads one to the question: can this vision of God you describe
work for people who are outside of the Church?
Well,
this vision of God, and even the experience of the sacred can exist
outside of the Church and outside of religious community. But for
me, and for many people, religious community is very important because
it's consistent with the Biblical tradition, which is always about
a community in relationship to God. The Hebrew Bible is the story
about Israel in relationship to God, and the New Testament is the
story about the early Christian community and its relationship to
God as known in Jesus. So community has been part of the Jewish-Christian
tradition forever. I find that the experience of religious community
is very nourishing for me. I'm nourished by being in the midst of
a group of people singing together and worshipping together. Moreover,
I think that excessive individualism is one of the pathologies of
contemporary American culture, and therefore an emphasis on community
is really important to counter that excessive individualism. The Biblical
vision of life with God always has a community dimension to it. Therefore
the [church] community exists not only as a source of nourishment
for us, but also as an embodiment of the alternative social vision
of God, of what I, using a phrase from Verna Dozier, call the "Dream
of God." The "Dream of God" is a human community living together in
peace and justice
Do
you think American culture prevents us from experiencing God in
our lives?
Well
let me waffle on this one a little bit and say "yes" and "no." The
"yes" part of it is that I think being socialized in modern Western
culture does give one a material understanding of reality, does suggest
that our happiness and our satisfaction lie in not only consumption,
but also in attractive physical appearance, and standing out, and
being successful and so forth. So that the primary messages of our
culture, as well as the visual images of our culture, all encourage
us to pay primary attention to--for want of a better word--this world.
I do this exercise with my students at Oregon State University where
I simply ask them to try to get in touch with cultural messages which
they've gotten as they're growing up. Almost all of [these messages]
have to do with consumerism, enjoyment, appearance, success. None
of them really have to do with community values, and [no student]
has ever reported a religious message as one of the messages. So I
think that we are, on one level, a profoundly secularized culture,
even though we have the highest...religious membership rate in the
world, and highest percentage of people saying they believe in God.
There's a strange kind of contradiction there. The "no" part of [this
question] is, oddly enough I think, our culture's emphasis upon, let's
say, material satisfaction. The number of people who can achieve some
level of material satisfaction also leads people to realize [that]
that's not where it is. It's like once one has tasted everything that
our culture says the good life is made up of, and still finds oneself
dissatisfied or unfilled, that odd feeling of being satiated and still
hungry, we learn that there's got to be something more. Perhaps my
strongest critique of contemporary American culture is the way it
is so oriented toward an individualistic political order, which causes
so much suffering for a large percentage of our population--and I'm
not thinking just of the bottom 10 percent here. But I would think
virtually everybody in our culture below the 50th percentile of income
is really struggling. Even though they may have two cars and three
television sets, and may have a modest house, chances are they are
one or two pay checks away from being terribly delinquent on mortgage
and car payments. I just think we live in a society that is very fragile
economically for all but the very well off. And this has happened
because of the over-emphasis on individualism in our culture and a
real disappearance not only of Biblical communal values, but of what
Robert Bellah in his study Habits
of the Heart calls the communitarian dimension of the American
political tradition. The individualistic strand has really triumphed
over the communitarian strand of our own tradition. And the result
is that we are an increasingly divided society, divided on financial
lines, economic lines.
This
alienation, this separation, is counter to the vision of the "Dream
of God?"
Yes.
It's a separation from the "Dream of God," the vision of God . It's
a separation from each other. And to link this back to the religious
theme of [my] book, I find it very striking that the Biblical tradition
as a whole, in addition to it being deeply and profoundly religious,
is basically a struggle between two different social visions: between
a social vision that might be called a domination system, such as
we found in [Biblical] Egypt, and the "Dream of God," as a human community
of peace and justice and joyful nourishment. I think one of the missions
of the Church in our time, is to speak of a social vision that is
very different from the [divided, individualistic social vision] that
animates most of us in this society.
Related Links
Marcus Borg: Redefining Jesus for the 21st Century
How can understanding Jesus as a 'man' can lead you to a more authentic
Christian life? Forum.
Reading
the Bible Again for the First Time
How are we to discern biblical authority? Marcus Borg urges us to
see the Bible through new lenses. Excerpt.
God
At 2000
Marcus Borg talks about how he sees God in this excerpt from his talk
at the highly successful God at 2000 conference, which was co-sponsored
by GraceCom. Excerpt.
Jesus
Under the Bodhi Tree
Marcus Borg discusses the parallels and similarities of Jesus and
Buddha, and Christianity and Buddhism. What can the two traditions
learn from each other? Interview.
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