The God We Never Knew

I just fin­ished read­ing The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dog­matic Reli­gion to a More Authen­tic Con­tem­po­rary Faith by Mar­cus Borg. I have been impressed with his other book, Met­ting Jesus Again for the First Time, in which he reimag­ined what Jesus may have been like. In The God We Never Knew, he takes on the even big­ger task of revi­sion­ing God and the Chris­t­ian faith based on this “new” vision of God. This is the sort of schol­ar­ship I admire in the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion. The abil­ity to bring out alter­na­tive voices and inter­pre­ta­tions from scrip­ture and tradition.

He and oth­ers like Matthew Fox, Dominic Crossan and John Spong have pre­sented new and excit­ing ways of think­ing about faith that are rooted in the mys­ti­cal, wis­dom tra­di­tion and are very rel­e­vant for today. While these writ­ers are not uni­ver­sally accepted, they are respected by those who seek a more pro­gres­sive Chris­t­ian vision and there is a clear move­ment in that direc­tion by a large seg­ment of the church. They were all part of the the­o­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment at the Grad­u­ate The­o­log­i­cal Union where I stud­ied. They do not work in iso­la­tion, but as part of main­line Christianity’s empha­sis on edu­cated clergy and intel­lec­tual integrity.

The Reformed tra­di­tion, which I am a part of, con­sid­ers itself to be reformed and always reform­ing. This is impor­tant. Oth­er­wise faith can become stale and dead. I would like to see such a pro­gres­sive reform move­ment develop within the Radha Krishna devo­tional move­ment in the West. So far, this has been slow and dis­si­dent voices tend to be squashed or mar­gin­al­ized. I do what I can, but I miss the intel­lec­tual col­le­gial­ity that these Chris­t­ian reform­ers share. There­fore, I turn to per­sons such as these to spark my thinking.

There are many sim­i­lar­i­ties between Chris­t­ian devo­tion and Radha Krishna devo­tion, and I believe the basic essen­tial con­cepts are trans­fer­able because they are some­what universal.

Borg begins by dis­cussing how we think about God and presents panen­the­ism as an alter­na­tive to the dis­tant monar­chi­cal model of God. He next goes into imag­ing God and Jesus, why and how it mat­ters. He then dis­cusses how we can live with God which is the heart of spir­i­tu­al­ity. This is more a mat­ter of rela­tion­ship with God rather than fol­low­ing God’s require­ments. God is com­pas­sion­ate and God’s grace pre­dom­i­nates. I am com­ing to believe more and more that it is sim­ply a mat­ter of being open to God’s grace. It’s not as dif­fi­cult or com­pli­cated and some would have us think. The “dream of God” or the “king­dom of God” leads to a pol­i­tics of com­pas­sion and thus has con­se­quences for how we con­duct our­selves in this life. Borg con­cludes by assert­ing that sal­va­tion begins in this life as we are lib­er­ated from bondage, rec­on­ciled with God, enlight­ened, for­given and loved just as we are. This is not to negate sal­va­tion in the after­life, but we really have no way of know­ing just what that will be like.

I am con­sid­er­ing using this book as a model to write my own revi­sion­ing of Radha Krishna devo­tion. I am more attracted to the myth of Radha Krishna than the bib­li­cal myth, but I see the need for a major revisioning.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 11:51 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.