Marcus Borg“The Christian life is about turning toward and entering into relationship with the one who is already in relationship with us, with the one who gave us life, who has loved us from the beginning, and who loves us whether we know it or not, who journeys with us whether we know it or not. The Christian life thus has at its center becoming conscious of that relationship.”
Clustering the Images: Two Models of God
In the minds of those who created the biblical images of God, there was something about each image that they thought of as like God. Biblical metaphors for God are evocative, carrying many rich associations. Many of these metaphors are relational, imaging not only God but ourselves in relationship to God.
Anthropomorphic images portray God in human-like form, king, lord, judge, lawgiver, potter, shepherd. Non-Anthropomorphic as rock, fire, light, eagle, hen, cloud, wind.
Some are images of distance: king, lawgiver, even father. Images of closeness: friend, healer, shield, breath, mother, lover.
In the biblical and Christian traditions, these metaphors have commonly clustered around two primary “models” of God. A model is a gestalt that is a foundational or root image. As a gestalt or foundational image, each model constellates several metaphors into a coherent pattern that also images God’s relationship to us and to the world. Each model of God thus goes with a model of the Christian life.
The first model, which I will call “the monarchical model,” clusters together images of God as king, lord, and father; it leads to a “performance model” of the Christian life.
The second model clusters together images of God that point to intimate relationship and belonging. I will call it “the Spirit model”; it leads to a “relational model” of the Christian life.
Both models and visions of the Christian life are found throughout all periods of Christian history, though the first is more common. From roughly the fourth century—when Christianity became the dominant religion of Western culture—through the present, the monarchical model has dominated. But alongside it, as an alternative voice, the Spirit model has also persisted. Though features from each model are commonly combined into a synthesis, usually by incorporating the second into the first, it is illuminating to see them as contrasting models of God and contrasting visions of the Christian life. They reflect two different voices within the Christian tradition.
Borg’s The God We Never Knew
God as mother
“As a woman pastor taught on prayer, she asked her class of eighth graders to write answers to a number of questions. One was “When you pray, what do you call God?” For all of them, their number one answer was “Father”. Another question was “When you pray, what do you pray for?” Number one on all of their lists was “forgiveness.” Is that a coincidence? If they had routinely prayed to God as mother rather than father, would they still have made forgiveness their number one prayer request, their most urgent need?
Deists and Supernaturalists
The two primary theological options of the 17th and 18th centuries > God as Supernatural Theism, one of creation then non-participation, the other as creation then sporadic intervention. Both alike thought of God as “out there” and not here.
The reasons why this concept of God is so common are easy to understand. Much of the language of the Bible and of Christian devotion creates the impression that
God is a supernatural being separate from the world. God created a universe separate from God, extraordinary miracles are naturally heard as stories of divine intervention from outside the natural order. God “sending” Jesus to this world imply that God is somewhere else. Language of christian devotion speaks of God as an anthropomorphic being separate from us.
These concepts of God are in fact serious misunderstandings, which makes it almost impossible for many to take seriously that God is real.
Borg and Inspiration
I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God. The creation stories in the book of Genesis were Israel’s stories of creation, not God’s stories of creation.
Paul Tillich
God is not a being but “Being-Itself” or “the ground of being.” God doesn’t exist but instead “God is”. To exist means to stand out from the ground of existence as a separate being. “Things” (stones, stars, people, and so on) exist by being separate things. God does not exist in that sense; rather, God is. The God of theological theism (supernatural theism) is bad theology because it sees God as a being beside others and as such a part of the whole of reality. But God is not a part of reality but is ultimate reality. Indeed, the natural and justifiable consequence of thinking of God as a separate being is atheism. God is “the God above God”—the God who remains when the God of supernatural theism disappears.
Compassion
” Compassion means to be moved within oneself as a mother is moved by tenderness and concern for the children of her womb. It is especially associated with feeling the suffering of others.
Saint Paul spoke as such when he said the greatest of the spiritual gifts is love, his more abstract term for what Jesus meant by compassion. “
Marcus Borg
Alfred North Whitehead“When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers…. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly…. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”
“Righteousness is a term that is frequently found in most translations of Matthew’s gospel. Other translators use the word “justice” instead. Righteousness is the personal form of justice. As Matthew uses the term it is not about being pure and holy; it is about service to others. The righteous are those who feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The justice of a compassionate God is not retributive justice. It is distributive justice. It is not about getting even, it is about giving evenly.”
disconnected from a suffering world
” Too many Christians today seem disconnected from a suffering world. In an age of massive human suffering from poverty, war, unjust social structures, and the quest for world empire, the real mystery is the moral and political complacency of middle-class American Christians.
But it’s really no mystery. It’s a reflection of a theology that places primary emphasis on individual redemption, and is frightened of political and social action on behalf of the least of humanity. It reflects a church that, by its silence and inaction, tacitly supports the status quo of the wealthy and powerful. Moreover, by supporting national wars of aggression, the church acts as a chaplain to the powers and principalities of empire. By urging personal acts of individual charity to the exclusion of acts of social justice, churches have effectively turned their backs to the real needs of the least of our brothers and sisters. “
© 2007 Kurt Struckmeyer
