Top 40 Marcus J. Borg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.”

— Marcus J. Borg

2. “Rather than imagining God as a personlike being “out there,” this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God, but in God. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek roots of the word “panentheism”: pan means “everything,” en means “in,” and theism comes from the Greek word for “God,” theos.”

— Marcus J. Borg

3. “Eschatology is not, of course, about the destruction of the earth, but about its transfiguration, not about the end of the world, but about the end of evil, injustice, violence – and imperialism.”

— Marcus J. Borg

4. “The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. 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 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.”

— Marcus J. Borg

5. “I think Jesus would have said, “It’s not about me.” During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as “Good Teacher,” Jesus responded with, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”22.”

— Marcus J. Borg

6. “Participatory eschatology involves a twofold affirmation: we are to do it with God, and we cannot do it without God. In St. Augustine’s brilliant aphorism, God without us will not; we without God cannot. We who have seen the star and heard the angels sing are called to participate in the new birth and new world proclaimed by these stories.”

— Marcus J. Borg

7. “Resurrection” does not mean resumption of previous existence but entry into a different kind of existence.”

— Marcus J. Borg

8. “The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.”

— Marcus J. Borg

9. “When somebody says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” my first response is, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Almost always, it’s the God of supernatural theism.”

— Marcus J. Borg

10. “One must die to an old way of being in order to enter a new way of being... salvation is resurrection to a new way of being here and now.”

— Marcus J. Borg

11. “But “having dominion over” meant something very different from what it has often been understood to mean. It refers to the relationship between shepherd and sheep.”

— Marcus J. Borg

12. “You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.”

— Marcus J. Borg

13. “It is a way of being Christian in which beliefs are secondary, not primary. Christianity is a “way” to be followed more than it is about a set of beliefs to be believed. Practice is more important than “correct” beliefs. Beliefs are not irrelevant; they do matter. But they are not the object of faith. God is the “object” of commitment – and for Christians, God as known in Jesus.”

— Marcus J. Borg

14. “Humanity’s universal sin is far, far worse than those traditional vice lists cited for Greeks and Jews by Paul in Romans 1–3. It is this: we have accepted violence as civilization’s drug of choice, and our addiction now threatens creation itself.”

— Marcus J. Borg

15. “The risen Jesus opens up the meaning of scripture. The risen Jesus is known in the sharing of bread. The risen Jesus journeys with us, whether we know it or not. There are moments in which we do come to know him and recognize him. This story is the metaphoric condensation of several years of early Christian thought into one parabolic afternoon.”

— Marcus J. Borg

16. “God has always been in relationship to us, journeying with us, and yearning to be known by us.”

— Marcus J. Borg

17. “When I was a young college teacher in my mid-twenties, an older colleague delighted in characterizing post-Enlightenment theology as “flat-tire theology” – “All the pneuma has gone out of it.”

— Marcus J. Borg

18. “Indeed, for Christians, the unending conversation about Jesus is the most important conversation there is. He is for us the decisive revelation of God – of what can be seen of God’s character and passion in a human life. There are other important conversations. But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most.”

— Marcus J. Borg

19. “The point: only a small minority of Christians and for only a brief period of time have taught biblical inerrancy and the sole authority of the Bible. So how and why has it become “orthodox” Christianity for about half of American Protestants?”

— Marcus J. Borg

20. “Being Christian doesn’t mean being anti-American, but it does mean that Christian identity and loyalty matter more than national identity and loyalty. When there is a conflict, Jesus is Lord.”

— Marcus J. Borg

21. “To state the obvious, how we see is to a large extent the product of what we have seen.”

— Marcus J. Borg

22. “That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads – as if “believing the right things” is what God is most looking for, as if having “correct beliefs” is what will save us. And if you have “incorrect beliefs,” you may be in trouble. It’s remarkable to think that God cares so much about “beliefs.”

— Marcus J. Borg

23. “The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

— Marcus J. Borg

24. “To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true.”

— Marcus J. Borg

25. “We do not think that Jesus thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. His death was the consequence of what he was doing, but not his purpose.”

— Marcus J. Borg

26. “The focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.”

— Marcus J. Borg

27. “Christians also speak of the Bible as the revelation of God, indeed as the “Word of God.” Yet orthodox Christian theology from ancient times has affirmed that the decisive revelation of God is Jesus. The Bible is “the Word” become words, God’s revelation in human words; Jesus is “the Word” become flesh, God’s revelation in a human life. Thus Jesus is more decisive than the Bible.”

— Marcus J. Borg

28. “To see Paul positively does not mean endorsing everything he ever wrote.”

— Marcus J. Borg

29. “In function, Jesus’s aphorisms are very much like his parables – provocative and invitational forms of speech. They provoke thought, lead people to reconsider their taken-for-granted assumptions, and invite them to see life differently.”

— Marcus J. Borg

30. “Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent, like Lent, is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.”

— Marcus J. Borg

31. “The terrible truth is that our world has never established peace through victory. Victory establishes not peace, but lull. Thereafter, violence returns once again, and always worse than before. And it is that escalator violence that then endangers our world.”

— Marcus J. Borg

32. “Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.”

— Marcus J. Borg

33. “God may or may not be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the cultural context in which we speak about God does change.”

— Marcus J. Borg

34. “The first phrase affirms “God so loved the world” – not Christians in particular, or the elect, or the church, but the world. God’s passion is the world. Christians have often been fearful of loving the world, for they have sometimes confused it with “worldliness.” But loving the world doesn’t mean getting lost in the world. It means loving the world – the creation – as God loves the world.”

— Marcus J. Borg

35. “More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted.”

— Marcus J. Borg

36. “We face a similar choice each Christmas, and so each Advent is a time of repentance for the past and change for the future. Do we think that peace on earth comes from Caesar or Christ? Do we think it comes through violent victory or nonviolent justice? Advent, like Lent, is about a choice of how to live personally and individually, nationally and internationally.”

— Marcus J. Borg

37. “Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. In him we see God’s passion.”

— Marcus J. Borg

38. “In the United States, the central values of our culture are the “three A’s”: attractiveness, achievement, and affluence. For.”

— Marcus J. Borg

39. “This vision of life is deeply centered in God, the sacred. So it was for Jesus. So it is in all of the enduring religions of the world. What makes Christianity Christian is centering in God as known in Jesus.”

— Marcus J. Borg

40. “Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one. It is the pragmatic test suggested by William James, quoting Jesus: “By their fruits you shall know them.” The fruit is love. Indeed, such fruit is the purpose of the Christian life.”

— Marcus J. Borg

41. “Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life? If we were not anxious, can you imagine how free we would be, how immediately present we would be able to be, how well we would be able to love? Faith as radical trust has great transforming power.”

— Marcus J. Borg

42. “The sacrifice that Christianity asks of us is not ultimately a sacrifice of the intellect.”

— Marcus J. Borg