Marcus Borg

Marcus J. Borg is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar and a liberal religious author. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University and is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, an endowed chair at Oregon State University. He lectures widely and occasionally appears in the national news media. He is currently president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars and a columnist for Beliefnet. A best-selling writer, Borg is among the most widely known and influential voices in progressive Christianity.

Borg was born in 1942^[1] into a Lutheran family of Swedish and Norwegian descent, the youngest of four children. He grew up in the 1940s in North Dakota, and attended Concordia College, Moorhead, a small liberal arts school in Moorhead, Minnesota. While at Moorhead he was a columnist in the school paper and held forth as a Conservative. After a close reading of the Book of Amos and its overt message of social equality he immediately began writing with an increasingly liberal stance and was eventually invited to discontinue writing his articles due to his new-found liberalism. He did graduate work at Union Theological Seminary, and obtained masters and D.Phil degrees at Oxford under George Caird. Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright had studied under the same professor, and many years later Borg and Wright were to share in coauthoring The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, an amicable study in contrast. Following a period of religious questioning in his mid thirties, and numinous experiences similar to those described by Rudolf Otto, Borg became active in the Episcopal church, in which his wife serves as a priest.

Borg advocates entering into relationship with God as more important than belief about God. He has a panentheist understanding of God, which sees God as both indwelling in everything and transcendent. He teaches that a historical-metaphorical approach to the Bible is more meaningful for today's world than is the historical-grammatical approach or that of biblical literalism. He also distinguishes between the pre-Easter Jesus, who was a Jewish mystic and the founder of Christianity, and the post-Easter Jesus, who is a divine reality that Christians can still experience personally.

Borg does not believe that the bible has to be taken literally if it is to be taken seriously. Indeed, he purports that truths can be found in the many messages and metaphors of the Bible stories even though he states that such stories may not have actually happened at all. Rather than asking what the events in certain New Testament stories actually were, he challenges his audience with another question - what effect must this man Jesus have had on the people he came into contact with for so many rich stories to have been written about him after his life?

Bibliography

• "Executed by Rome, Vindicated by God," Stricken by God?, ed. by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9780174-7-7
• Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, 2006, ISBN 0-06-059445-4
• Living the Heart of Christianity: A Guide to Putting Your Faith into Action, co-authored with Tim Scorer, 2006
• The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem, co-authored with John Dominic Crossan, 2006, ISBN 0-06-084539-2
• The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (2003)
• Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (2001)
• The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate, co-authored with Dale C. Allison, John Dominic Crossan, and Stephan J. Patterson, 2001
• God at 2000 (editor, with Ross Mackenzie, 2001)
• The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Co-authored with N. Thomas Wright, 1999, ISBN 0-06-060875-7
• Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, 1998 (Marcus Borg, Respondent)
• Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus, rev. ed., 1998 (originally published in 1984)
• Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, ed., 1997
• The God We Never Knew, 1997
• The Lost Gospel Q, ed., 1996
• Jesus at 2000, ed., 1996
• The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels, co-authored with John Dominic Crossan and Stephen Patterson, ed. by Hershel Shanks, 1994
• Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, 1994
• Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 1994, ISBN 0-06-060917-6
• Jesus: A New Vision, 1987
• The Year of Luke, 1976
• Conflict and Social Change, 1971

References

External links

• Borg has contributed an article, "Executed by Rome, Vindicated by God," to a new text on the Atonement, "Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ"
• Video of Oregon State Socratic Club meeting featuring Marcus Borg discussing question, "What is the Heart of Christianity?"
• Me & Jesus: The Journey Home, an autobiographical sketch by Marcus Borg
• A Portrait of Jesus, based on the works of Borg; includes Biographical notes about Marcus Borg
• Meeting God Again: An Interview with Marcus Borg
• Professional Credentials
• IMDb Entry

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