Marcus Borg

[andrewlittle]

I'm gonna be gone a couple of days. I will be in Cedar Rapids listening to Marcus Borg lecture and dialogue. A drift of fresh air in an otherwise stale part of the world.

Hopefully, I'll come back pumped.

Have fun, and play nice while I'm gone. Maybe I'll be able to learn how, when I read the posts after I get back.

[anyslyenchanter]

Yay for Marcus Borg... I was able to hear him speak at Chautauqua Institution several years ago and was fully challenged and blessed.

[Daniel]

Ok....I'm out to lunch. Who's Mr. Borg? (Yes....I will google...but a first hand account would be welcome.)

And for the record, I did not make a "Resistance is Futile" joke.

[Daniel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Borg


Marcus J. Borg is a contemporary Jesus Scholar and 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.

Borg was born 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 Biblical literalism.

My kind of guy.

Andy. Sounds like you are in for an interesting weekend.

How could anyone resist this? He sounds like a Buddhist in disguise.

[anyslyenchanter]

Yeppir that's him. He's a columnist for Beliefnet as well (http://www.beliefnet.com/author/author_52.html). I highly recommend his books and essays. Enjoy, Andy!

[Daniel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Otto


Borg's spiritual anscestor.

Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869–6 March 1937) was an eminent German Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion.




Life

Born in Peine near Hanover, Otto attended the Gymnasium Andreanum in Hildesheim and studied at the universities of Erlangen and Göttingen, from where he received both his doctorate (with a dissertation on Martin Luther) and habilitation on Kant. In 1906, he became extraordinary professor (see professor), and in 1910 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen. In 1915, he became ordinary professor at the University of Breslau, and in 1917, at the University of Marburg's Divinity School, then one of the most famous Protestant seminaries in the world. Although he received several other calls, he remained in Marburg for the rest of his life. He retired in 1929 and died of pneumonia eight years later, after he had suffered serious injuries falling some 20 m from a tower. Persistent but unconfirmed rumors identified this as a suicide attempt. He is buried in Marburg cemetery.


The Holy

Otto's most famous work, The Idea of the Holy (published first in 1917 as Das Heilige), is one of the most successful German theological books of the 20th century. It has never been out of print and is now available in about 20 languages. The book defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self". He coined this new term based on the Latin numen (deity). This expression is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant's noumenon, a Greek term referring to an unknowable reality underlying all things. The numinous is a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time. It also sets a paradigm for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right. This paradigm was under much attack between approximately 1950 and 1990 but has made a strong comeback since then, after its phenomenological aspects have become more apparent.

Influence

It is more difficult to say who, in theology and philosophy of religion in the first half of the 20th century, was not influenced by Otto than who was. German-American theologian Paul Tillich acknowledged Otto's influence on him, as did Romanian-American anthropologist Mircea Eliade and Otto`s most famous German pupil Gustav Mensching (1901-1978) from Bonn University. Eliade used the concepts from The Idea of the Holy as the starting point for his own 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane. It is also noted that Otto was one of the very few modern theologians to whom C.S. Lewis indicates a debt, particularly the idea of the numinous in The Problem of Pain. Others to acknowledge Otto were, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer (critical in his youth, respectful in his old age), Max Scheler, Ernst Jünger, Joseph Needham and Hans Jonas.

[andrewlittle]

My kind of guy.

Andy. Sounds like you are in for an interesting weekend.

How could anyone resist this? He sounds like a Buddhist in disguise.

I loved it. I always do. And for you Daniel, Borg says,
"As far as I am concerned Jesus was one of the two most influential and holy humans ever to walk the earth. Whenever I say this, people always ask me who is the other one. My first answer is that it really doesn't matter, does it? But then they press. So, I tell them its Buddha."

Okay, now to bed. I have to leave by 5:30 to back there for Session 2.

[Daniel]

I loved it. I always do. And for you Daniel, Borg says,
"As far as I am concerned Jesus was one of the two most influential and holy humans ever to walk the earth. Whenever I say this, people always ask me who is the other one. My first answer is that it really doesn't matter, does it? But then they press. So, I tell them its Buddha."

Okay, now to bed. I have to leave by 5:30 to back there for Session 2.

:cool:

Ah....this closet Buddhist can sniff another one out a mile away. Please take good notes. I want a full report! :love:

~

I ordered Otto's book from abebooks.com for 5 bucks. Can you believe that? Thought I'd go back to the guy who inspired Borg before I read the latter.

[andrewlittle]

And I'll give you a summary. Like he said, he really didn't give a lot of new information - but he definitely discussed a lot of ways to Christian Re-education.

It was largley about how to move church members from a simplistic, semi-literal Biblical understanding to a more nuanced one, without scaring the hell out of them or making them feel like they are being backed against the wall.

The surprise to me was in the shows of hands that he asked for to determine the range of participants.

25% Catholic
15% each Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian
10% Evangelical or Pentecostal
the rest unaffiliated.

The sad part (taken from the reservations):
15% were ministers in any denomination. The rest were laypeople. When asked if they think their pastors would get involved in the conversation, almost all the laypeople said "no".

I shouldn't be surprised - this drew from mostly the eastern half of Iowa. But still!