The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith - Hardcover

How to have faith -- how to even think about God -- without having to stifle modern rationality is one of the most vital challenges facing contemporary religion. In providing a much-needed solution to the problem of how to have a fully authentic yet fully contemporary understanding of God, Borg --author of the bestselling Meeting Jesus Again for the first Time -- traces his personal journey. He leads readers from the all-powerful and authoritarian God of his (and their) childhood and traditional faith to an equally powerful but dynamic image of God that is relevant to contemporary seekers and more biblical and spiritually authentic. Borg shows how the modern crisis of faith is itself rooted in delusion --misinterpretation of biblical texts and of God's true nature -- and challenges readers to a new way of thinking about God. He opens a practical discussion about how to base a relationship with the divine both immanent and transcendant, here and now, always and everywhere.

Arguing that the authentic Judeo-Christian tradition is that God's being includes the whole world, Borg persuasively shows how this understanding accounts for the whole variety of human religious experience. Ultimately, he introduces readers to a way of thinking about God who is "right here" all around them, rather than distant and remote. This understanding is more intellectually and spiritually satisfying and allows readers to reclaim a stronger sense of God's presence.

"For me, the problem was thus centrally intellectual, even though it deeply affected the rest of my life. For a variety of good reasons, not everybody experiences a serious intellectual problem with the notion of God. But some do. For my own religious journey, the resolution of the intellectual problem was indispensable; without it, I would still be on the outside of the Christian life looking in."--from The God We Never Knew

How to have faith--even to think about God--without having to stifle modern rational thought is one of the most vital challenges facing many of us today. Marcus Borg, author of the bestselling Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, traces his personal spiritual journey to the discovery of an authentic yet fully contemporary understanding of God. In a compelling, readable way, he leads us from the distant, authoritarian God of our childhood to an equally powerful, dynamic adult image of God--"the beyond in our midst," the life spirit that is within us and all around us--that reconciles faith with science, history, critical thinking, and religious pluralism.