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

In The God We Never Knew, Marcus Borg contrasts the God most people were taught about growing up—remote, authoritarian, monarchical—with a different way of looking at God. This God was just as present in the Christian scriptures and tradition, although it has perhaps not been dominant for much of Christian history.

This conception of/metaphor for the divine that Borg is trying to introduce more broadly is called panentheism. In this, God is everywhere, on some level present and entangled with the entire material universe. I’ve heard someone else describe this way of looking at the relationship between the material universe (and us) and God as being between a ship on the ocean floor and the ocean. The ship is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the ship. But the ship doesn’t contain the ocean: the ocean is far vaster than this ship.

My favorite chapter in this was probably chapter six, “The Dream of God: A Politics of Compassion.” As I’ve hinted at elsewhere, my politics is slowly changing and becoming a more public part of my life, and the phrase, a politics of compassion particularly resonated as one path into the values that I want guiding my politics. I’d like to look at other discussions using that term and think more deeply about it, push more on that phrase.