Status Updates From Jesus: Uncovering the Life,...

Questions of vindication and visions amplify Borg’s suggestion of “participatory eschatology”. It’s shocking that this book is more relevant in 2025 than it was when first published.

Augustine wrote that “Without us God will not, and without God we cannot.” Borg uses this aphorism to summarize his concept of participatory eschatology. Contextualizing ideas like turning the other cheek as nonviolent resistance is another hallmark of this chapter. While I don’t agree with Borg on every concept, this is essential reading for anyone exploring Christianity or the person and teachings of Jesus.

Borg’s grasp of metaphor and openness to recontextualizing aphorisms across multiple settings continues to elicit challenging questions.

Reading this at a pace of a chapter or two each day. I don’t agree with everything Borg asserts or argues, but he raises challenging and compelling questions. The post-Enlightenment responses to religious thought have ironically dehumanized some of the most crucial experiences individuals had for millennia. Borg restores some of these with an emphasis on the person and personal connection to communities.

“We are in good hands; therefore, let us take care of one another.” It’s hard to put it better. Of course,I am not suggesting that we reduce Christianity to a message that can be put on a greeting card. The Chris tian tradition—its scriptures,its history, its intellectual tradition, its worship and practices, its wisdom, its music and art, its saints, its lives filled with compassion and sometimes justice

“Jesus’s message about the kingdom of God, it seems to me, is not that complicated. God’s will for the earth, God’s passion for this world, is very different from what we see around us. To his hearers he said, “Can you see that?” And he sought to open the eyes of the blind, to set free the captives and oppressed, to proclaim the jubilee of God. This is participatory eschatology.”

Thus the word “repent” combines to return from exile and to think/ see anew. It means to return from a condition of estrangement and exile to the presence of God. And it means to acquire a new way of seeing and thinking that goes beyond the conventions of culture. Both meanings involve centering in God—in God as Jesus spoke of God.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” If we do not examine our lives, if we do not submit them to critical reflection, we are doomed to live our lives as the conventions of our culture dictate.

Borg repeats Karen Armstrong’s idea in a Short History of Myth how the Enlightenment changed the reading of scripture. ( Armstrong probably has been reading Borg. ) Now, certain readers demand factuality and become blind to metaphorical truth. Anyone interested in narratology and the history of first century Israel should read this text

I’m actually rereading this book.

Reading about the Gospels outside of a Catholic school perspective is eye opening.