Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

My religious experiences and conversion also affected my intellectual convictions. I have already mentioned two: they made God real to me, and they changed my understanding of the word “God.” But there is a third: I am convinced that there are no intrinsic conflicts between the intellect and Christianity, reason and religion. When there are, they are the unnecessary product either of a misunderstanding of religion and its absolutization or of the absolutization of a nonreligious worldview. Often both: most of today’s “New Atheists” contrast the least thoughtful forms of religion with their robust confidence that contemporary science has the ultimate word on what is real. And there is a fourth: being Christian is not about getting our intellectual beliefs, our theology, right. I emphasize this because much of this book is about a different understanding of Christianity, a change in how we think about God, the Bible, Jesus, and so forth. But being Christian is not having an intellectually correct theology.