Online registration is now open for the 2009 Festival of Theology & Reunion, March 15-18, at Louisville Seminary. Lecturers include Diana Butler Bass, Marcus Borg, and Brian McClaren, speaking on the theme “New Ways of Being Church.”
To learn more and/or register, visit www.lpts.edu/reunion.
About LeahBradley
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 the historical-grammatical approach or that of biblical literalism. He also distinguishes between the pre-Easter Jesus, who was a Jewish mystic and the founder of Christianity, and the post-Easter Jesus, who is a divine reality that Christians can still experience personally.
Borg does not believe that the Bible has to be taken literally if it is to be taken seriously, an idea he develops in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, subtitled Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. Indeed, he purports that truths can be found in the many messages and metaphors of the Bible stories even though he states that such stories may not have actually happened at all. Rather than asking what the events in certain New Testament stories actually were, he challenges his audience with another question – what effect must this man Jesus have had on the people he came into contact with for so many rich stories to have been written about him after his life?
Why is he speaking at a Christian conference?
How exciting. Obviously, christianity, mainstream, is not really being effective to the masses. Preaching to the choir, blah blah blah . . . Jesus worked with everyone, loved everyone, freed people from all walks of life. I am excited about a conference that is titled “New Ways of Being Church”. Wish I could go.
David Sawyer assured me that the audio of these presentations will be available on the Louisville Seminary website after the event. Some of us old guys can’t make it either. John Matthew, Boise,ID, Louisville Seminary Class of 1954.