The Heart of Christianity

The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith

In The Heart of Christianity, world-renowned Jesus scholar and author of the bestseller Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time argues that the essential ingredients of a Christian life—faith, being born again, the kingdom of God, the gospel of love—are as vitally important today as they have always been, even during this time of conflict and change in the church.
Borg wants to show us, as today's thinking Christians, how to discover a life of faith by reconceptualizing familiar beliefs. Being born again, for example, has nothing to do with fundamentalism, but is a call to radical personal transformation. Talking about the kingdom of God does not mean that you are fighting against secularism, but that you have committed your life to the divine values of justice and love. And living the true Christian way is essentially about opening one's heart—to God, and to others. Above all else, Borg believes with passion and conviction that living the Christian life still makes sense.
"What is the heart of Christianity? What does it mean to be Christian today? In this book, I describe two quite different answers to this question. The first is an earlier vision of Christianity; the second, an
emerging vision. Both are present in the churches of North America today, deeply dividing Christians. We live in a time of conflict and
change in the church. I write with both conviction and passion. The conviction: Chris- tianity makes sense. In my own life, this conviction took time to develop. For about twenty years, from my mid-teens to mid-thirties, Christianity did not make much sense to me. Largely for intellectual reasons, the form of Christianity that I learned in my childhood ceased to be persuasive. For some time now I have been convinced that there are no seri- ous intellectual obstacles to being Christian. There is a way of seeing Christianity that makes persuasive and compelling sense of life in the broadest sense a way of seeing reality and our lives in rela tionship to what is real; a way of seeing God, our relationship to God, and the path of transformation. The sacrifice that Christianity asks of us is not ultimately a sacrifice of the intellect. The passion: to communicate this way of seeing to those for whom an earlier understanding of Christianity makes little or no sense."