A Thinking Reed

Category: Marcus Borg

  • Heart of Christianity 3 – Bible

    Unlike his take on faith, I found Borg’s treatment of the Bible surprisingly weak. He starts out by saying that Christianity is centered on the Bible because it points to God, but that the Bible has become a stumbling block for many because of biblical literalism. Literalism, according to Borg, puts an undue emphasis on 1. infallibility, 2. historical factuality, and 3. moral and doctrinal absolutes.

    By contrast, his emerging paradigm is 1. historical, 2. metaphorical, and 3. sacramental in its treatment of the Bible. Let’s unpack that a bit:

    Historical: The Bible, Borg says, is a human product, created by two historical communities (Israel and the early Christian communities). It tells us how these communities saw their life with God, but, as such, it is historically and culturally conditioned. The Bible should be interpreted in its historical context–as texts written from and to particular communities.

    Metaphorical: Borg defines metaphor as the non-literal but “more-than-literal” meaning of a text. In his account, the more-than-literal is what matters most. For example, the Genesis creation story is primarily about God’s relation to us and the world, not whether the world was created in six 24-hour periods. Likewise, the circumstances of Jesus’ birth as reported in the gospel (the virgin birth, the star of Bethlehem, the wise men, the shepherds, etc.) have rich symbolic meaning that doesn’t depend on their historical factuality.

    Sacramental: The Bible is a “means of grace” whereby God becomes present to us. In personal or public devotional reading of scripture (e.g., lectio divina) we can hear the Spirit speaking to us through the words of the text.

    For the emerging paradigm, Borg says, the Bible is fundamentally a “way of seeing” God and our life with God (metaphor) and a means or way that God speaks to us and comes to us (sacrament).

    I agree with Borg that much of the Bible can–and should–be understood metaphorically and that flat-footed literalism often misses the point. Borg’s key claim is that the stories have this meaning independent of their historic factuality, and, despite the importance of historical context, focusing on the question of “what really happened” detracts from their meaning. While true as far as it goes, I think this is an over-simplification.

    After all, the Bible is a different kind of literature from Shakespeare or Moby-Dick, or even the Bhagavad-Gita. Its spiritual or religious meaning depends, at least to some extent, on historical factuality. To take the most obvious example, Christian faith would collapse–or at least be radically different–if it turned out that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived or that he lived a life very different in character from the one depicted in the gospels (leaving aside how we could ever learn that this was the case).

    Historical truth does matter–even if we agree that there is a lot of mythical embroidery on the basic facts. The meaning of Jesus–the more-than-literal meaning if you like–would be a lot different with a different set of historical facts. This is because the Christian claim is that the divine life was actually lived out among us. I’m not sure Borg would deny this, given the work he’s done on the “historical Jesus” question, but he gives little indication–in this chapter at least–that the history matters much at all. (Which, as Jonathan pointed out, makes you wonder why getting the historical context right is so important.)

    Borg seems at times to want to replace a one-dimensional “literalist” interpretation with a one-dimensional “metaphorical” one. But I think he’s asking the concept of metaphor to do too much work here. (In fact, at times I think he’s using “metaphorical” to include every non-historical type of meaning, from “moral” to “theological” and “metaphysical.” This confuses more than it clarifies.). The Bible is more complex than a simple dichotomy between “literal” and “metaphorical” captures, and I think other approaches do more justice to that complexity.

  • Heart of Christianity 2 – Faith

    I liked chapter two, “Faith: The Way of the Heart,” not so much because it breaks any new ground, but because it clearly lays out what I (at any rate) find to be a helpful understanding of the nature of faith.

    Borg notes that some people criticize Christianity for being more about believing than being a way of life. While this criticism has some bite, he points out that Christianity was originally known as “the Way” and that faith is, properly understood, a way of life.

    Borg distinguishes four meanings of faith:

    – Faith as assent: This refers to giving one’s intellectual assent to the truth-claims of Christianity. Borg claims that this idea of faith rose to prominence during and after the Reformation when the various Protestant sects and the Catholic Church came to be distinguished primarily by their belief-systems. In the wake of the Enlightenment, faith came to be almost identified with the act of believing highly improbable, or at least questionable, things. Borg argues that this definition of faith “puts the emphasis in the wrong place” because it “suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads–as if ‘believing the right things’ is what God is most looking for, as if having ‘correct beliefs’ is what will save us” (p. 30).

    – Faith as trust: Specifically, “radical trust in God.” God is the one who keeps us afloat. This means that we can relax and not be anxious because we can trust in the “sea of being in which we live and move and have our being” (p. 31).

    – Faith as fidelity: Borg describes this as a “radical centering in God.” It is ultimate loyalty to God and God’s commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. The opposite of faith as fidelity is idolatry–putting something ahead of God as our ultimate concern.

    – Faith as vision: This is our synoptic view of reality as a whole. In particular, is God/reality hostile or indifferent to us, or is it consonant with our best interests? To have faith in this sense is to view God/reality as “life-giving and nourishing” or “gracious” (p. 35) rather than out to get us or unconcerned with us.

    Borg cites the last three understandings of faith as particularly congenial to the emerging paradigm because of their relational quality–they define the nature of our relationship with God and shape our response to God, which is lived out in love of and service to our neighbor. He also recognizes, however, that they are important to the earlier paradigm too. The problem with the earlier paradigm, he thinks, is that it over-empasizes the propositional component of faith to the detriment of the relational.

    As a Lutheran, I find Borg’s discussion of faith appealing. Whatever else it might mean, “justification by faith” can’t mean you will be saved if you can manage to believe six impossible things before breakfast. For Luther, it was radical trust in the graciousness of God that constituted “saving” faith.

    However, I’m less persuaded that this approach to faith is distinctive of the “emerging” paradigm. I think that this more relational notion of faith has always been present in the tradition at its best. Even fundamentalism goes beyond “mere belief” to “trust in the Lord” (or “accepting Jesus into your heart”). I suspect that any genuine faith includes elements of all four of the types Borg has identified.

  • Borg’s Heart of Christianity – 1

    Taking a break from the denizens of the deep, I started reading Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity. This is a kind of Mere Christianity for liberal Christians, and something that people at my church have found helpful, so I thought I’d give it a read. (I’ve been critical of Borg in the past, but also appreciative of his work.)

    The agenda of this book is set by what Borg calls two “paradigms” for viewing the Christian tradition–the “earlier” paradigm and the “emergent” paradigm. Now, paradigm has been an overused concept ever since Thomas Kuhn mainstreamed it, but Borg makes a good case for there being multiple comprehensive ways of seeing the same “data”–Jesus, the Bible, and the Christian tradition. No one paradigm can claim to be the Christian tradition; they are all different expressions of it.

    So what distinguishes these two interpretations of the tradition? According the Borg, the earlier paradgim, which has been the dominant one for “the last few hundred years,” emphasizes belief, understood as assent to certain truths. The key beliefs are that God exists, that the Bible is a “divine product”–God’s revealed word–and is to be interpreted “literally,” and that Jesus is God’s Son whose atoning death makes possible the forgiveness of sins.

    According to this paradigm, the main point of Christianity is to get “saved” (understood as ensuring one’s blessedness in the afterlife) by meeting certain requirements, including having the correct beliefs about God and/or Jesus.

    So, what’s the “emergent” paradigm, then? Borg says that this is a more recent view–dating back about one hundred years–that arose in response to the challenges of modernity, especially modern science, historical criticism of the Bible, and religious and cultural pluralism. (Actually, Borg sees both paradigms as responses to modernity; he thinks the earlier paradigm adopts many of modernity’s epistemological assumptions, particularly its emphasis on “literal-factual” truth-claims.)

    The characteristic features of the emergent paradigm, according to Borg, are that it 1. interprets the Bible in its historical context, as a set of writings originally addressed to a diverse set of ancient communities; 2. focuses on the metaphorical or “more-than-factual” meaning of the texts; and 3. sees the Bible and tradition as sacramental mediators of the Spirit–that is, the Bible is sacred in status and function, not origin (inerrancy).

    The emergent paradigm, in contrast to the earlier paradigm’s focus on belief, puts a stronger emphasis on personal response and the relational nature of faith. What’s important is not so much having the “correct” beliefs (which, Borg notes, would make faith a “work” by which we are saved), but being transformed at the level of the “heart”–i.e., the deepest, most fundamental orientation of our selves.

    Given the differences between the two paradigms, does it make sense to even see them as expressions of the same religion? Borg thinks so, for two reasons. First, Christianity has always had multiple interpretations–cultural and theological diversity have been part of the Christian tradition from the beginning. Second, and more importantly, the two paradigms affirm the same central commitments:

    – the reality of God,
    – the centrality of the Bible,
    – the centrality of Jesus,
    – the importance of a relationship with God as known in Jesus, and
    – our need (and the world’s need) for transformation (see p. 17)

    Hinting at a somewhat pragmatic understanding of religious (or at least doctrinal) truth, Borg says that

    the issue isn’t that one of these visions of Christianity is right and the other wrong. Rather, the issue is functionality, whether a paradigm “works” or “gets in the way.” (p. 18)

    By “functionality,” what Borg seems to have in mind is that the tradition of which we’re a part leads to “a sense of the reality and grace of God, to following Jesus, and to lives filled with compassion and a passion for justice” (p. 18). The problem with the earlier paradigm, he says, is that for many people living today it causes unnecessary “static,” preventing them from hearing the message of the gospel.

    I already have a few questions about Borg’s approach, but I want to hold off until I see how he fleshes it out. In a future post (or posts), I’ll take a look at Borg’s exploration of the meaning of faith, the importance of the Bible, the nature of God, and other topics that he thinks require a fresh understanding.

  • Quasi-mea culpa on Marcus Borg

    A while back I lamented that moderate-to-progressive Christians were in danger of creating their own theological ghetto by creating an “approved” reading list of people like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I wrote that “Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the person of Christ with a historical reconstruction of their own devising.”

    Recently, though, our Sunday school class has been using a series of videos that feature various theological talking heads, Borg among them, and I found myself more impressed with him than I remembered being when I first encountered his work. So on a lark, I picked up his Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time from the library. I have to say, while I by no means agreed with everything in it, it offers a much more robust version of Christian faith than I expected. He has a particularly good chapter on Christology that draws on the “Wisdom” Christologies that have been developed by Elizabeth Johnson, among others, which I found pretty congenial (if not entirely satisfactory). Moreover, Borg writes in a warm, pastoral, and intelligible style; when so much theology is written in the impenetrable jargon of the academic guild, it’s no wonder he appeals to a lot of lay Christians.

    I stand by my point that moderate, progressive, and mainline Christians could do a much better job engaging the tradition, but I think Borg deserves more credit than I gave him for working outside of a narrow, historical paradigm.

    UPDATE: This review of another of Borg’s books from Walter Bruggemann seems to strike about the right balance:

    Borg offers a clear contrast between the older model of faith and the new paradigm he advocates–a paradigm marked by the terms “metaphorical” and “sacramental.” He assures the reader that many of the claims in the old model of faith are caricatures that do not need to be honored. Borg’s contrast between old and new paradigm is instructive and helpful. With generosity of spirit, he acknowledges that over time women and men of faith have been helped by both models, though at points the argument takes a somewhat Manicheistic tone whereby all the good claims are grouped in the new and all the bad claims are grouped in the old. Borg does not entertain the possibility that many people of faith “mix and match” across his paradigms in quite workable ways. He consistently draws a sharp and clean contrast.

    […]

    In such a reading the Bible is either a human document or the divine word. God is either a demanding giver of requirements or a generous giver of transformative energy. Jesus must be seen either as a metaphor and sacrament of God or we are stuck with irrelevant formulae cast in impenetrable rhetoric. Such a simple sorting out of either/or (which Borg does with generosity toward claims that he rejects) seems to this reader not only unnecessary but misleading.

  • The fundamentalist hangover

    It occurred to me that there may be something more personal driving some of the points I tried to make in the previous post. I’ve enountered a fair number of people who were raised in very conservative or fundamentalist churches, and who had bad experiences in some cases. For some of these folks, encountering the writings of, say, Marcus Borg can be profoundly liberating simply because they hadn’t realized that there was a different way of looking at Christianity or the life of faith. They exult in a newfound freedom to explore possibilities that would’ve been closed off to them before. And I wouldn’t want to dispargage or downplay how important that can be for some people.

    However, this experience of liberation, it seems, can harden into a permanent anti-fundamentalist defensive crouch. This means that any claims–whether on one’s belief or obedience–can appear to be the thin edge of the fundamentalist wedge. The result is that liberal Christians who are so busy being anti-fundamentalist aren’t always particularly clear on what they’re for (apart, that is, form tolerance, inclusiveness, and social justice, defined in somewhat vague and largely secular terms).

    The problem for me–someone who didn’t grow up fundamentalist and is not particularly reacting against its strictures–is that I am looking for a positive, substantial vision of Christian faith. I don’t imagine that traditional formulations of that vision can be taken over by contemporary people wholesale, but I do think there is a stream of continuity. We catch glimpses of this in the creeds, the liturgy, the lives of the saints, and the writings of some of the great theologians and mystics, but our churches all too frequently come across as afraid to use these treasures they have inherited. Is this because any affirmation of a robust Christian identity is considered a step down the slippery slope to fundamentalism?

  • On not exactly identifying as a “progressive Christian”

    I’ve noticed a trend recently of Christians in mainline chruches, often self-identifying as “progressives,” developing an alternative “canon” of books, Sunday school curricula, approved authors, etc. parallel to those of their conservative counterparts, but which offers an interpretation of Chrisitianity more to their liking. Anyone who’s hung around moderate-to-liberal mainline churches will recognize some of the names: John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Diana Butler Bass, John Spong, Brian McLaren, etc. The idea seems to be that more liberal Christians need to construct their own identity, an identity that is at least in part one created in opposition to “conservative,” “fundamentalist,” or “evangelical” Christianity.

    There’s much to applaud here, at least to the extent that one thinks that U.S. Christianity has been distorted by too close an association with certain conservative interpretations of the Bible and the conservative political agenda they supposedly provide support for. No doubt there are people put off from Christianity because they associate it with a particular social and political stance, and who are relieved when they realize that being a Christian doesn’t require adopting that stance.

    But I’m not entirely comfortable with the “progressive” alternative either, for a few different reasons. First, it risks creating another theological ghetto where certain authors, ideas, etc. are “safe” or “sound” because they’re on “our side.” Second, the critique of fundamentalism–while appropriate–often fails to replace it with a substantial or satisfying alternative. Too many progressives seem opposed to the idea of doctinal truth, per se, creating a void into which rush all sorts of theological individualism and eclecticism.

    Finally, the theology that many of these progressive authors promote is thin and unsatisfying because it’s too detached from Christian history and tradition. Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the person of Christ with a historical reconstruction of their own devising. Indeed, their theology threatens at points to be replaced by Jesus-ology: all we need are the social ethics of Jesus (appropriately filtered through a particular set of historical criteria), and we can dispense with most of the God-talk that has characterized historic Christianity, replacing it with, at most, a kind of vague mysticism.

    This may be unfair to the more nuanced insights of some of these scholars, but once those insights get filtered down to the level of the layperson in your average mainline parish, the theology you end up with is thin gruel indeed. Maybe what we need instead is more of an ad fontes approach: recovering a more complex understanding of Christian tradition by actually engaging with it. Is it really beyond the average Christian layperson to, say, participate in a group study on Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, or Augustine’s Confessions, or the writings of Luther and Calvin, or even more recent authors who are accessible and firmly rooted in the tradition without being easily pigeonholed as “conservatives”? (Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, William Placher, Luke Timothy Johnson, and others come readily to mind.) Traditional theology can have surprisingly radical implications in the areas of social ethics–sometimes far more radical than the tepid liberalism sometimes offered as the only alternative to fundamentalism. And, as Christopher and Derek would no doubt remind us, our tradition is embodied in our prayers and liturgies, the history and theology of which most laypeople are, I think it’s safe to say, woefully ignorant.

    Of course, really engaging with these sources would require leadership who actually believed there was something to be gained by doing this. But I can’t help but think that progressive Christians are too captivated both by a kind of presentism and a kind of primitivism: on the one hand, they take a dim view of tradition, but at the same time think we can leap back to the original Jesus, unobscured by ecclesiastical accretion, with the soul of an egalitarian social refomer and a tolerant, undogmatic theology. Once you’ve watered Christianity down to that point, though, I for one have a hard time seeing why it’s worth bothering about.

  • Marcus Borg’s non-eschatological Jesus

    I found Dale Allison’s book on the historical Jesus stimulating enough that I thought I should get another perspective. I had read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision several years ago, but didn’t really remember much of it. So I thought it might be worth re-visiting.

    Though he comes to different conclusions than Allison (Borg argues for a non-eschatological Jesus), Borg makes a very similar argument regarding our ability to know at least the general shape or pattern of Jesus’s life:

    Though it is true that the gospels are not straightforward historical documents, and though it is true that every saying and story of Jesus has been shaped by the early church, we can in fact know as much about Jesus as we can about any figure in the ancient world. Though we cannot ever be certain that we have direct and exact quotation from Jesus, we can be relatively sure of the kinds of things he said, and of the main themes and thrust of his teaching. We can also be relatively sure of the kinds of things he did: healing, association with outcasts, the deliberate calling of twelve disciples, a mission directed to Israel, a final purposeful journey to Jerusalem.

    Moreover, as we shall see, we can be relatively certain of the kind of person he was: a charismatic who was a healer, sage, prophet, and revitalization movement founder. By incorporating all of this, and not preoccupying ourselves with the question of whether Jesus said exactly the particuar words attributed to him, we can sketch a fairly full and historically defensible portrait of Jesus. (p. 15)

    Borg is countering both what he regards as an excessive agnosticism about the historical Jesus and the prevailing image of Jesus in much 20th century scholarship–that of the eschatological prophet who expected the imminent end of the world.

    However, Borg makes his case against the “eschatological Jesus” largely by denying the historicity of the “Son of Man” sayings, which suggest that Jesus identified himself with an apocalyptic heavenly figure who would usher in the end-times. He says that the scholarly consensus has shifted toward ascribing these sayings to the early church rather than Jesus himself, but I’m not sure he’s being completely consistent here. Allison would point out, I think, that the gospels provide the most reliable general image of Jesus we have and would question whether we have grounds for excluding an entire category of sayings (as opposed to doubting that any particular saying goes back, verbatim, to Jesus). Presumably Borg has more to say about this, so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions; but there does seem to me to be a tension there.