A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • 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.

  • Huxley on the Bard and religion

    Speaking of Shakespeare and Christianity, one of the best essays in the Aldous Huxley collection I recently read was “Shakespeare and Religion.” You can read it online here.

  • Stuff evangelical hipsters like

    The author of the blog (and book) Hipster Christianity asks:

    How many of these 50 books have you read? If you’ve read more than 20 of them, there is a good chance that you are a Christian with artistic or intellectual tendencies. If you’ve read more than 30 of them, you are most likely a Christian hipster. If you’ve read more than 40 of them, let me know. You could probably write the sequel to Hipster Christianity.

    Here’s his list, with the ones I’ve read in bold. Best as I can tell, a true hipster Christian must also be an ex- (or current?) evangelical. I like to think that I have artistic or intellectual tendencies (pretensions?), but I only racked up 15 14 books. I would’ve done better if his Dostoevsky choice was The Brothers Karamazov, the Faulkner was The Sound and the Fury, and Steinbeck was The Grapes of Wrath. What makes these particularly un-hip? Too obvious? Also, what makes King Lear the Christian hipster play par excellence??

    Augustine – Confessions
    C.S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces
    Walker Percy – The Moviegoer
    Dorothy Sayers – The Mind of the Maker
    G.K. Chesterton – Orthodoxy
    George MacDonald – Phantastes
    Evelyn Underhill – Mysticism
    Terry Eagleton – After Theory
    Jean-Paul Sarte – Being and Nothingness
    Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings
    Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
    Donald Miller – Blue Like Jazz
    Kathleen Norris – Acedia & Me
    Marilynne Robinson – Gilead
    Shushako Endo- Silence
    George Steiner – Real Presences
    William Shakespeare- King Lear
    Anne Lamott – Traveling Mercies
    Plato – The Republic
    Jacques Ellul – The Technological Society
    Flannery O’Connor – Wise Blood
    Chuck Klosterman – Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs [I mis-remembered the Klosterman book I read, which of course was Fargo Rock City.]
    Dave Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
    Martin Buber – I and Thou
    Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death
    Lauren Winner – Real Sex
    Douglas Coupland – Life After God
    Tim Keller – The Reason For God
    N.T. Wright – Surprised by Hope
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
    A.W. Tozer – The Knowledge of the Holy
    Henri Nouwen – The Return of the Prodigal Son
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer – The Cost of Discipleship
    Jack Kerouac – On the Road
    John Steinbeck – East of Eden
    Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
    Rob Bell – Velvet Elvis
    William P. Young – The Shack
    Shane Claiborne – The Irresistible Revolution
    Thomas a Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
    Dallas Willard – The Divine Conspiracy
    Eugene Peterson – The Message
    Paul Tillich – The Courage To Be
    Francis Collins – The Language of God
    J.I. Packer – Knowing God
    Andy Crouch – Culture Making
    Madeline L’Engle – Walking on Water
    Mark Noll – The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
    Jim Wallis – God’s Politics
    William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

  • Friday links

    – Jim Henley on the high road and the low road

    – The July issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics focuses on poverty and development

    – How easy would it be to fix Social Security?

    – The Twilight series: not just bad, but morally toxic

    – Who you callin’ a pescatarian?

    – Marvin writes about teaching Anselm’s ontological argument

    – The AV Club on alt-country pioneer Robbie Fulks

    – The New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof reports from the West Bank

    – A recently published dystopian novel about animal rights; here’s the author’s blog

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract from the phenomena of experience in order to provide a more precise mapping or modeling of certain aspects of reality for various purposes; the error of reductionism is to mistake those abstract models for the whole of reality itself. (Huston Smith once compared it to thinking that an increasingly detailed map of Illinois will–eventually–result in a map of the entire United States.)

    Physicalism and reductionism are frequently seen as threats to religious belief. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as that they seem to undermine belief in an immaterial (and possibly immortal) soul, or that they deny the “specialness” of human beings. However, I do think it’s possible for a Christian to affirm a non-reductive version of physicalism. This would mean that human beings are physical beings with consciousness, feeling, and rationality. These are genuinely “emergent” features of the world–features that appeared over the course of evolutionary history and which we share with other animals, but they are not reducible to the physico-chemical aspect of reality. They are not simply the outworking of their underlying material substrate but exert a genuine causal influence on the world. Philosophers and theologians have characterized how this might work in a variety of ways, such as “whole-part” or “top-down” causation. But the point is that the mental introduces genuine novelty into the world and is capable of affecting the course of events. Moreover, if something like this is right, it seems possible that God could, at death, preserve whatever it is that constitutes each person’s unique selfhood (e.g., memories, character traits) and “translate” them into some other medium, whether embodied or not.

  • Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and the perennial philosophy

    In the previous post I mentioned Aldous Huxley’s embrace of the “perennial philosophy” and his influence on the scholar of religion Huston Smith. Smith’s work had a big influence on me during my undergraduate years. When I was a callow 20-year-old atheist, Smith’s writings, as well as a series of interviews he did with Bill Moyers for PBS, helped show me that my understanding of religion–including the Christianity that I had so confidently rejected–was extremely shallow.

    Moreover, Smith’s argument that the religions of the world were culturally mediated expressions of a “primordial tradition” (what Huxley referred to as the “perennial philosophy”) was very appealing to me. He combined a robust ontology with an ecumenical spirit that seemed superior–intellectually, morally, and spiritually–to both conservative “orthodoxy” and watered-down liberalism or materialistic atheism.

    Huxley defined the philosophia perennis like this:

    the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being (Huxley, “The Philosophy of the Saints,” Huxley and God, p. 61)

    Huxley characterizes the perennial philosophy as a “working hypothesis” about the nature of reality that goes beyond “humanism and nature-worship” but is wary of the over-developed dogmas of organized religion. This working hypothesis can provide the basis, Huxley thinks, for experiential “research” into spiritual Reality.

    Smith, being a scholar of religion, takes a more positive view of the developed traditions of the world’s religions. Like the Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon, who Smith has also been influenced by, he sees each tradition as an expression or revelation of the divine Mind that is complete in itself as a vehicle for salvation. Unlike some forms of pluralism, which see the various religions as gropings toward an ultimately unknowable Reality (e.g., John Hick’s), Smith’s view is that the divine Reality makes him/her/itself known by means of the various religions.

    Embracing a perennial-philosophy perspective is pretty unfashionable these days. Both the scholarly study of religion and Christian theology tend now to emphasize the differences among traditions. Some Christians attack perennialism as an import of pagan metaphysics into the biblical tradition. However, others–like the Anglican theologian Owen Thomas–argue that Christianity is a synthesis of “biblical religion” and a Neoplatonist-influenced version of the perennial philosophy.

    Despite its problems, I think the perennial philosophy continues to have appeal because it seems to address the problem of religious pluralism without falling into either exclusivism or relativism.

    You can see at least some of the Moyers interviews with Smith on YouTube here.

    The works of Huston Smith that had the biggest impact on me:

    The World’s Religions

    Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions

    Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

    See also his Soul of Christianity for an interpretation of the Christian tradition that is heavily influenced by his perennialist outlook.

    Huxley edited an anthology of mystical writings, interspersed with his own commentary, called–appropriately–The Perennial Philosophy.

    Frithjof Schuon makes the case for perennialism in religion in his book The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

  • “Graceful simplicity” in worship

    Interesting post on Justin Martyr’s account of an early Eucharist (via Connexions). I’m not completely sold on the principle that whatever the early church did was better, but I do think there’s a case to be made for occasionally pruning the liturgy to let the gospel show forth more clearly (a sound Reformational principle). I’d be interested to know what Derek or Christopher thinks of this.

  • Lectionary irony

    In an earlier post I mentioned that our church was hosting a gathering of the “Network of Spiritual Progressives” this past weekend. As part of that event, Rabbi Michael Lerner–one of the chief movers of the network and the publisher of Tikkun magazine–preached at our church this Sunday.

    Ironically, perhaps, this passage from Galatians was one of the lectionary readings:

    We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is justifiednot by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law. But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor. For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. (Gal. 2:15-21)

    The good rabbi didn’t comment directly on the reading, but instead gave a stirring talk on the need for believers in the Bible/Gospel (by which he meant, I take it, both Jews and Christians) to commit to a vision of caring for the world that isn’t hemmed in by the supposed “realism” of the political status quo. It would’ve been interesting to hear his take on the Galatians passage, though.