Five years ago I was distraught over the pummeling my lifelong faith in fundamentalism had taken. Agnosticism was an alluring respite from the endless wrangling. I didn’t so much doubt God’s existence as I doubted his goodness–that perhaps he was the great fundie cult leader in the sky. At the same time, I couldn’t bear admitting my doubts to my family. Neither could I let go of my morbid fascination with theology.

One night I saw Marcus Borg on BookTV. Near the end of his talk, I heard him say that he remains in the Christian tradition because it’s where he feels the most at home. “Oh, well, I can do that,” I thought. It was one more step out of my black and white fundie cocoon. He gave me a way to continue identifying with the Christian tradition without committing what felt like intellectual suicide.

I’m not sure if I have any better grasp on faith today than I did back then, but I will always be grateful for that ray of hope during my dark night.

I believe that you can accept someone’s scholarship without accepting that person’s conclusions. I really don’t stay up nights wrestling with whether Borg is a “true Christian” or not. That’s between him and God. I happen to think God is a lot more merciful than many of his followers, but that’s just me.

I’ve got family in Canada, where the shift away from Christianity is far more pronounced, and it is amazing to me how much we take for granted as Christians here in the United States.

Anyway, I’ve been intrigued recently by people who don’t seem capable of listening to arguments for an idea. Perhaps it’s very post-modern, or perhaps it’s just that I can sometimes be verbally intimidating, even when I try not to be. I wish I had Borg’s skill of presenting compelling arguments, even though he uses his power for ill and not for good.

BTW, it’s funny how much I wanted to start my comment with, “Borg is wrong, …” and then say whatever else. Like somehow it was important to me to pronounce judgment so that everybody would know I’m on the right side of things. But in fact, the more I think of it, it makes me *sad* that Borg is so wrong, and I wish it weren’t so, because there seems to be a lot to admire about the man and maybe much to learn, too. I pray that God will reach out to Borg and restore his faith in a real, once-dead, living Christ.

The TR side of the blogosphere can stop reading INTO and start reading.

Borg believes we are all justified. Automatically. No works or even faith needed.

One of the striking aspects of Borg’s theology that gets overlooked it is essential works-righteousness. After all is said and done, this Jesus which Borg advocates doesn’t really do anything “for” us: He exemplifies something which we have to do. All that hokum about Jesus coming to us over and over is platitudinal smoke and mirrors to cover the fact that Borg is about earning the merit the Jesus in the story earns.

So if we want to give him not only charity but extensive benefit of the doubt, the real problem turns out to be that Borg thinks men can be like Jesus on naturalistic terms, which is to say, through a naturalistic cause to a naturalistic effect.

I hope you would agree that this is bad stuff, and not a matter of “how much” but of “what kind”.

From the desk of the Secretary of Theological Correctness over at TR World HQ, this post is an example of what gets you in trouble with the hard side of the theological blogosphere.

The problem is not your general assessment of Borg — which I think is charitable but clear. It is that final sentence in which you call his faith “real”. “Real” in what sense, bub? It’s real in the sense that Borg thinks Jesus can be real in the way Santa and Aslan are real and the Christian faith still be more than the raw material for greeting cards.

Borg’s faith is “real” in that he believes it, just like any suicide bomber believes in Allah or the Dalai Lama believes in, well, the sound of one hand clapping (who is available at dalailama.com, btw, so so much for “want not”). But it’s not the faith which saves — because it’s not a faith in, as you astutely point out, the Jesus John the Apostle was very “saw-him-after-the-tomb-was-empty” about. In that, it’s not “real”.

So as a memo — not an edict — could you manage epistemological categories inside the Generally-Accepted Theological Accounting Principles? (GATAP) You can download a copy of these someplace — I have lost the link.

Your questions regarding Borg’s faith – i.e., the content of his faith – and his eternal destiny are very good ones. Those of us who are fall under the rubric of fundamentalist evangelical orthodox? conservative? Christianity emphasize the importance of faith in God for salvation. But are the mechanics or means to the end essential for salvation? Do we have to know how Jesus Christ accomplished our salvation in order to believe that he did, in fact, do just that? Can one believe in the resurrection and then later deny its physicality, as perhaps Borg has done?

I don’t know, quite honestly. Did Abraham believe in a physical resurrection? Well, probably, if Heb 11.19 is to be taken literally and not written off as ancient, knuckle-dragging ignorance on his part (from our own position of cultural snobbery and elitism). Did the thief on the cross believe in physical resurrection? I don’t know. The Ethiopian eunuch? Again, I plead agnosticism.

The questions you raise are not so much “What must I do to be saved?” as “How much must I know and accept to be saved?” Again, my answer is: I don’t know.

Dr Mike

When I read Borg, I do find it imminently useful (as he points out) to keep in mind that the experience of the “post-Easter” Jesus is not a body-tapping-on-the-door-of-the-morgue moment. The Gospels note that Jesus was unrecognizable at first glance – the Gospel of John has a resurrected Jesus walking through doors, simply appearing at the side of a lake, etc. (in comparison to the way the resurrected Lazarus interacts with the world) – then in Acts Jesus appears before Saul of Tarsus in a way that only he could comprehend.

It seems that when you get to the bare bones, the fundamental things about the resurrection are that:

1) Christ could not be held by the bands of death.
2) Christ is not dead – he is alive, and still with us.

The resurrection simply defies what we might know of as ’scientific’ knowledge. I think there is a difference between pondering the points above and pondering what a crime scene detective might suspect about the whole thing.

One other comment. I note this:

Primarily, however, I am fascinated by Borg’s journey from orthodox Lutheran Christian to one who rejects the standard orthodox meanings of much of the Christian story, yet remains in the church. Borg is never a ranting, carping scholar looking down his nose at fundamentalists. He calmly recites his loss of one kind of faith as the birth of another kind. In the process, he seldom does more than say “I simply could no longer believe the orthodox version of the story.”

and need to add that there is one other thing I truly admire about Borg: when he presents an argument, he presents an argument and doesn’t try to hide his own personal viewpoints behind rhetorical trickery and/or the attempt to couch that argument in the “infallibility” of The Bible. A lot of modern Christian authors do that as an attempt at ‘evangelism’, which drives me crazy. (Hence, I appreciate writers like Borg and Luke Timothy Johnson, who simply argue their own points instead of trying to make their personal argument “God’s argument”.