Reflections on
Marcus Borg
Marcus Borg has died. Many of my
liberal/progressive Christian friends are expressing unqualified enthusiasm for
Borg and his work. I too greatly appreciate Borg’s contribution to popular,
progressive Christian theology. Yet that being honestly said and meant, I am a
bit less enthusiastic about Borg than many of my friends. So on the occasion of
his death I want to reflect on what I see as Borg’s gifts and his shortcomings.
They are both significant, and I sense that his shortcomings are often
overlooked in progressive Christian circles. We need to recognize both sides of
his important work.
Marcus Borg was a Christian
theologian and biblical scholar. For many years he held an endowed chair in the
philosophy department of Oregon State University. OSU is an odd place for a
widely read popular theologian to work, but that’s where Borg lived and taught
for most of his public life. He was educated at, among other places, Oxford
University in England, perhaps the most prestigious university in the world. He
certainly had the credentials to be a first class theologian. Whether he ever
became one is another question.
Borg first came to public
attention as a member of the Jesus Seminar. The first project of that large
group of biblical scholars was to determine which of the sayings the Gospels
(including for some reason the Gospel of Thomas) attribute to Jesus he may
actually have said. The issue the Seminar addressed was the undeniable truth
that the Gospels were written at least a few decades after Jesus’ death. They contain
both historical fact and confessions of faith about Jesus from the later
Christian communities that produced the Gospels. The Jesus Seminar established
what they consider to be objective criteria for determining which of the
sayings of Jesus actually come from Jesus and which are more likely faith
confessions by his later followers. These criteria include whether a Jesus
saying appears in more than one independent ancient source and whether the
saying is something the later community would likely leave out if they could
because the saying was so unpopular or caused them so much trouble with the
Romans.
The members of the Seminar
applied their criteria to each Jesus saying in the Gospels, then they voted on
whether they thought the saying was authentic Jesus or the later community.
Their method of voting got a lot of publicity and was rather widely ridiculed.
They used colored balls. A red ball meant the member thought the saying was
from Jesus. A black ball meant the member thought it wasn’t from Jesus but was
a later faith confession. Each saying was then colored red, pink, grey, or
black. Red meant there was a consensus in the group that the saying came from
Jesus. Pink meant they thought it sounded a good deal like Jesus but probably
had some later addition or alteration as well. Grey meant it didn’t sound much
like Jesus but may have some echo of an authentic Jesus saying. Black meant
they were sure Jesus never said it. Marcus Borg was an important member of the
group doing this voting.
Many progressive Christians are
very enthusiastic about this work of the Jesus Seminar. Frankly, I’m not, or at
least I’m not as enthusiastic as many of my friends. I have a couple of
problems with it. First, it seems to me that the Seminar claims an objectivity
for their work that just isn’t there. I get the sense that their opinions come
down to no more than “It sounds like Jesus to me” or “It doesn’t sound like
Jesus to me.” There certainly are Jesus sayings that sound like Jesus to me and
that don’t sound like Jesus to me too, but I don’t claim much objectivity
behind those reactions. This kind of sorting of the Jesus sayings can far too
easily come down to “I like this one” and “I don’t like that one.” Or “This one
sounds like who I want Jesus to have been” and “this one doesn’t sound like who
I want Jesus to have been.” Many of the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions sound right
to me, but that doesn’t make them objectively correct.
Second, the question of whether
Jesus actually said something a Gospel says he said has no bearing on the fact
that the saying is in the Bible. All of the sayings the Seminar addressed are
in one Gospel or another, some of them in more than one. The Gospels, and not
some version of the Gospels edited to take out things the Seminar (or anyone
else) thinks Jesus didn’t actually say, are our sacred texts. Concluding that Jesus
didn’t say something in a Gospel can be very useful. At John 3:18, for example,
Jesus says “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not
believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of
the only Son of God.”[1]
That verse has been a bulwark of destructive Christian exclusivism and thus of
Christian spiritual imperialism for nearly two thousand years. It helps us to
reject that saying if we can say Jesus never said it, which I am convinced he
never did. Yet that conclusion doesn’t change the fact that John 3:18 is in the
Bible. It doesn’t change the fact that we pastors have to deal with it in our
relationships with parishioners who have been taught all their lives that it is
something Jesus said because the Gospel of John says he said it.
Finally, whether Jesus actually
said something a Gospel attributes to him is essentially irrelevant to whether
or not a saying is true and/or important. The Jesus Seminar doesn’t think Jesus
said any of the things attributed to him in the Gospel of John, and I think
they’re probably right about that. John of course includes the famous “I am”
sayings—I am the good shepherd, I am the way the truth and the life, I am the
vine you are the branches, and others. I am quite prepared to agree that those
statements are faith confessions about Jesus by the Johanine community and not
actual sayings of Jesus. I read them as though they said “We confess that Jesus
is the way, the truth, and the life,” etc. Yet those sayings are among the most
powerfully true statements about Jesus in the New Testament. For us he is the
way, the truth, and the life. For us he is the good shepherd. For us he is the
vine on which we are branches. It really makes no difference to the truth of
those statements that Jesus didn’t say them. So I get a lot less excited about
the work of the Jesus seminar than do many other progressive Christians.
Borg made a name for himself
first by publishing books about Jesus that became quite popular. His early work
was rather scholarly and was intended, at least in part, for an audience of
scholars. Borg became famous, however, not through his scholarly work but
through his work as a popularizer. His book Meeting
Jesus Again for the First Time, published in 1994, was one of his early
popular successes. In that book we see both Borg’s greatness and his
limitations. With that book Borg became much more of a popularizer than he was
a scholar. My father, a history professor at the University of Oregon, used to
object to Borg because he held a chair at a major public university but published
popular, faith based books, not scholarly ones. Dad was largely correct about
that. Meeting Jesus Again for the First
Time, along with its sequel Reading
the Bible Again for the First Time, published in 2001, are immensely useful
tools for adult education in the church. They present the understandings of
modern biblical and theological scholarship in a way that is quite easily
accessible to a lay audience that doesn’t have much theological or biblical
education. I have used them that way myself, and I may well do so again in the
future. They introduce people to nonliteral ways of thinking about Jesus and
about the Bible, something Christianity desperately needs if it is to survive
in the postmodern world. What these works are not however is original
scholarship. Borg may have held an endowed chair at a public university, but he
wrote mostly as a man of faith writing to an audience of faith.
Borg’s greatest contribution to
the life of the church is his book The
Heart of Christianity, Rediscovering a Life of Faith, published in 2003. It
introduces lay people to a new way of looking at Christianity as a whole. It
leads us to see Christianity as a new way of life rather than as an old way of
believing. It is a wonderful book. I believe every Christian should read it and
probably should read it again and again. Yet once more I must say, this book is
not original scholarship. I found nothing in it that I hadn’t heard before.
Borg’s virtue is not really that he comes up with new insights. It is that he
takes insights that really are quite old and makes them accessible to people
who have never heard them before.
Borg did some of his best work
with his colleague and close personal friend John Dominic Crossan. Crossan is a
much better scholar than Borg. Crossan’s book The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,
published in 1993, is scholarly and intellectually dense in a way Borg never
was. So is his book In Search of Paul,
published with Jonathan L. Reed in 2005. Borg and Crossan became close personal
friends. I heard them speak together two or three times. Together they wrote The First Christmas, What the Gospels Really
Teach About Jesus’ Birth, published in 2005, and The Last Week, What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in
Jerusalem, published in 2007. These are fascinating books, and many lay
Christians find them quite challenging. They are great adult education tools in
the church for people who are ready to take on what for them are new ways of
thinking about Jesus and the Gospels. Borg and Crossan used to lead tours of
Turkey to look at ancient Christian sites and teach people about early
Christianity. I wish I had been able to go on one of them.
Here’s the bottom line about
Borg for me. He was a popularizer, not a scholar. He certainly had scholarly
training, having received advanced degrees, including a D.Phil., from Oxford
University. Yet he isn’t primarily significant as a scholar. He is significant
as a popularizer. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with being a
popularizer. I often wish I were more of one than I am. Yet my father was
right. A professor at a public university really shouldn’t be writing faith
based, popular literature; yet that’s exactly what Borg did before he retired
from Oregon State University in 2007.
More importantly perhaps, Borg’s
work as a popularizer rather than a scholar led him to make some compromises in
his theology that I wish he hadn’t made. Here’s the most important one for me.
In The Heart of Christianity and
other works Borg insists that we think of the language of faith as metaphor.
His use of the word metaphor is, frankly, a cop out. What he means is myth
and/or symbol. Myth and symbol are the technical theological terms for what
Borg always calls metaphor. Yet metaphor doesn’t really mean the same thing as
myth. A metaphor is a figure of speech that defines a thing by saying that it is
something else. “All the world’s a stage” is a metaphor from Shakespeare. “But soft, what light through yonder window
breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” from Romeo and Juliet contains several metaphors. A light is the east. A
person is the sun. Obviously Juliet’s window isn’t literally the east, although
it may face east. Juliet is a young woman, not literally the sun. Yet these
metaphors tells us a good deal about how Romeo perceives Juliet. Metaphors like
these say something about a subject by calling it something else with which we
all are familiar.
Symbol and myth have
similarities with metaphor but they are much more than metaphor. A symbol is a
thing or word that points beyond itself to a profound truth that we cannot
grasp in any direct, literal way. A myth is a story that acts as a symbol.[2]
“God is love” is also on one level a metaphor. In the statement “God is love,”
however, the word love isn’t a mere metaphor, it is a symbol. It says something
about God by calling God something else, in this case love. Yet “God is love”
also has a much deeper meaning than a mere metaphor. The statement points
beyond itself to an ineffable reality that we call God that we cannot know
directly but know through symbols that point to God and participate in the
reality of God. A symbol conveys meaning in a way a mere metaphor never can.
Borg says metaphor when he means
symbol or myth. It’s not hard to understand why he does. He’s writing for a
popular audience not a scholarly one, and it seems that he’s afraid of how
theologically unsophisticated people react to the word myth. It get it. You
see, the word myth has acquired a meaning in popular usage that is very
different from its technical meaning. In popular usage a myth is something that
people think is true that in reality is not true. In theological usage a myth,
so far from being something that isn’t true, is something that is more deeply
true than mere fact can ever be. Still, I know how church people react against
the word myth. I use it my own writing. I use it in Liberating Christianity. I explain it. I try to get people to use
the technical, theological meaning of myth not the popular one. I admit that I
have had rather limited success in that endeavor. Some of the people in groups
with which I have read Liberating
Christianity, never got over the popular meaning of myth, and their
inability to accept my definition of myth blocks them from fully grasping what
I’m trying to tell them in my writing. Still, Borg was a university professor.
He compromised his scholarly integrity to reach a mass audience. Reach a mass
audience he did, and he did a lot of good work there. Still, I’ve never gotten
over his compromise of his language. It keeps me from celebrating Borg as
enthusiastically as many of my friends do.
So rest in peace Marcus. You
were a good man who did much good work. I won’t follow you everywhere you went.
Because I understand the language of the faith as symbol and myth I don’t have
to reject things like Jesus’ Resurrection as you sometimes seem to do. Still, I
appreciate what your work can bring to the people of the church who are
searching for new (to them) ways to understand the faith. I trust that much of
your work will continue to be of great use in the church for decades to come.
[1] At
least Jesus says that in John if the translators have put quotation marks,
which aren’t in the Greek original, in the right place. The NRSV has a
translators’ note that says “Some interpreters hold that the quotation
concludes with verse 15.” If that’s right John 3:16-18 isn’t even a saying
attributed to Jesus but is only a statement by the author of the Gospel of
John. Still, the Christian tradition has always taken those verses to be
statements by Jesus.
[2]
For a fuller discussion of symbol and myth see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New
Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, chapter 3.
