On Christian
Apologetics and Contextual Theology
For the adult ed.
series on
Borg, The Heart of Christianity
Rev. Dr. Tom
Sorenson, Pastor
March, 2017
One way to understand Marcus
Borg’s work is to see it as Christian apologetics. Apologetics is a type of
Christian theology. It is not theology that apologizes for Christianity as the
name might suggest. Rather, it is theology that seeks to make the Christian
faith understandable and accessible to the people of a particular time and
place. It is theology written to speak Christian truth to people of a
particular historical, cultural, and linguistic context. Many Christians today
may find the notion that Christianity must adapt itself to particular contexts
puzzling or even just plain wrong. I mean, aren’t the truths of the Christian
faith eternal and unchanging? That’s certainly what we’ve been taught that they
are. Aren’t they? Well, yes they are, and no they aren’t. The foundational
beliefs of Christianity are eternal. God is eternal. The Christian confession
of Jesus Christ as the Son of God is eternal. Yet the specific human contexts
within which Christianity lives and functions and to which it endeavors to
speak are not eternal. They change all the time. A faith that cannot find ways
to address the specific and changing worlds with which it is faced will die.
Only a faith that can adapt itself to changing contexts will survive.
Perhaps this example will help
here. The Christian Bible was not written using language and categories from
Greek philosophy. It was written using language and understandings from the
Jewish religious heritage. That heritage did not concern itself much with
philosophical issues like the nature of reality (ontology) or with the question
of how we humans can know anything at all (epistemology). At least it did not
discuss those issues in so many words. It doesn’t address those philosophical
issues in anything like the way Greek philosophy did. Christianity, however,
quickly moved away from its Jewish base and origins into the world of the
Greeks, Greek being the dominant language and culture of the eastern
Mediterranean world in the first century CE. As a result, and in order so speak
meaningfully to a Greek world, Christians began to use language from Greek
philosophy to talk about God and Jesus Christ.
We see them doing that, for
example, in the Nicene Creed. That Creed dates from the year 325 CE and the
First Ecumenical Council. The Nicene Creed was formulated in Greek by Christian
bishops thoroughly steeped in Greek culture. Thus we find Greek words in that
creed like “homoousious,” usually
translated as “of one being” or “of one substance.” The root word behind that
word, “ousia,” means substance as
substance was understood in the Platonic philosophy of the fourth century CE.
That word appears only rarely in the Greek originals of the New Testament
texts, where it means only something like “goods” or “property.” In the New
Testament it has none of the meaning it had in Greek philosophy. The Nicene
Creed used the word in its Greek philosophical meaning. That Creed was written
by Greeks for Greeks not by Jews for Jews, so it spoke in the contemporary
cultural idiom of the Greeks.
In the year 451 CE another
Ecumenical Council, the Fourth, issued another creed of a sort sometimes called
the Definition or Formula of Chalcedon, Chalcedon being the city in Asia Minor
where the Council met. The Formula of Chalcedon dealt with the identity of Jesus
Christ and the nature of the Trinity. Like Nicaea it used language from Greek
philosophy, having like Nicaea having been written by Greeks mostly for Greeks.
It says that Christ has two “natures,” using the Greek word physis for nature. It says that these
two “natures” appear in one “Person,” using the Greek word “prosopon.” The one “Person” appears in
one “hypostasis,” an essentially
untranslatable Greek philosophical word that is also sometimes translated as
“person.”
The words physis, prosopon, and hypostasis
all had specific but quite complex meanings in Greek philosophy. They spoke
meaningfully to the original Greek audiences of the Creeds, but the people who
produced the Bible over the centuries would have understood them not at all.
Neither do most people today. Take the word prosopon,
translated as person, for example. We translate it as person, but it didn’t
mean anything like our modern psychological sense of what a person is. The word
originally referred to the masks Greek actors held before their faces to
indicate the character they were playing or the character’s emotional state. We
call that object a mask not a person. Prosopon
came to mean something which expresses the nature of a thing or person. Fifth
century Greeks would have understood that that’s what prosopon meant, or at least the educated among them would have. The
people who produced the Bible would not have understood it at all, for Jewish
thought had no equivalent; and all of the biblical authors (except probably for
the author we know as Luke) were Jews. We don’t understand prosopon today either unless we’ve made a point of studying its meaning.
We translate it as person; but we mean something very different by person than
the Greeks meant by prosopon, so we
read the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds differently than their authors and
original audience did. The language of Nicaea and Chalcedon spoke to the people
of their times and places. It didn’t speak to Jewish people of its time, and it
doesn’t much speak to us.
That’s contextual theology.
Theology must speak to the people of its context, that is, of its time and
place. When it does it may not speak much at all to people of a different time
and place. Theology that seeks to reimagine the faith so that it speaks to the
people of its time and place is called apologetics. That’s what Borg is doing.
It’s also what I do in my books Liberating
Christianity and Liberating the
Bible. People today say that the world is changing. It is more accurate to
say that it has already changed, it’s just that not everyone knows it yet. The
kind of Christianity that Borg calls the Earlier Paradigm is a kind of
Christianity that spoke to people in our country primarily in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the Christianity probably all
of us were taught as we grew up in the church. What far too many people haven’t
realized yet is that the world has moved beyond it, and Christianity must move
beyond it too if it is to survive.
Most Christians don’t know it,
but that Christianity that we were all taught is not ancient Christianity. It
is actually quite modern Christianity. It is grounded in certain assumptions
about the nature of truth that are modern not ancient. They come from the
European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they
come from the Scientific Revolution that was such an important part of the
Enlightenment. Those assumptions include most significantly the belief that
truth consists only of facts. Because in the time of the Enlightenment and ever
since science has made so many astounding discoveries about the natural world
that we take to be fact, truth got reduced to fact. People began to assume that
the Bible must be speaking about facts because only facts are true. Thus, if
the Bible is true it must be factual. That’s why some Christians cling so
desperately to a belief in the factual truth of, for example, the six days of
creation story with which the Bible opens. They cling to believing that it is
factually true because for them if it isn’t factually true it contains no truth
at all. These Christians don’t know that in the time when Genesis 1 was written
it would have occurred to no one that the purpose of such writing was primarily
to convey facts. The purpose of such writing was to convey what theologians
(other than Borg and some others aiming at a popular audience) call mythic
truth. Mythic truth is truth told through story not through factual reporting.
It is truth to which a writing points, a truth that lies beneath and beyond the
writing to which the writing points but which it can never fully capture.
European culture, and through it the dominant North American culture, lost
belief in that kind of truth in the Enlightenment. That’s why we were all
taught, for example, that the story of Noah and the ark happened as a matter of
fact just as the Bible supposedly tells it (supposedly because in that story
there are actually two versions of how many animals Noah was to take—you can
look it up) when actually the author of that story surely never considered that
he was writing fact just as the authors of either of the creation stories in
Genesis ever considered that they were writing fact.
Our loss of an appreciation of
mythic truth is just one example of how Christianity that spoke to a world that
had lost that kind of truth no longer speaks to a great many people today. The
world has changed. One of the ways in which it has changed is that the leading
elements of western culture have rediscovered mythic truth. Borg calls it
metaphoric truth, but the technically correct term for it is mythic truth. Using
the intellectual tools developed in the Enlightenment we have discovered that
it just isn’t possible to believe that everything in the Bible is factually
true. No, Joshua didn’t make the sun stand still in the sky because the sun
doesn’t actually move across the sky. It just looks to us like it does. See
Joshua 10:12-13. But we have also rediscovered that many—not all but many—parts
of the Bible that surely are not factually true are nonetheless profoundly
true. The creation story of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 is a prime example. Many Bible
stories are more true than any mere fact could ever be. They are more true
because they speak of God, and God ultimately transcends all of our meagre
facts.
Other examples of how the
Christianity of the modern, rationalistic world has become outmoded could
easily be given, but I trust the point is made. The world changes. Culture
changes. Christianity must and throughout its history has changed to speak to new
and newly emerging worlds. Christianity in western Europe and North America has
been doing that for at least a century as the reality that the world of
modernism was changing into the world of postmodernism started to become
apparent. Bog’s book The Heart of
Christianity is a very good popular introduction to how contemporary
Christianity has changed in response to a changed and changing world. It is a
good example of popular contextual, apologetic theology.
