Apologetics

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.