The Heart of Christianity

The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg is an argument for an alternative to the literalist and exclusivist tradition that has dominated Western Christianity in the modern era. Borg describes an ‘emerging paradigm’ which he believes ‘has been developing for over a hundred years and has recently become a major grass-roots movement within mainline denominations’ (xii). The language used and the nature of the critique of the tradition suggest that Borg’s vision constitutes an alternative not only to modern evangelicalism but also to what is now quite widely labelled ‘emerging church’.

The book falls into two parts, the first looking at what Christianity is, the second at how it is lived. In this article I merely want to ask some questions about the four themes that Borg addresses in the first part: faith, the Bible, God, and Jesus. Much of what he says is entirely valid, and his willingness to acknowledge the power of, and remain in dialogue with, the earlier paradigm is really quite impressive. But at a number of points he diverges significantly from the sort of theology that, I think, is needed for a genuine renewal of the people of God in the wake of the collapse of modernism. For the most part these have to do with Borg’s habit of extracting a universalized spiritual meaning from the particular historical-eschatological narrative - rather as one might extract the body of a snail from its shell. The big question is whether one is really left with a viable animal.

Faith

Borg argues that central to the old paradigm is the idea that faith ‘means holding a certain set of "beliefs," "believing" a set of statements to be true, whether cast as biblical teachings or doctrines or dogma’ (25). As a result faith has been understood as a business of the head, not of the heart. The problem with the ‘propositional’ or intellectual notion of faith, for which Borg uses the Latin term assensus, is that intellectual assent has become ‘effortful’ - it has become too difficult to believe much of the traditional content of Christianity (30). He opposes to assensus three relational forms of faith: faith as fiducia (trust), faith as fidelitas (faithfulness), and faith as visio (a way of seeing). This latter form of faith connects with one of the central arguments of the book - that the Christian tradition is a metaphor through which we see God (36).

It seems to me, however, that the fundamental question regarding faith that we have to deal with is not ‘How do we apprehend the reality of God (head or heart)?’ but ‘Where is it taking us?’ Borg offers a generalized, existentialist definition of faith that is in many respects an improvement on the propositional model, but it lacks a crucial sense of covenantal purpose: what has God called his people to do that requires such radical trust? When Jesus taught people not to be anxious (fiducia), or to love their neighbour (fidelitas), or (perhaps) to see ‘what is’ as ‘life-giving and nourishing’ (visio), he did so within the overarching story of God and Israel: they are to learn such faith in order to escape the catastrophe of judgment, or to be a dwelling place of the Spirit, or for the sake of mission. In relation to this purpose there is no particular reason to prefer one form of faith over another: they all come into the play as the people of God, drawing on a whole spectrum of resources, seeks to make sense of and respond to its calling.

The Bible

To be Christian, according to Borg, is to be ‘centered in the God of the Bible’ - not to the exclusion or denigration of other sacred texts but as a mark of Christian identity (43). Many Christians today, however, can no longer accept the premise of the earlier paradigm that the Bible is literally true, so an alternative way of reading it is required - in Borg’s view one that understands the Bible as historical, metaphorical, and sacramental.

By ‘historical’ Borg means that the Bible is the product of two historical communities - ancient Israel and the early Christian movement. It is a human document, not the revealed Word of God, and offers only a ‘relative’ and ‘culturally’ conditioned insight into the religious experiences of these communities. Of course, understood in this way ‘many of the problems that people have with the Bible largely disappear’ (46). What has also disappeared, however, is the possibility that the ‘God of the Bible’ might wish to play an active part in human history - by, for example, addressing individuals such as Abraham or Paul, calling people to be a ‘royal priesthood’, and so on. Borg is anxious to emphasize the relational nature of Christian faith but at the same time he rules out the one thing that makes a relationship interesting - the freedom of the other party to take the initiative, act unpredictability, conceal or reveal herself or himself.

What happens when you regard not only individual stories but the whole Bible as a ‘"giant" metaphor’ (57)? At some point you have to ask whether the Bible really allows us to do this. For a start, whose metaphor would it be? Did the biblical authors, and the people whose words they recorded, believe that they were constructing a giant metaphor? Is it God’s metaphor? But Borg doesn’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God as such. Or is it our metaphor? In which case, aren’t we merely allegorizing the Bible to make it say what we want it to say? There is surely a contradiction between the argument that the Bible is a historical text and Borg’s reluctance to allow the Bible, as a historical text, to define its own story, establish its own meaning, set the rules for determining what is ‘literal’ and what is not. The solution to the problem of biblical literalism is not in a rather lazy fashion to allegorize the problematic passages (creation, birth stories, resurrection), but to step back to take in the larger story, which is quite different from the framework of an abstract and universalized theology that guides Borg’s interpretation.

God

Borg’s view of God is explicitly panentheistic and is contrasted with the supernatural and interventionist theism of the earlier paradigm. God is not ‘out there’ but ‘right here’, indeed ‘more than right here’ (66). He does not intervene from outside but is always present, ‘in, with, and under’ everything. Part of the reason for this preference is what Borg sees as the ‘insuperable difficulty’ of divine nonintervention: ‘if God sometimes intervenes, how does one account for the noninterventions?’ (67). There are, however, other ways of accounting for the apparently erratic nature of divine interventions, answers to prayer, etc. If we regarded ‘miraculous’ events as signs - on the one hand, of the character of God and, on the other, of the possibility of a new creation - we would not be stuck with the problem of having to account for the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of these incursions into the natural order. The point then is not that God has somehow failed to intervene on all occasions but that along the road of normal human experience there are signposts to the renewal of creation.

The ‘out there’ / ‘right here’ distinction is another one of those stubborn dualisms that hamper the development of a post-modern theology. These dualisms become inevitable outside any concept of a covenantal relationship, at the level of Borg’s ‘wholesale God’ (71); but the biblical God, in whatever manner he is encountered, worshipped, loved, feared, is a God who chooses, who instructs, who alters the course of events, and so on. This sort of covenantal theology, with its strong interest in the interweaving storylines of human history, does not readily resolve itself into some abstract, universal, philosophical notion of God. The problem with Borg’s panentheism is, again, that it takes all the fun out of the relationship. By the time we get to statements like ‘God is the name we use for "isness without limitations," "isness" without limits’ (69), we have to wonder whether it is worth using the word ‘God’ at all.

Jesus

Borg objects to the literalism of the earlier paradigm that treats the gospels as ‘straightforward historical documents’ and generates an unpersuasive image of Jesus:

It emphasizes his identity: that he was the Son of God, the "light of the world," the "bread of life," the promised messiah who will come again, and so forth, and that he knew and taught this about himself. It emphasizes the saving significance of his death and sees it as the purpose of his life: he died for our sins. It emphasizes the miraculous, especially the virgin birth and physical bodily resurrection. It also emphasizes that Jesus is the only way to salvation, and that Christianity is therefore the only true religion. (81)

Borg’s reading of the gospels forces an unnecessary and unwarranted division between history and metaphor. So for example, he argues that the story of Jesus turning water into wine is literally incredible, therefore it must be metaphor: it is John’s way of saying, ‘This is what the story of Jesus is about…’ (85). If we insist on reading it literally as a mere proof of divinity, we will miss the rich metaphorical meaning of the story. This raises all sorts of questions. What is left of the story of Jesus for these stories to be about if we transfer all the ‘miraculous’ incidents from the category of history to the category of metaphor? Why must this be John’s way of saying what the story of Jesus is about? Why couldn’t Jesus himself have fused the historical and the metaphorical, the literal and the symbolic, in a defining prophetic event? Borg argues that in this instance the ‘literal reading’ of the story is inferior to the metaphorical (86). But would we want to say the same thing about the healing of the woman with a discharge of blood? Is the metaphorical reading of that story superior to the literal?

We also find in Borg’s account of Jesus the same tendency to filter out the covenantal and eschatological elements in the interests of a universalized ‘wholesale’ theology.

i) He interprets the phrase ‘Son of God’ as a metaphor that ‘affirms that Jesus’ relationship to God is intimate, like that of child to parent’ (87). That is enough to knock the ‘literal reading of the birth stories’ on its head. Borg’s purposes are served simply by switching from the literal to the metaphorical - and in the process he conveniently misses the real point of the metaphor, which brings into play a much more sharply defined commitment and intentionality than is conveyed by the idea of ‘intimacy’.

ii) Borg uproots Jesus’ image of the ‘narrow way’ from its historical-eschatological context and makes of it a metaphor for ‘an internal psychological-spiritual process’, analogous to M. Scott Peck’s ‘road less travelled’, ‘beyond the "broad way" of convention and tradition’ (90).

iii) Borg makes much of the ‘political’ implications of Jesus’ life and death, but typically Jesus’ critique of injustice and the ‘domination system’ of Rome is treated as simply an instance of a universal ethical or religious stance. I think we entirely misconstrue the significance of Jesus the ‘social prophet and movement initiator’ if we allow the particular story about God and Israel to fade into the background. This point could also be illustrated from a chapter in the second part of the book, in which Borg argues for a ‘politically engaged spirituality’ that ‘affirms both spiritual transformation and political transformation’ (146). I’m not convinced that we can make the sort of unqualified extrapolation from the political implications of the gospel under the eschatological circumstances of the first century that would require Americans to say, ‘"Jesus is my commander in chief" - and thus the president is not.’