Receiving Christ Anew A Tribute to Marcus Borg

(1942-2015)

Christopher Currie

Student of Claremont School of Theology January 25th 2015

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This past week, Christianity saw the passing of one of its most prominent academic voices in the public

arena. A leading advocate for the value and wealth of a progressive and nouveau-traditional take on Christian

tradition, Marcus Borg was a leading writer, speaker and a devoted contributor to historical Jesus study. Above all

else he was a passionate Christian who endorsed the value and life giving quality of all the world’s leading

religious traditions and presented a new way of understanding who Jesus might have been, a way that for many,

reinserted life back into the Christian story and tradition.

I would most probably not be in seminary today if it were not for Marcus and his work. His coherent,

sincere, compassionate and informed writings opened my eyes to a way of articulating my own deep conviction in

an inclusive Christian philosophy and a narrative that holds a wellspring of life and hope for all humankind. I

remember many a visit to a UK bookstore where I would perch on the nearest chair for hours being entranced and

excited to discover a Jesus I could believe in, a Christian I could be. Marcus presented Jesus as an inspired

example of what we can become and the tradition in such a way that you could not fail at least be disturbed and

touched by his God of passion, justice and unconditional love.

It is in deep appreciation for his commitment to Jesus, all whose lives he touched and will continue to

touch and with the news of his passing from this world that I have edited an academic paper I produced as part of

my studies late last year. As a proud voice of the committed and devotional spiritual community that is the

Claremont School of Theology, I would like to share a relatively brief summary of some of the passionate ideas of

Marcus Borg as a tribute and kind salute to a man who in his own unique way helped to build an Earth of

compassion and justice, to erect Jesus’ beloved Kingdom of God.

Throughout this article I will utilize several of his central literary works including Meeting Jesus Again

for the First Time, The God We Never Knew, Reading The Bible Again for the First Time, Jesus: Uncovering the

Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, Speaking Christian: Recovering the Lost Meaning of

Christian Words and, co-authored with N.T.Wright, Jesus: Two Visions.

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Marcus Borg

Described by the New York Times as “a leading figure in his generation of Jesus scholars”1, author,

lecturer and scholar Marcus Borgi made his impact both in the church and academic world. A now highly

prominent voice in progressive Christian thought, his work was largely centered on helping people to understand

what it means to be a Christian today. This is especially so in his home country of the United States, where he

recognized deep divisions in the church.

Borg grew up in what he describes as “the world of Christendom.”2 He was a part of an all-Christian

community situated in northeastern North Dakota. He reports to have had his first religious experiences within a

mid-west Lutheran church community in the 1940’s. Rooted in a confessional protestant background, his church

was to leave him with memories of a finger-wagging Pastor Thorson who stressed the importance of accepting

Jesus as a savior for the sins of mankind. He reports being taught of a God as separate from humankind and who

had strict rules of which one would be strongly advised to adhere. He says that he was taught that the most

important reason Jesus mattered was because he died to save him and all humankind from their sins, he died to

allow for forgiveness and the opportunity for believers to attend the heavenly reality upon death. This is what he

later in his work would refer to as “the payment understanding of Jesus.”3 Whilst he admits that he and his family

were more ‘soft-literalist’ in their approach, which is to say that they did not consider all Biblical claims to be

factually true as to deny such scientific ideas as evolution, he says he was in a state of ‘pre-critical naiveté’, a

phrase he attributed to a childhood state where one takes for granted what significant figures teach as fact.4

It was growing up within the ‘modern worldview’, during the enlightenment, which presented him with

questions. He confessed to deeply struggling with matters of faith as he was introduced to a Newtonian type

1 “About Marcus Borg”, accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.marcusjborg.com/about-me/ 2 Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. 3 “Why Jesus Matters”, accessed December 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0g5UzTZz4 4 “Dr. Marcus Borg”, accessed December 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUcOSe47EGA

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worldview where what was real was matter and energy in a space-time universe. Biblical claims began to become

less convincing to him and struggles with his own adolescent sexual desires made him feel distant and unwanted

by the God of his earlier years. He writes in his book The God We Never Knew, “In my early teens, I began to

have serious doubts about the existence of God as a being “out there”…faith began to mean believing claims that

went beyond what we knew”. Whilst he had been taught that faith was a matter of believing the unseen, this was

becoming increasingly difficult. During his college years he was more a deist than a theist but nevertheless was

motivated by ‘intellectual fascination’ with which he found himself at seminary.5

There he found his own conflicts over traditional theological doctrine to be shared by some theologians.

He was inspired by writers such as Paul Tillich and then bishop of the Church of England, John Robinson, who

welcomed the concept that God was less a being and more ‘being itself’. Furthermore what he had received from

his earlier Lutheran experience became incredible to him. At seminary his studies into the historical Jesus, early

Christianity and Biblical texts led him to conclude that there was much more to the story than he had been

previously exposed to. His critical thinking was to lead him to other highly prized academic institutions and

ultimately, informed also by a series of mystical experiences, to reaffirm his faith in God, however this time in a

panentheistic context. His education was to bring him full circle back into the centre of the contemporary Christian

church where he was to make a large contribution to contemporary scholarly interpretations, academic and

ecclesiastical communities and to become a compelling, if controversial voice.

Marcus Borg never really lost his belief in the importance of the questions that lie at the heart of the

Christian tradition. The divisive climate within the American church was one of his largest motivations for helping

redefine the faith, that and his own love and conviction of a contemporary re-envisioning of God and Jesus. He

strongly asserted ‘how we think about God matters.”6

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5 Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

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God

Borg’s growing acquaintance with modern Biblical scholarship, the study of ancient Judaism and the

cross-cultural study of religion are among several academic disciplines which helped form his convictions about

the origins of the Christian faith, it’s central claims, and how it can best be understood to allow for an appreciation

and embodiment of the life to which Jesus calls his followers to.

He was a panentheist, which is to say that he rejected the classical notion of a God that is wholly

separate from life itself and affirmed both the transcendence and the imminence of the divine, which he asserted is

“deeply rooted in Christian tradition…even though the notion is not widely known in popular Christianity.6

Panentheism from the Ancient Greek πᾶν pân ἐν en Θεός Theós meaning ‘all-in-God’ is the theory that the divine

is both apart from and an imminent presence throughout the creation. Unlike pantheism, panenthism upholds a

distinction between divinity and creation whilst stressing the presence of God within all of life. To use Borg’s

words “God is more than the world yet God is present in the world, always here and in moments disclosed to us.”7

He gives several Biblical references to this in The God We Never Knew. He references texts of the psalmists in the

Hebrew Bible and the apostle Paul in the Book of Acts during his marketplace speech, which reads:

They would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God though indeed God is not far

from each one of us. For “In God we live and move and have our being.”8

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The Bible

Borg argued that there is a common misunderstanding among Christians today. He said that contrary to

popular belief, a fundamentalist approach to the Bible does not go back to the early Christian tradition. He argued

6 7 8 Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. 8 Acts 17.27-28 The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. New York: T. Nelson, 1959.

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that fundamentalism, which he described as “a conscious and deliberate insistence on the literal and historical

factuality of Scripture”9 developed in the early eighteenth century as a reaction to the enlightenment. In his book

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Borg wrote “the explicit description of the Bible as inerrant and

infallible by fundamentalists and some conservative-evangelicals cannot claim to be the ancient and traditional

voice of the church”. Whilst he admitted that the notion of the Bible as God’s truth and the importance of Biblical

authority go back further into the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century with its argument for sola

scriptura (“by scripture alone”), he argued that “it wasn’t until the second and third generation of the Reformation

that claims for the infallible truth of the Bible were made…’plenary inspiration’ – the notion that the words of the

Bible were dictated by God and are therefore free from error-was emphasized by those later Reformers.”10

Borg rejected the approach that the Holy Scriptures are the ‘living Word’ in that they are infallible and

beyond human origin in their compositional nature. He saw the Bible as a sacrament for God; whilst God can

speak through the text to readers, the text itself is not literally word for word the words of God

himself/herself/itself. He wrote “in the Bible, as the foundation of the Christian cultural-linguistic world,

Christians find the disclosure of God-not because the Bible is the words of God but because the Bible contains

primary stories and traditions that disclose the character and will of God”.11 He saw the Bible as the human

response to God, the Bible is the way humans saw things and not necessarily the way that God did.

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The Gospels

Not unlike other modern Biblical scholars, Borg stated that the source material of which we are largely

indebted to in knowing anything about Jesus and the central tenements of the Christian faith, the Gospels, need to

be understood within two core assumptions. The first core assumption is that these texts are the result of

developing tradition. This means that during the time between Jesus’ death and the Gospel compositions, the

10 11 Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

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traditions about Jesus developed. This was in order to adapt them for new settings and issues within early Christian

communities. He argued that they did so quite naturally as these early communities experienced the risen Christ,

shaping their understandings of Jesus. The second core assumption, which he asserted helps us to understand the

Biblical content in its proper framework, is that observably (and partly as a result of this developing tradition

described above) the Gospels are both history remembered and history metaphorized. This is to say that the

content of the Gospels are a mixture of what the real historical Jesus said and did and the evangelists’ (the writers

of our several Gospel texts’) attempts to describe the meaning and importance of Jesus to their readers.

N.T Wright is a prominent English-born New Testament scholar and theologian and is more traditional

in his approach than Marcus Borg. He is therefore an efficient contrast in discussing such issues. Wright and Borg

were to become good friends and co-wrote a book together in an attempt to place contrasting views on Jesus and

the Christian tradition in one space. In contrast to Borg’s central claims about how to read the New Testament, in

The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Wright affirms that to approach the Gospels from a contemporary perspective

is to miss the point. He argues that there exist many authoritative and varying perspectives on the nature of New

Testament texts, which invalidates the exclusive reliability of any claim made through objective observation.

Wright prefers to read the New Testament documents from a first century Jewish context. Rather than coming at

the text as Borg does, seeking to look for contemporary influence, he is encouraged to reconstruct the texts from

within this Jewish context. Wright says that to see Jesus as a self-perceived Messiah with an eschatological

mission is appropriate given what we know of Jesus’ times and thus to read the texts as his friend Marcus Borg

does, as though such language was attributed to Jesus only later is to avoid reading the documents as they actually

appear and to take their claims seriously. Nevertheless for those who find the content of the New Testament to

stretch credibility and to bolster a kind of Christian exclusivism, Marcus’ theory has proved very popular amongst

progressive Christians.

To clarify, Borg did not see the Bible as the infallible and directly divinely authored words of God.

Rather he saw it as a fallible, human-penned collection of records about communities and individuals and their

perceived relationship with God. It is sacrament of God, not unlike Jesus, a means by which we can come to know

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God. He stresses in his work the concept of ‘more than factual’. This means that metaphor can be true even if what

it is talking about is not literally true. He uses Jesus’ parables as an illustration of this and says that we are not

concerned about whether such things as told in parables by Jesus are literally true but that they embody a truth and

that the very same context applies to the Bible as a whole. Having said this, to clarify, he did believe in the

historical Jesus.

What is of importance when coming to appreciate the intentions of Marcus Borg is that he intended his

work to enhance the spiritual wealth of the Christian faith, not diminish it. His claims can be seen as a rejection of

a kind of rigid dogmatism, which he sees as destructive to the authentic roots of Christianity. He is himself a

professed believer and member of the Episcopalian church and he was not trying to devalue the heart of the Gospel

narratives or to disclaim the truth of the Gospels but to enhance it by giving people a wider context in which to

appreciate the content. To give an example of how Borg approaches New Testament texts, ‘Jesus is the light of the

world’ is not to say he is literally the light of the world but that he is as the light of the world. Borg sees such

phrases as symbolic, metaphors that can help us to understand something profound about the nature of Jesus.

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Jesus

Pre-Easter and Post-Easter

For Borg, God was witnessed and experienced in many different religions and spiritual traditions. It was

for him as a Christian that he said that he saw the decisive revelation of God’s character and passion in that of

Jesus Christ. The historical Jesus was for him a human possibility, allowing us to deeply appreciate Jesus’

remarkable human example and thus illuminate the divine gift he is to the world. For him, Jesus was not God

himself/herself/itself, at least in the exclusive way proclaimed by the Nicene Creed. Rather Borg considered him to

be a ‘Jewish mystic.’12 The Christ of faith on the other hand is the ‘Christian messiah’, a divine reality experienced

today.

12Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

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Therefore his first priority in discerning anything about Jesus from the New Testament was to

distinguish what he called the ‘pre-Easter Jesus’ from the ‘post-Easter Jesus’13, the ‘Jewish mystic’ from the

‘Christian messiah’. The pre-Easter Jesus was a historical figure born around 4BC and died around 30CE, a real

corporal figure that walked on Earth. Nevertheless he was a man who came to embody a higher level of

consciousness; he lived within a divine reality, an intimate relationship with God. The pre-Easter Jesus then is the

decisive revelation of God’s character and passion in a human life and ever more impact-full and inspiring because

of this. He is a human possibility, one so extraordinary that his followers came to determine that he was the

decisive revelation of God.

The reports we hear about those who experienced him after his death tell us that he was no longer bound

by the physical limitations of time and space, he could walk through walls and is reported by Paul to have

appeared to himself and others in visions. After his death he was experienced differently and thus for Borg this

process of distinguishing these two is appropriate.

This is so important, he said, because to say that Jesus was more than a flesh and blood figure is to deny

the wonder of his work. If Jesus was part God or God himself/herself/itself, he is necessarily ‘more than human’

and thus not human at all. If God performed these wonders, Jesus’ work, whilst alive. ceases to be so miraculous.

The post-Easter Jesus, for Borg, is how Jesus has been experienced following his death, be it in

resurrected or vision form to his early followers and as a living presence in Christian community to this day. Borg

did not defend or reject the idea of an empty tomb and a risen corporeal presence in his work yet he did personally

believe Jesus appeared in resurrected form, even if the stories are not accurate reflections of this reality. He was

primarily interested in what it means for Christians to say, “Jesus is risen!” For him the parabolic consequences

were of just as much value as a literal occurrence.

Christians have received several stories about encounters with the risen Jesus, some of which present

him as a supernatural reality in that he does things he is not reported to have done in his lifetime and that make

13 Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power-- and How They Can Be Restored. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

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him more than human. The resurrection narratives and visions of Jesus reported in the New Testament are parts of

what constitute Marcus Borg’s post-Easter Jesus. Because these narratives are written later than Jesus’ reported

resurrection encounters in reality they are also informed by the experience and witness of early Christian

communities and the sensed living presence within the Christian testimony up to that point. This includes the

exalted language the writers apply to him, language Borg believed early Christian communities composed about

Jesus, including our Gospel writers. Passages such as John 20:28 when Thomas refers to Jesus as “My Lord and

my God” and in ‘Matthew’ when the resurrected Jesus professes “I am with you always, to the close of the age”

reflect this understanding of Jesus, that is the post-Easter Jesus. Borg wrote “there is a near unanimous consensus

among mainstream Biblical scholars that these titles are post-Easter and do not go back to Jesus himself. He did

not talk about himself this way. Instead, these titles are the testimony of his followers to who he had become for

them-in their experience, life and thought.”14. His hope was that this clear distinction would allow us to emulate

the example given to us by Jesus in how we can embed ourselves in the spirit of God.

His contemporary Wright writes “I discover a Jesus who was not simply an example, even the supreme

example, of a mystic or Sprit person…I find…a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the

kingdom of God…and indicating…that he believed he was Israel’s messiah, the one through whom the true God

would accomplish his decisive purpose.”15 For Wright all evidence points to a Jesus with a messianic self-

conception, a Jesus who believed that the kingdom would be brought about through his own work. Borg disagreed

when he wrote “we have no way of knowing whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or as the Son of God

in some special sense. According to the earliest layers of the developing gospel tradition, he said nothing about

having such thoughts. They were no part of his own teaching. His message was not about believing in him”16 So if

14 Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power-- and How They Can Be Restored. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. 15 Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 16 Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994.

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Borg does not share Wright’s confidence in the authoritative New Testament claims then whom does he consider

the historical Jesus to have been?

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The Historical Jesus

Borg asserted that there are key things we can know about the historical Jesus. Among them include that

Jesus was Jewish, grew up in Galilee, became a follower of John the Baptist around his late twenties, shortly after

began his own public ministry (teaching, healing and casting out demons), attracted a following, taught in parables

and aphorisms, was known and criticized for his association with marginalized people, spoke of the ‘kingdom of

God’, was non-violent in his beliefs and was arrested and crucified under Roman rule.17

He refers to him as a ‘Jewish mystic’ but says that in his use of this term when describing the historical

Jesus it contains five elements: spirit person, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet and movement initiator.18

Whilst he may have seen himself as a prophet, Jesus was a teacher of subversive wisdom, using parables to

emphasize compassion and the short sightedness so many possess.

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Jesus and Metaphor: Christological Language

Borg maintained that the New Testament contains within it a variety of Christological images and

understandings about who Jesus was. The traditional and widely accepted Trinity theology of Father, Son,

Spirit was to develop some considerable time later and therefore to assume that the early Christian communities

saw Jesus as the councils who would later decide upon his identity did, ‘homoousios with’ or ‘of the same

17 Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power-- and How They Can Be Restored. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. 18 Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

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substance as’ God the Father is to be incorrect. He argued that for the authors of the Gospels there were a

number of ways in which people conceived of Jesus’ identity and relationship with God. He admits that this

does indeed include the father/son imagery but in conjunction with what he calls “a variety of Christological

images, which function as metaphors for imaging the significance of Jesus and his relationship to God.’19

In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, he made an argument for an alternative Christological

model than that most commonly known today which was ‘Jesus as wisdom personified’. Borg argued that it

was highly possible that Jesus saw himself and spoke as personified ‘wisdom’ in accordance with his Jewish

inheritance and/or that his followers interpreted him in this way and that such an interpretation is embedded

within our Bible. The conceptualization of Jesus as a son of God, that is to say he is as God’s son whose

essence is of God and that he emerges directly from the essence of God eternally is the Christology that has

become staple in official church doctrine throughout the world. He sought to argue that this began as a

rudimentary illustration along with others of equal persuasiveness in our now Biblical literature. He wrote that

the ‘literalistic reading of “Son of God” narrows the scope of Christology by giving primacy to one image.”20,

an image that he argued has been molded by “Trinitarian thinking (which) took shape in a patriarchal and

andocentric culture.”21 He stressed that there are equally valid Christological models or ways of seeing Jesus

contained within the New Testament that are of equal value to the early communities and that they should be

given more consideration than they have been in the past. Such alternative models help us to explore other ideas

about who Jesus was and the mission he was seeking to accomplish. They allow us to move beyond a strictly

male understanding of God or a necessarily patriarchal God of power and control.

He argued that by exploring these other images it could also give us new insights into the earliest

stages of Christological conceptualization. That considering a variety of models allows us to better understand

the author’s use of such images as metaphors to describe Jesus.

19 20 21 22 23 Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994.

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For Borg there was more than one way to view the nature of the pre-Easter Jesus, the flesh and blood

Jesus and for him, as a Christian, how the historical figure is interpreted was important in understanding God’s

character in human form and how he was received and conceived by early Christian communities. He said that

Jesus was conceived of in different ways, be it Logos, Sophia, or Son and we can strongly argue the case that

most likely these were indeed metaphorical devices.

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Christology

For Borg, the idea of Jesus as a participatory sacrifice was unconvincing and dislikeable. When

speaking at All Saints Episcopalian church in 2013 he remarked, “I have come to believe that the notion that

Jesus died in our place to pay for our sins is a deeply destructive notion, corrosive of the meaning of

Christianity. I recognize that some people’s lives have been transformed in a very good way by coming to

believe that but as serious theology or history its deeply mistaken…when you think about it theologically its

kind of terrible, the notion that God cannot forgive unless someone is punished…it leads to a very legalistic or

punitive understanding of the sacred.”22 For him the ‘payment understanding’ as he called it, was limited. He

argued that this understanding was not part of early Christian roots and was first articulated by Anselm of

Canterbury in around 1098.

Furthermore as seen earlier, he did not consider Jesus to have been God in that he was of the same

substance as God. Certainly the idea of the second person of the Trinity and even Jesus as God did not go back

to early Christian contributors Paul and Iraneus, such ideas did not seem to be a part of early Christian thought.

Orthodox Christian debates that followed however were not void of theories about how it was possible for Jesus

to be both fully human and fully divine. Orthodox contributor Athanasius of Alexandria and Borg were

completely at odds in their beliefs. For Athanasius, Christ was only worthy of worship if he was God but for

22 “Why Jesus Matters”, accessed December 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0g5UzTZz4

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Borg, whilst he worshiped Christ, Jesus points to what God looks like in a fully human person and is

remarkable profoundly for that reason. Perhaps what Borg was seeking to stress in his work among other things

was that the earliest Christian thought was to profess Jesus as God revealed in man.

For Borg, the creation of the councils, creeds and an official doctrine of the Trinity are the outcome of

human efforts bound up within political agenda. He talks of how Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 shortly

before he called together a council to aid the unification of his empire. He argued that the bishops involved were

“treated royally” and that this council was rooted in an agenda to quell conflicts in the empire. The Nicene Creed

complimented Athanasius’ theories of Jesus as God and ironically made him appear larger than the emperor.

Within a few years Constantine became Arian (meaning he supported a more human concept of Jesus inspired by

presbyter Arius) along with imperial successors. Could this really have been purely coincidental? Borg writes

about the ever influential Nicene Creed, “As a fourth century product, it uses the language of our religious

ancestors in that century. It, like everything expressed in words, is a historically conditioned and historically

relative product.”23

Whilst he acknowledged that there are certainly references to Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the New

Testament, he sees the trinity as a human creation. He argues that many religions, despite popular belief, hold to a

‘twofoldness’ to God in that he is both transcendent and imminent but Christianity added a third because of the

significance of Jesus to his followers. He thus believed the Trinity to be a witness and testimony of the centrality

of Jesus to Christians but not as a divinely initiated understanding.

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Conclusion

For some Marcus Borg was heretical in his claims. Some might say that like other modern scholars he

consulted the Bible through a lens of his own making, seeking to make such stories and claims accessible for a

modern audience. NT Wright, when speaking publicly, said “I’m fascinated by the way in which lots of people 23 Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power-- and How They Can Be Restored. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

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in America seem really desperate to say that Jesus really wasn’t the significant climatic Jewish figure that the

New Testament makes him out to be…I want to challenge that as a historian”.

Jesus and the core elements of the Christian tradition were of utmost importance to Marcus Borg. He

did not say that because the Jesus of the protestant reformation, the substitute savior of divine essence was not

real for him that there was no truth to the holiness of the Christian tradition and Jesus himself, that there was no

divine inspiration in these processes. He was saying that Jesus was a person like any other but who embodied a

level of consciousness, a God consciousness, God for Jesus was an experiential reality. He was divinely

inspired and thus an extraordinary human being, what one might call a ‘spirit person’, not unlike other

enlightened individuals who have revealed God in their own unique way. He proclaimed that Christians see the

decisive revelation of God through and in Jesus’ example, recorded through the eyes of those who witnessed his

miraculous behavior and that like with them, we see in him the character of the divine reality, what God looks

like in human form. Seen through this lens, Jesus gives us an example to emulate.

This is not to say that the reverent titles attributed to him later had no truth for Borg who asserted that

truth could be ‘more than factual’, metaphor can point to a truth to which we can receive and experience. The

titles given to Jesus represent a truth that Jesus embodied. This is not to say that he was the essence of the

Father or the second person of an actual Trinity but that he was such an extraordinary example that he was

given such venerations. When we worship the Christ of faith we worship a divine reality, which Jesus revealed

to us through his remarkable human accomplishments on Earth, that same reality he worshiped when he too

was on Earth and therefore as Christians or Christ followers we receive God through Jesus. Jesus showed us

that full humanity is not so separate from divinity. He shows us who we can be, the sort of values to embody to

get us closer to divinity here on Earth, a picture of what it is like to act and do as God would. This is the kind of

remarkable and life-changing vision Marcus Borg has left us with.

He was not, like some contemporary thinkers today, interested in doing away with Christianity. In

response to someone like 19th century German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, Borg professed that spiritual

experience is real, that transcendence is something we can experience and that the divine engages with our

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world. We can witness this in the multitude of mystical experiences encountered by human kind. To see the

world in a spiritual context is to be profoundly enriched or so it was for Borg. He wrote “The Christian life is

about personal transformation into the likeness of Christ and it is about participation in God’s passion for the

kingdom of God.”24 Jesus is neither the only way to God or apart from us. We can liken this to words attributed

to Jesus in the Gospel According to John “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have

been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.”25

He tells us that the Jesus who walked this Earth is a human possibility and that the Jesus of now is a

divine reality, willing his followers to do the work he so passionately inspired. In an age where we have come

to understand, with the help of modern psychology, that what we believe about ourselves has profound effects

upon how we live and act in the world, perhaps his model comes at a good time. For could it be a bad thing for

people to affirm the capacity for holiness and goodness in themselves?

For more conservative Christians, Borg distorted the meaning of the Christian gospel and in producing

a solely human Jesus, he might for some not be considered a Christian. Perhaps nobody has the final say on the

inevitable mystery of Jesus’ life but I am reassured that what Marcus Borg has given us in a world in need of

saviors is a savior who can transform the hearts of people today. He inspired us to emulate Jesus’ personhood,

perhaps allowing the gospel to take new life in the ages to come, transforming what is currently a beautiful yet

conflicted world.

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37 The Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978.

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Prayer

God of all creation, Life itself,

We thank you for blessing us with the life of Marcus Borg, a passionate example of one of Earth’s

stewards who stood inspired by one of our great human stories, a story of the humble servant of life

who reminds us of the beauty, awe and majesty that lives within each living heartbeat. In a time of

religious conflict, growing complexity and uncertain future may Marcus’ contribution act as

Inspiration as we grow into greater remembrance of the love that exists in all of our hearts, the awe-

inspiring beautiful cosmic mystery to which we are apart and the Christ’s we truly are.

Amen.

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Bibliography and Supporting Resources

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. USA: Harper Collins,1994. Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Borg, Marcus J. Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power-- and How They Can Be Restored. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Borg, Marcus J. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Borg, Marcus J., and N. T. Wright. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. The Holy Bible: New International Version, Containing the Old Testament and the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1978. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Edition. Plume, Revised Edition of 1974. Web References: “About Marcus Borg”, accessed December 17, 2014, http://www.marcusjborg.com/about-me/ YouTube: “Dr. Marcus Borg”, accessed December 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUcOSe47EGA YouTube “Why Jesus Matters”, accessed December 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0g5UzTZz4 Photographs: Title page: Courtesy of bobcornwall.com Prayer: Courtesy of marcusjborg.com

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Endnotes

i Born in 1942 in North Dakota, Marcus Borg was brought up within the traditional mid-west

Lutheran church. It was as a junior in his college years and being the student of his passionate teacher

of religion, Paul Sponheim, which led him to accept his scholarship at Union seminary in New York

City. It was at Union seminary that Borg fell in love with theological enquiry and where he became

acquainted with liberal theology. He moved to Oxford University in England to receive his doctorate

in philosophy. He went on to be the professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University

where he taught for twenty-eight years. Alongside this he has been a national chair of the Historical

Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, co-chair of its International New Testament

Program Committee and president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. He was also first

cannon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and a fellow of the Jesus seminar, a group of critical

scholars and laymen devoted to examining the historicity of the Jesus story. He is the author of

twenty-one books that engage with the issues of Bible reading, Christian language, the heart of

Christianity and a selection of books on the historical Jesus.

Please kindly note: The article is not official publication and thus its content is not pre-

approved by Harper Collins Publishing or any authoritative representation of Mr. Marcus

Borg. It is the result of research conducted by seminary student Christopher Currie alongside

his personal reflections. Claremont School of Theology does not endorse the accuracy or

reliability of any of the information contained and the article does not necessarily represent

the views of the school.