My father and I went out to a lecture given by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan at Plymouth Congregational Church (one of the most beautiful churches in town) here in Wichita, KS. We were interested in hearing what these two men, who some Christians hold in high regard, had to say. I’ll go through the first main section Borg’s lecture, and tackle the second section and then Crossan’s lecture at a later date.
Borg started out talking about the need for “adult theological re-education” in the church. His reasoning? Christianity has “become unpersuasive to millions of people in our time.” My first question for this is why, but Borg skips the questioning and goes straight to his belief that Christians have been misinterpreting the scriptures and that the existence of miracles in the scripture makes it difficult to believe. To him, Jesus Christ was nothing more than a Jewish peasant who had nice things to say. All of the miracles, or any of His claims of divinity and even His resurrection are all myths fabricated by the “post-Easter” church in order to better understand/explain the death of their teacher.
My first problem with this? Borg’s insistence that because the Western church has failed, (and we have, time and time again) we must just be wrong. Instead of trying to reconcile our errors with the teachings of Christ he simply disregards anything that he personally has a hard time understanding and guts roughly 80% of the stories and teachings of Christ as myth. This is an illogical step, trying to reconcile Biblical understanding and enlightenment era reasoning is the first step to becoming a relativist. And there is no doubt in my mind that Borg is a relativist, as Borg does not believe in absolute truth, he made that very clear when he removed it from his understanding of the Word of God. According to Borg, all religions are valid, making him a pluralist as well (why any Christian would listen to the words of a pluralist and regard them as truth is beyond me). At this point I began to wonder what the point of his “belief” in Christ was. Unfortunately he never answered this.
The next part of Borg’s lecture focused on removing some of the “myths” of the church. First of all, he regards substitutionary atonement as unBiblical. Let’s look at 1 Peter 3:18:
“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”
Christ suffered and died for our sins, at least according to the Scriptures, so his insistence that it is unBiblical makes me believe that he took his whiteout to that section. Other Scriptural passages that discuss substitutionary atonement include; 2 Corinthians 5:21, Galatians 3:10 – 13 and 1 Peter 2:24.
Borg then went on to talk about Christ as “Superman,” faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap buildings in a single bound etc. He simply removes the miracles as myth, gives no reasoning other than it doesn’t make sense to people and moved on. This is about as weak an argument one could make against the miracles found in the Scriptures, and one that literally needs no refuting from me. His argument just doesn’t stand up on its own.
Borg then goes on to discuss the second coming of Christ as the belief in a “killer Jesus.” He disregards the prophecies, both OT and NT about the Son of God and his judgment of the living and the dead. He also has no answer for the book of Revelation. I will admit that second coming eschatology is not my strong point. I myself am too busy trying to live my life with Christ as an example to worry myself about the myriad of metaphors regarding the reconciliation of the new creation. I know Christ’s eventual return to be truth, and that is enough for me.
Edit: As I was sure that many people would want to argue my lack of scripture for this last paragraph I give you these two references. Hebrews 13:14:
“For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.”
In other words, the cities of this earth will perish, but God’s eternal kingdom will be fulfilled in the second coming of Christ. His second coming is referenced in Revelation 21:2 – 4:
“2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’”
The final argument presented in this section of his lecture regards the belief of “Jesus as a great teacher.” Borg simply states that he believes that Jesus was a great teacher, but that it is inadequate and “often banal.” I simply can’t understand how Borg can completely disregard this as banal, since it is the only item of the historical Jesus that he regards as true.
I will continue with the last section of Borg’s lecture (The Nature of the Gospels) in a later post. Then I will talk about Crossan’s much shorter lecture in a third post. I hope this has been informative and I welcome your comments.
