Bored with Borg's Book

Borg’s Boring Project

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in church history to sense that what used to be Jesus’ simple teachings about

loving God and neighbor seem to have become a labyrinth of endlessly nuanced dogmatic theology over the centuries with more volumes than one could possibly read in several life times. The famous and influential German theologian Adolf von Harnack once remarked in his work What is Christianity? that over the centuries Jesus’ pure Gospel has been polluted and corrupted by subsequent generations of church theologians and that what the church really needs is to scrape away all these extra theological trappings in order to return to what is simple and essential (Adolf von Harnack, What is Chrstianity?, Trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957). Likewise, Thomas Jefferson once remarked about his project of literally cutting out the “genuine” words of Jesus from the supposed surrounding later ecclesial corruption was as easy as separating “the diamond from the dung hill.” In a way this is the same sort of argument taken up by Marcus Borg in his Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, (and the wider “Quest for the Historical Jesus” project,) and while his multifaceted portrait of the “real” Jesus is compelling, his work is nonetheless ladened with theological, historical, and methodological problems and therefore his usefulness as a resource in ministry is minimal. 

Sacking Salvation

One of Borg’s most important, and problematic, theological moves is to bifurcate what he calls the “pre-Easter” Jesus with the “post-Easter” Jesus. The former is the “historical” Jesus, and the later is the Jesus the Church created and adorned with theological embellishments decades after the fact. This distinction may seem at first to be a useful and benign philosophical construct, however if the historical Jesus is significantly different than the church’s christological doctrines then the fault is set for major theological earthquakes and the whole house of cards will soon collapse. 

For example when Borg writes, “The image of Jesus sketched in this chapter suggests that the answer is ‘No, the pre-Easter Jesus was not God,’” the hook is set to undercut ancient and authoritative teachings about the way we are saved which rely heavily on Christ doing and being exactly what the Church has said that he did and is (Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994), 37). For example, Gregory of Nazianzus once famously said, “that which [Christ] has not assumed He has not healed” (Gregory of Nazianzus, qtd in William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: an Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1983), 81). If Borg is right and the real historical Jesus was not also God incarnate then our very salvation is at stake! 

The Historian’s Magic Trick

Nonetheless, if Borg’s theory is correct, then even if it brings down the whole house of Christian theology it should be embraced, and therefore we should now carefully consider the validity his historical analysis itself. Borg is a modern exponent of a much larger academic project called “The Quest for Historical Jesus” which has dominated New Testament studies for the past two hundred years. The Quest argues that a well equipped historian can construct a full and accurate portrait of Jesus distinct from the theologically ladened witnesses we have in the Gospels. 

For example, one of the tools that the historian is supposed to be able to use to make such determinations is the criteria of “dissimilarity.” This method aims to find authentic original aphorisms of Jesus by examining a saying to see if it is just part of the Jewish cultural milieu of Jesus’ time (and therefore not original material) or if it seems to be too similar to later theological formula of the church (and therefore not authentic). 

This seems at first to be a promising criteria for determining original and authentic sayings of Jesus, but the problem quickly becomes apparent when one asks what the results might be if this same criteria was placed on a modern figure such as Martin Luther King Jr. Would it be a fruitful project to conclude that only those sayings of MLK that were dissimilar from both the Black Church tradition and the Civil Right movement were authentic and original? Of course not! The historical Jesus is lost to us, and all we have presented to us now are the faithful witnesses of the Gospels. As Rudolph Bultmann once said, “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.” (Rudolph Bultmann, qtd in Powell, 11). There is no getting “behind” the received texts to the historical truth; the method of transmission and the message are inseparable.

Reconstructing the Historical Jesus Borg

While Borg’s project may be theologically and historically problematic, the portrait that he draws of his “historical” Jesus is “a vivid and persuasive description,” yet perhaps problematic in itself as well (Powell, 103). Borg envisions Jesus as a deeply spiritual person who connected to God in a tangible yet mystical way, a healer with powers over demons, a charismatic teacher of wisdom who claimed to have intimate knowledge of God, and a social prophet who offered an alternative vision for society as a whole. This is a compelling vision of Jesus, and one that takes seriously the political and social implications of Jesus’ teachings. 

However, it does seem rather suspicious that Borg’s Jesus seems to affirm exactly the same sorts of things that Borg himself is invested in. For example, Borg is the professor of “religion and culture” at Oregon State University, and as his position’s designation implies he is heavily invested in the relationship between matters of faith and sociopolitical realities. Borg is also particularly interested in a wide variety of spirituality and mysticism as a student of world religions. In short, Borg seems to have “objectively historically reconstructed” Jesus into his own image: a liberal, idealist, mystical, activist.

 Hays writes, “...despite the apparent objectivity of beginning with an appeal to the ‘historical,’ the history of New Testament research demonstrates that efforts to reconstruct the historical Jesus have been beset by subjectivity and cultural bias...and the problem continues unabated in the present renewed outpouring of studies of the historical Jesus” (Richard B. Hays, Moral Vision of the New Testament). Borg seems to fall right into the common trap of the historical reconstruction of Jesus — creating God in his own image.

Re-Introducing Jesus

Having now briefly surveyed Borg’s work in terms of it’s theological, historical, and methodological substance, we are in a good place to say something about his implications for and use in ministry, specifically in the Episcopal Church. It has been my experience that the Episcopal Church is often the site of recovery for people who have been battered and bruised by the brutal forms of Christianity out there today, and for those people I think Borg may indeed be helpful and edifying, but perhaps only spuriously so. 

The work of Borg and the Jesus Seminar could “open a window of opportunity for significant consciousness raising and education within the church...it could provide a way for people to be both thoughtful an Christian, rather than having to choose between the two” (Marcus Borg, qtd in Powell, 65). Even so, Borg is not where I would start the process of healing a post-Christian person nor introducing a neophyte to Christ because in the long run the “Quest’s” project may do more harm than good. Instead, I’d re-introduce them to the incarnate man from Galilee in the exact way that the church has been doing so for centuries — through the narrative passed down to us in the canonized Gospels.