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.

A Voice in the Wilderness: Reflections on Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence and Its Implications for the Episcopal Church of Tomorrow

“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.” 

Matthew 9:16-17

On the cover of Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a single portrait composed from four artistically distinct representations of Christ. By stitching together several different images, a new eclectic picture emerges, and in essence, the cover of Tickle’s work closely mirrors the book’s central argument of how the face of modern day Christianity is once again undergoing a semi-millennial upheaval as it morphs into a poly-blend of four main strands of "traditional American Christianity" (p. 133).

Tickle’s thesis has a few problems however, but nonetheless leaves church leaders of tomorrow with a handful of important and challenging questions about what effective ministry in the future will look like.

Argumentative Problems: Oversimplification, Logic, Inaccuracies

Tickle spends a majority of her book looking back at several of the sea changes Christianity has gone through over the last 2,000 years, and drawing parallels between them in order to argue that the modern day church is also in the midst of a similar dramatic change and may have some of the same outcomes including liturgical reform, doctrinal realignment, a new fresh spirit in both the new and old tradition, as well as wars and pandemics.

Tickle writes, “...the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale...about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur” (16).

Such a grand sweeping historical thesis would be truly important and illuminating for the church’s self-reflection, but unfortunately, at the end of the day, her historical analysis is simply too superficial to lift her ambitious thesis and her cursory treatment of historical facts leads almost inevitably to oversights, logical fallacies, inaccuracies, and unlikely conjecture. 

At the heart of Tickle’s historical analysis is the assertion that about every five hundred years the church goes through a major change: the time around Gregory the Great, the Great Schism, and the "Great" Reformation. The church has of course gone through great reform at these times, but the church has undergone many more dramatic events and changes than just those few. What about the dramatic socio-political shift in the fourth century under Emperor Constantine the Great? Or the ocean of theology poured out on the church by the great “Doctor of the Church” Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Or the bi-continental revivals during “The Great Awakenings” whose theological narrative is still dominant today among a grand majority of evangelical Protestants in America?

For its entire life Christianity has been undergoing change and challenge; focusing on only the ones that happen every five hundred years is like drawing a constellation using only a few select stars in the sky: yes a picture can be created, but there are many more stars in the sky and more than just one picture that can be created with them.

A second problem is logic. Citing a skeptic is normally a ten yard penalty in productive discussions, but Hume's emphasis on the fallacy of inductive prediction is helpful in debunking Tickle's repeated claim that previous Christian periods of reform can help us understand and predict what will happen in the alleged current one.  For example, if someone had a bag of apples and pulled them out one at time and they all happened to be green does mean that one can logical conclude that the very next apple taken out of the bag won't be red. Put more specifically, even if there was a current reformer named Luther nailing 95 Theses to church doors, that still wouldn't mean that we could assume to understand anything about this new reformation or predict how it will unravel. The past simply cannot predict the future logically.

There are also several places where Tickle simply gets her history wrong. For example one of the most brazen errors occurs in her discussion over how Greek philosophy mutated Christian theology into a dualistic religion that then despised the physical temporal world (p. 161). Christianity undoubtably used and learned from Greek philosophy (specifically neo-Platonism and Stoicism), but it is completely untrue that Christianity therefore despised the physical world. The endless Arian controversies of the fourth century leave no room for doubt on that topic.

In addition to her troubles regarding previous times of great change in the Church, Tickle's prediction of the “Great Emergence” itself may also have some difficulties. The central tenant of her description of the Emergence is a Christianity that is blend of four currently distinct traditions. This sort of melting-pot theory was also the predicted result of the “Americanization” of many culturally distinct immigrants in the 18th century. However, it simply did not come to pass, and instead what emerged was a “salad bowl” of culture rather than a homogeneous blending of cultures. Perhaps then Tickle is incorrect in her prediction of such an ecclesiastical blending. Only time will tell.

Important Challenging Questions

Tickle’s historical thesis may need further development, but despite its deficiencies, her description of the Emergence itself it still raises crucially important questions that the church must face if her characterization of “The Great Emergence” is accurate.

One of the great unanswered questions that future church leaders are left with vis a vis emerging Christianity is similar to the central dramatic question raised in the critically acclaimed period drama “Downton Abbey:" how will Downton weather the financially trying and culturally changing times of the post War world? Up until the War, the Abbey's residents had blissfully and naively existed in their insular routines and had been coasting on timely infusions of capital despite being overstretched and financially mismanaged for years. 

Similarly, in the midst of such a metamorphosis of ecclesial culture how can the modern day church merge arcane ritual practices with modern sensibilities, continue to maintain huge aging physical edifices, train and employ expensive highly specialized staff, and still continue to benefit its local community in a meaningful way?

Will this new emergent melting-pot church turn out to be “The Great Abandonment” of the polity, principles, and property of the preceding parish? Will this new emergent spiritual revival spell financial ruin and the de-professionalization of ministry? Would that be entirely negative for the authenticity of the Church and God’s work in the world? Jesus once said that “you can’t put new wine in old wineskins,” does that mean that this new emerging spirit can’t be housed within the current structures of the Church without irreparably damaging each?

Darwin’s observation that species who adapt to a new environment have a better chance of surviving applies equally to the field of biology as it does to business and the church. If Tickle is correct and the environment is changing to favor those churches that can embrace a wide range of traditions, how then will the Episcopal Church will handle, weather, respond to, and thrive in this new environment? Is it ready, willing, and able to tweak its DNA to fit better with this new environment? Is it prepared for the conversation of longer teaching style sermons, fuller contemporary or charismatic worship experiences, more emphasis on Bible study, or the updating of its facilities to be more versatile? 

Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence is a voice crying in the wilderness proclaiming the changing of a season, and can be a wake-up call to entrenched churches to repent and change their ways to receive new life in this next outpouring of the Spirit. It is the opinion of this author that the Episcopal Church is in a theologically advantageous position for this Emergence because within its very DNA exists a deep tolerance for a variety of voices and a rich tradition that balances “holding fast to that which is good” and “singing to the Lord a new song.”

Sources: 

Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).

Book Review: "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" by Al Franken

A Theologian's Rubbernecking at the Strange World of Politics:
A Book Review of Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations

It may seem odd for a blog about "life, faith, and God" to have a book review about contemporary politics in it. I mean, what about the whole "separation of Church and state" thing? It's a fair question, so here are two responses before we dive into a brief synopsis and analysis of Mr. Franken's witty work. 

The first reason this book review is on this blog is for the simple reason that "it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing out that he is a big lardbutt" (5). To me this is a compellingly winsome advantage for a book, and I thought that such an insight was worth sharing with the world on this blog. 

The second reason I feel that reviewing a book about contemporary politics is appropriate for a blog about religion is because politics is about how we live together in society, and a foundational dogma of Christianity is that God came to Earth incarnate in the person of Jesus. I sort of feel that 95% of my seminary experience at Duke revolved around unpacking the character and scope of the political, physical, and otherwise temporal implications of the doctrine of God-made-flesh, so suffice it here to say that the fact that God went through the trouble of coming in the flesh to Earth to redeem the same is more than sufficient reason for theologians to be very interested in politics, public policy, and big fat demagoguring idiots like Rush Limbaugh whose Reaganomic utopia might be completely antithetical to God's good future. (Oh yea, and one of Duke Divinity school's heros, John Howard Yoder, also wrote a book titled The Politics of Jesus, and if a theologian of Yoder's caliber thinks politics and Jesus mix well then that's adequate warrant for me to jump on the wagon.)

Ok, now that we've sorted out the whole "separation of Church and state" thing let's move on to actually reviewing the book. Mr. Franken's work is divided into forty five "essays" which cover a myriad of topics: insults towards Rush Limbaugh, personal anecdotes, tripe non-sequiturs, more non-sense off topic (occasionally funny) ramblings, and observations of other Republican leaders.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed to find that Franken spent so much time covering the "Other Observations" part of his book instead of any thing resembling a sustained analysis of Rush Limbaugh's arguments, claims, or facts. It seems fair that one would expect from looking at the front cover that the 36 sized font main title, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," in comparison to the 18 sized font subtitle, "And Other Observations,"that the lion's share of the content of the book would be mainly concerned with dissecting Mr. Limbaugh's platitudes. Instead, most of the book is concerned with scurrilous ad hominem attacks of other prominent Republican leaders, several totally pointless chapters, and uninteresting irrelevant personal narratives.

But perhaps I'm being unfair. I mean, if I really wanted a serious book about the faults of Rush Limbaugh why pick up a book by a comedian instead of one from an actual political analyst. That's fair enough (even if Franken is a Harvard educated professional political satirist), but at least we should expect to find in Franken's book some good humor. Unfortunately this is not the case. While some of Franken's jokes did make me LOL, a majority of them were a bit flat, and others were just flat repetitive. For example, Franken makes good on his title's implicit promise by pointing out that Limbaugh is big and fat, but after 3 million incarnations this joke gets a bit old. (On a side note, even though pointing out that Rush is fat is apparently a crucial part of Franken's project, no where is there one footnote verifying Mr. Limbaugh's alleged obesity. But who really cares right, it's still funny!)

However despite the book's faults, it does offer those of us who are desperately searching for political ammunition against the infamous windbag several nuggets of insight and quips next time a Limbaugh devote starts spouting Rush-ism durring the next workplace coffee break:

• Some of Rush's adamant followers voluntarily call themselves "dittoheads"(6).
• Statistically, "Limbaugh listeners thought they were the best informed, and yet were the least informed" (12).
• Rush has been married three times (13).
• "The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples...I don't have compassion for the poor"- Limbaugh (15).
• "Limbaugh has himself fed off the largesse of the government. In the form of unemployment insurance...[Rush] filed for unemployment at a time when he was able-bodied and spending his days sitting around the house eating junk food, too lazy to even mow his own lawn" (15).
• Rush never voted for Reagan; in fact he never even registered to vote until he was shamed into it by a reporter at age 35 (16)
• In face-to-face interviews, Rush gets hammer by his opponents. 
• "During spin-the-bottle game, cheerleader refuses to kiss 'Rusty'" (26).
• "1974-78: Hired and fired by four different radio stations" (27).
• Rush's fact checker, Waylon, is a moron. 
• "There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived" - Limbaugh (52)
• Limbaugh doesn't think smoking causes cancer (52)
• Newt Gingrich served his wife divorce papers on a yellow legal pad just as she was waking up from cancer surgery (this is an example of Franken's irrelevant, yet politically/argumentatively useful, facts) (44)
•  Rush Limbaugh failed out of college (16).
• Rush thinks styrofoam is biodegradable, and Hilary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered (124).
• Nice summary of Limbaugh's obsession with Reagan: "Other lies bug me a lot. These are the rational, carefully constructed, deliberate lies of a man running a giant propaganda factory dedicated to two things: convincing people who were screwed sideways by Reaganomics that it was actually good for them, and encouraging the people who turned the screws to feel good about themselves...This gets to the heart of supply-side economics: the less you tax the rich, the faster the economy will grow. Take for example the fifties. We taxed the shit out of the rich. The top marginal rate was 88 percent" (124). 
• Rush is dead wrong about the way taxes affect the poor (125-130). Tax cuts for the wealthy cause a disproportional burden on the poor.
• Rush thinks there are more acres of forestland in American today than when Columbus arrived. Problem is, he's off by about 250,000,000 acres. (198)
• Rush thinks that if the polar ice caps melted it wouldn't affect sea levels. Problem is, sea levels would rise by about 200 ft. (199)
• Rush doesn't think that humans can destroy "creation." I guess pollution doesn't exit then?? (201)
• Rush is big and fat, and has a disgusting, puss filled, hairy open sore on his arse caused from being sedentary.
• And finally, Franken admits that making fun of Rush Limbaugh's idiocy "has gone from an amusing to a sad reminder that millions of Americans are being lied to every day by an obese millionaire with a repugnant political agenda." (201)

In sum, if you want a book about why Rush Limbaugh is a fat idiot you can probably find a better source of political commentary, and if you want a good laugh at Rebublican's expense try watching "Saturday Night Live" reruns (Franken wrote some of those too). Thanks for book Mr. Franken, when is Sarah Palin is So Stupid She Scares Me coming out?