The Heart of Christianity

by Marcus J. Borg

And some, especially many under forty, have never been very involved in the church and find little in Christianity that attracts them, but often are hungry for a source of meaning and values.

how we see is to a large extent the product of what we have seen.

“someone has testified somewhere” (Heb. 2:6a).

So significant is this time of change and conflict in North American Christianity that some observers speak of a “new reformation” in our time comparable in importance to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Though it is an overstatement, even overstatements can contain truth: we are living in a time of major change.

The earlier paradigm sees the Bible as a divine product. For this paradigm, the Bible comes from God as no other book does. It is the unique revelation of God.

The earlier paradigm interprets the Bible literally. It emphasizes the literal-factual interpretation of the Bible.

The creeds are understood as summaries of essential Christian doctrine.

Faith as believing is central. The reason is obvious: the earlier paradigm’s way of seeing the Bible and the tradition is hard to believe, and that’s why it takes faith.

The afterlife is central. For the earlier paradigm, the afterlife is central as both promise and motive.

The Christian life is about requirements and rewards. For the earlier paradigm, at the heart of Christianity is the dynamic of requirements and rewards.

Of course, the earlier paradigm uses the language of God’s grace and compassion and love, but its own internal logic turns being Christian into a life of requirement and rewards, thereby compromising the notion of grace. Indeed, it nullifies grace, for grace that has conditions attached is no longer grace.

the earlier paradigm is not “the Christian tradition,” but a particular and relatively recent way of seeing the tradition, shaped by the conflict with modernity over the past few hundred years.

The first three adjectives describe a way of seeing the Bible (and the Christian tradition as a whole): historical, metaphorical, and sacramental. The last two adjectives describe a way of seeing the Christian life: relational and transformational.

The Bible was not written to us or for us, but for the ancient communities that produced it.

It is sacred in its status and function, but not in its origin.

Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. To be Christian does not mean believing in Christianity, but a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a metaphor and sacrament of the sacred.

there is no single right way of understanding Christianity and no single right way of being Christian. Of course, there are some wrong ways of being Christian, as when Christian language is used to legitimate hatred,

Prior to the modern period, the most common Christian meanings of the word “faith” were not matters of the head, but matters of the heart.

Faith is what you turn to when knowledge runs out.

It’s remarkable to think that God cares so much about “beliefs.”

Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.

Faith as trust is trusting in the buoyancy of God. Faith is trusting in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our being.

we can measure our degree of faith as trust by the amount of anxiety in our lives.

Faith as fidelity means loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the “heart.”

Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether biblical, credal, or doctrinal. Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the Bible and creeds and doctrines point.

Christian faith means affirming the utter centrality of Jesus.It means seeing Jesus as the decisive disclosure of God and of what a life full of God looks like.

as Christians, we can say that’s who Jesus is for us, without needing to say that he’s the only such disclosure or the only adequate one among the religions of the world. Affirming the centrality of Jesus for Christians need not lead to Christian exclusivism.

But credo does not mean “I hereby agree to the literal-factual truth of the following statements.” Rather, its Latin roots combine to mean “I give my heart to.”

the creed tells the story of the one to whom we give our hearts: God as the maker of heaven and earth, God as known in Jesus, God as present in the Spirit.

The Christian life is as simple and challenging as this: to love God and to love that which God loves.

Given the premodern meaning of “believe,” to believe in God is to belove God. Faith is about beloving God and all that God beloves. The Christian life is about beloving God and all that God beloves. Faith is our love for God. Faith is the way of the heart.

God is also known in other ways and other religions, I am convinced, but to be Christian is to be centered in the God of the Bible. This is a mark not of Christian exclusion, but of Christian identity.

In the last half century, probably more Christians have left the church because of the Bible than for any other single reason. More precisely, they left because the earlier paradigm’s way of seeing the Bible ceased to make sense to them.

“culturally conditioned” means that the Bible uses the language and concepts of the cultures in which it took shape.

Within the emerging paradigm, inspiration refers to the movement of the Spirit in the lives of the people who produced the Bible.

It is human in origin, and sacred in status and function.

The Bible

To quote a Swedish proverb and then to modify it: “Theology is poetry plus, not science minus.”

A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, “The Bible is true, and some of it happened.” To make his point obvious: the truth of the Bible is not dependent on its historical factuality. The same point is made by a Native American storyteller as he begins telling his tribe’s story of creation: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.”

“Believe whatever you want about whether it happened this way; now let’s talk about what the story means.”

Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.

the point is not to “believe” in a metaphor—but to “see” with it. Thus the point is not to believe in the Bible—but to see our lives with God through it.

“The Word of the Lord.” Even more clearly, in the New Zealand version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the reader says, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.”

And so the question “Is God real?” is really the question “Is there a ‘More’?”

Rather than imagining God as a personlike being “out there,” this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God, but in God. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek roots of the word “panentheism”: pan means “everything,” en means “in,” and theism comes from the Greek word for “God,” theos.

God is not only “right here,” but also “more than right here.”

Tillich’s point is that the word “God” does not refer to a particular existing being (that’s the God of supernatural theism). Rather, the word “God” is the most common Western name for “what is,” for “ultimate reality,” for “the ground of being,” for “Being itself,” for “isness.”

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” If you name the sacred, you are distinguishing it from the rest of reality and thus you are no longer talking about it. The sacred, the Tao, is beyond all our words.

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks.

Frederick Buechner

The point: it makes a difference how we see the character of God, for how we see the character of God shapes our sense of what faithfulness to God means and thus what the Christian life is about.

the erotic love poetry of the Song of Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon and Canticles) has been understood as an allegory or parable of the God-Israel relationship, the divine-human relationship, or the Christ-church relationship.