The Heart of Christianity

by Marcus J. Borg

The birth of the separated self—what we call “the fall”—is something we go through early in our own lives. We have all experienced this. Moreover, it cannot be avoided; it is utterly necessary. Imagining that Adam and Eve could have avoided it misses the point. We cannot develop into mature human beings without self-consciousness.

The sense of separation and self-concern is intensified by the process of growing up. Commonly called “socialization,” this process involves internalizing within the self the central “messages” of one’s upbringing.

We feel okay or not okay about ourselves to the extent that we measure up to the messages we have internalized. In our culture, these messages center around the three A’s of appearance, achievement, and affluence.

We live our lives in relation to what Thomas Keating calls “the false self,” the self created and conferred by culture. Or, to use language from Frederick Buechner, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out.24

Our fall into exile is very deep.

We live in bondage in Egypt, in exile in Babylon, and sometimes we become Egypt and Babylon. We can even be both victim and oppressor.

Thus we need to be born again. It is the road of return from our exile, the way to recover our true self, the path to beginning to live our lives from the inside out rather than from the outside in, the exodus from our individual and collective selfishness.

But for the majority of us, being born again is not a single intense experience, but a gradual and incremental process. Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way of being and living into a new way of being, is a process that continues through a lifetime.

It even applies to the micro-rhythms of daily life. Martin Luther, a major spiritual mentor in my childhood, spoke of “daily dying and rising with Christ” and, in language that sounds a bit archaic, of “daily putting to death the old Adam,” the old self in us. By adding “daily,” Luther echoes the gospel of Luke.

This process is at the heart not only of Christianity, but of the other enduring religions of the world. The image of following “the way” is common in Judaism, and “the way” involves a new heart, a new self centered in God. One of the meanings of the word “Islam” is “surrender”: to surrender one’s life to God by radically centering in God. And Muhammad is reported to have said, “Die before you die.”

At the heart of the Buddhist path is “letting go”—the same internal path as dying to an old way of being and being born into a new. According to the Tao te Ching, a foundational text for both Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Lao Tzu said: “If you want to become full, let yourself be empty; if you want to be reborn, let yourself die.”

To relate this to John’s affirmation that Jesus is “the way”: the way that Jesus incarnated is a universal way, not an exclusive way. Jesus is the embodiment, the incarnation, of the path of transformation known in the religions that have stood the test of time.

Spirituality combines awareness, intention, and practice. I define it as becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God.

A deepening relationship with God: in what is now a familiar theme, the Christian life is not very much about believing a set of beliefs, but about a deepening relationship with the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

The same is true for Jesus. For Jesus, the primary quality of a life centered in God is compassion. When Jesus sums up theology and ethics in a few words, he says: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”

To use a central metaphor from the gospels, the Christian life is about the “Kingdom of God.” It is about “being born again” and the “Kingdom of God.”

One reason is the long period of time during which Christianity was the religion of the dominant culture.

Another reason is because of a common misunderstanding of “God’s justice.” Theologically, we have often seen its opposite as “God’s mercy.” “God’s justice” is understood as God’s deserved punishment of us for our sins, “God’s mercy” as God’s loving forgiveness of us in spite of our guilt.

Most often in the Bible, the opposite of God’s justice is not God’s mercy, but human injustice.

In the United States in particular, there is yet another reason why we often miss the Bible’s passion for justice. Our culture is dominated by an ethos of individualism. It is our core cultural value: we are probably the most individualistic culture in human history.

But individualism as a core value leads to a way of seeing life that obscures the enormous effect of social systems on the lives of people.

The issue is what is commonly called “systemic injustice”—sources of unnecessary human misery created by unjust political, economic, and social systems. Its opposite, of course, is “systemic justice,” also known as structural, social, substantive, or distributive justice.

This is what the political passion of the Bible is about.

What Egypt and the monarchies of Israel and Judah shared in common is that both were forms of the “ancient domination system,” the most widespread form of society in the premodern world.

What is the story of Jesus most centrally about? The Kingdom of God. It is also the subject of many of Jesus’ parables and short sayings. And it is at the center of the best-known Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come.”

So what is the political meaning of the Kingdom of God? In a sentence: it is what life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of this world were not.

In wording that is almost identical, Matthew and the Didache both have “debt”: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Luke’s version is different. Luke has “sins” in the first half: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

Thus the best-known Christian prayer names the two central material concerns of peasant life in the time of Jesus. The coming of God’s Kingdom involves bread and debt forgiveness.

Indeed, several of the “titles” of Jesus in the New Testament were also titles of Caesar. On coins and inscriptions, Caesar was referred to not only as “lord,” but also as “son of God,” “savior,” “king of kings,” and “lord of lords.”

The Beast from the Abyss: John speaks of the Roman Empire as the “beast from the abyss,” the ancient serpent who threatens the creation itself with chaos, as the incarnation and embodiment of Satan.

The Great Harlot: John continues his indictment of empire by portraying Rome as the “great harlot,” the great seducer.

makes a striking point: Roma—empire—is the embodiment of avarice, the incarnation of greed. That’s what empire is about. The embodiment of greed in domination systems is the root of all evil.

As we conclude this section on the political passion of the New Testament and its indictment of empire, it is worth remembering that, as empires go, Rome was not particularly bad. A good case can be made that it was better than most. In terms of its system of law, protection against bandits and pirates, a stable order, public projects such as roads, and so forth, Rome was better than the empires it replaced and better than most of the kingdoms and empires that replaced it. But its policies negatively impacted the lives of millions. Its wars of conquest were brutal. In the world of empire, the rich taxed the poor.

Thus the cross is both personal and political. It embodies the path of personal transformation, of being born again by dying and rising with Christ; and it indicts the domination systems of this world.

I am defining politics in its broad sense as the social systems in which we live. The English word comes from the Greek polis, which means “city,” and politics is thus about the shape and shaping of the city. By extension, politics is about the shape and shaping of human community, from smaller communities to nations and the international community.

God cares about justice because the God of the Bible cares about suffering. And the single biggest cause of unnecessary human suffering throughout history has been and is unjust social systems.

The title of a very recent book by Kevin Phillips names the problem: Wealth and Democracy. Its central argument is twofold. First, the amount of national wealth owned by the richest 1 percent of our population is increasing dramatically. And second, the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few threatens American democracy, simply because of the political power and influence that go with wealth.

The New Testament names some from the wealthy and powerful elites who were attracted to Jesus and his vision: Joanna, Susanna, Phoebe, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea. They must have been disenchanted members of the elites. And they can be role models for those of us who are comfortable or wealthy.

It would be a politics suspicious of the ways wealthy and powerful classes use their power and wealth to structure systems largely in their own interest.

Militarily, we are the world’s superpower. We are also the world’s major economic power. The combination of global military and economic power is the defining characteristic of empire. We are the Rome of our time.

In our usage, the heart is most commonly associated with love, as in Valentine hearts; courage, as in brave hearts; and grief, as in broken hearts. But in the Bible, the “heart” includes these and more: it is a metaphor for the inner self as a whole.

The heart is an image for the self at a deep level, deeper than our perception, intellect, emotion, and volition.

The Bible has many pairs of metaphors for the human condition and our need. These pairs of images portray our predicament and the solution.

Yet another of the Bible’s correlative metaphors for our condition and the solution is “closed hearts” and “open hearts.”

A closed heart and exile go together. Self-preoccupied, turned inward upon itself, the shut heart is cut off from a larger reality. Separated and disconnected, it is estranged and in exile.

A closed heart lacks compassion. In the Bible, compassion is the ability to feel the feelings of another at a level lower than one’s head, “in the womb,” “in the bowels,” and then to act accordingly. A closed heart does not feel this. Though it can be charitable, it does not feel the suffering of others.

For the same reason, a closed heart is insensitive to injustice. Closed hearts and injustice go together. The prophets and Jesus, champions of God’s justice, o...

The closed heart is the natural result of the process of growing up. The birth and development of self-awareness involves an increasing sense of being a separated self. We live within this separated self, as if the self is enclosed in a dome, a transparent shell: the world is “out there,” and I am “in here.”

The mild form of violence is judgmentalism; of brutality, insensitivity; of arrogance, self-centeredness; of rapacious greed, ordinary self-interest.

When our hearts are closed, we live within a shell. To extend the egg metaphor: the shell needs to be broken open if the life within it is to enter into full life. What we need is the “hatching of the heart.”1 And if the heart is not hatched, we die. The hatching of the heart—the opening of the self to God, the sacred—is a comprehensive image for the individual dimension of the Christian life.