The Heart of Christianity

by Marcus J. Borg

I owe the metaphor of “thin places” to Celtic Christianity, a form of Christianity that flourished in Ireland and parts of Scotland, Wales, and northern England beginning in the fifth century.

“Thin places” has its home in a particular way of thinking about God. Deeply rooted in the Bible and the Christian tradition, this way of thinking sees God, “the More,” as the encompassing Spirit in which everything is. God is not somewhere else, but “right here.” In words attributed to Paul in the book of Acts, God is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.”

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.4

Thin places can literally be geographical places. For Celtic Christianity, the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland is a classic thin place.

Mountains and high places are thin places in many religious traditions, including the Bible and Native American traditions.

Even times of serious illness, suffering, and grief can become thin places. They do not always, of course; but sometimes our hearts are broken open by such experiences.

People can become thin places. Many of us have known at least one or two people through whom we experienced the presence of the Spirit at particular junctures in our lives.

Worship can become a thin place. Indeed, this is one of its primary purposes. Of course, worship is about praising God. But worship is not about God needing praise.

Worship is about creating a sense of the sacred, a thin place. The diverse forms of Christian worship do this in different ways.

If we took this seriously, it would affect our selection of hymns. Hymns that are difficult to sing are very unlikely to work as a thin place. Hymns intended for congregational participation need to be accessible to musically untrained and musically challenged voices.

The Bible can become a thin place. This is its sacramental function and is most obvious in its private devotional use, but the Bible can also become a thin place in the worship life of the church.

Liturgical words—by which I mean words that are a regular part of worship services—can become thin places.

Rather, the point is to let the drone of these words that we know by heart become a thin place.

An open heart and seeing go together. We see more clearly when our hearts are open—see the person right in front of our face, see the landscape stretched out before us.

From the vantage point of other religions, the Christian emphasis upon sin looks strange. As a friendly Buddhist quip puts it, “You Christians must be very bad people—you’re always confessing your sins.”2

I think it is possible to say that in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by having a single plot. It is one that can be simply stated: God creates the world; the world gets lost; God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which God created it.4

In the history of Christian thought, sin has also been thought of in more “root ways”—not so much in the plural as specific behaviors, but as a “state” or “condition” that produces the more specific behaviors that we commonly call sins.

For Reinhold Niebuhr, heir to a school of thought reaching back at least to Augustine, the “root sin” is “pride,” hubris, to use the Greek term. Hubris is self-centeredness.

For Paul Tillich, the root meaning of “sin” is separation, to be put asunder. Tillich’s term for this state is “estrangement,” very deliberately chosen to suggest being separated from that to which we belong. Our lives are estranged from God.

To list some but not all of them: we are blind, in exile, in bondage; we have closed hearts; we hunger and thirst; we are lost.

So also “sin” has a correlative image in the Bible and in the Christian imagination—“forgiveness.”

When sin becomes the one-size-fits-all designator of the human condition, then forgiveness becomes the one-size-fits-all remedy.

If the issue is blindness, what we need is not forgiveness, but sight. If the issue is bondage, what we need is not forgiveness, but liberation, and so forth.

Estrangement, the birth of the separated self, is the natural result of growing up; it cannot be avoided.

The message of sin and forgiveness doesn’t address these issues very well. To the extent that we are responsible for these conditions, the message of forgiveness does mean that we are accepted by God even though our hearts are closed, even though we’re in bondage, even though we’re self-centered, and so forth. This message is true and important.

I am persuaded that our understanding of the heart of the Christian vision of life is enriched by using multiple biblical images for the human problem and its remedy.

But the central images of the Christian life as a “way” do: it is a way of return from exile, of reconnection; it is way of liberation from bondage; a way in which our sight is restored; a way of having our hearts opened by spending time in thin places; a way that leads from being lost to finding and being found.

For example, what does the message of sin and forgiveness mean to victims of domestic abuse?

For them, the message they need to hear is not that they have sinned and need forgiveness, but that it is not God’s will that they live under an abusive and oppressive Pharaoh. God wills their liberation and safety.

But it wasn’t individual sins that caused Jesus’ death. He wasn’t killed because of the impure thoughts of adolescents or our everyday deceptions or our selfishness. The point is not that these don’t matter. The point, rather, is that these were not what caused Jesus’ death. Rather, Jesus was killed because of what might be called “social sin,” namely, the domination system of his day. The common individualistic understanding of sin typically domesticates the political passion of the Bible and Jesus.

Salvation is most often associated with “heaven” or “going to heaven.” The question “Are you saved?” most often means “Are you confident that you’ll go to heaven when you die?” Salvation is about the next world.

About a year ago on a lecture trip, I found myself saying in response to a question, “If I were to make a list of Christianity’s ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would be popular Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife.”

For a long time now, mainstream biblical and theological scholarship has recognized that belief in an afterlife did not emerge until nearly the end of the writing of the Hebrew Bible. The first unambiguous reference occurs in the last chapter of Daniel, seen by most scholars as the latest document of the Hebrew Bible, written around 165 bce.

By the time of Jesus’ public activity, two centuries after Daniel, a majority of the Jewish people did believe in an afterlife. A major reason for growth in the belief was the continuing experience of oppression and persecution.

Jesus himself seems to have believed in an afterlife, but he doesn’t talk about it very much.

In any case, it’s clear that his message was not really about how to get to heaven. It was about a way of transformation in this world and the Kingdom of God on earth.

The writers of the New Testament (and thus the early Christian movement for whom they wrote) believed in an afterlife.

Paul affirms an afterlife, yet his letters suggest that his primary emphasis was new life “in Christ” in this life, a metaphor that has both personal and social dimensions.

So also in John’s gospel. Though it affirms life after death, his phrase “eternal life” (or “everlasting life”) does not mean primarily that.16 The English phase translates a Greek phrase that in turn expresses a Jewish notion: “the life of the age to come.” “Eternal life” means “the life of the age to come.”

An important further connection: in John, “eternal life” is often spoken of in the present tense. “The life of the age to come” has come.

Thus salvation in the Bible is primarily a this-worldly phenomenon. It happens here. But what is it? The root of the English word is helpful. It comes from a Latin word that means “wholeness” or “healing” (the same root from which we get the word “salve,” a healing agent). In its broadest sense, salvation thus means becoming whole and being healed. The language of “wholeness” suggests movement beyond fragmentation, and the language of “healing” suggests being healed of the wounds of existence.

The first of these is the story of the exodus from Egypt. It images the human problem as bondage and slavery.

The story of salvation begins in bondage and ends in the land of God’s promise, a land flowing with milk and honey.

The second is the story of exile in Babylon, which images the human problem as exile.

The solution is a journey of return, a journey that God both invites and energizes. The journey, “the way,” once again leads through the wilderness, and in the wilderness we are nourished by God. The story of salvation is a story of reconnection with the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one who has always been here even though we have been estranged.

The third is what I call the temple story.19 It images the human problem as sin and impurity.

The story of salvation is thus a story of being cleansed, forgiven, accepted.

Jesus as “the Way” has its metaphorical home in the exile story: in his life, death, and resurrection, he embodies the way of return. The gospel is about homecoming. Salvation is homecoming.

All of these, the stories and the images, are metaphors of salvation. Put most simply, salvation means to be saved from our predicament.

Salvation is about peace and justice within community and beyond community. It is about shalom, a word connoting not simply peace as the absence of war, but peace as the wholeness of a community living together in peace and justice. Salvation is never only an individual affair in the Hebrew Bible.