The Heart of Christianity

by Marcus J. Borg

As such, it is a human product, not a divine product. This claim in no way denies the reality of God. Rather, it sees the Bible as the response of these two ancient communities to God.

As their response to God, the Bible tells us how they saw things. Above all, it tells us how t...

As a human product, the Bible is not “absolute truth” or “God’s revealed truth,” but relative and culturally conditioned.

When the Bible is approached in this way, many of the problems that people have with the Bible largely disappear.

Just as this view of the Bible does not deny the reality of God, it does not deny that the Bible is “inspired by God.” But it understands inspiration differently.

Within the emerging paradigm, inspiration refers to the movement of the Spirit in the lives of the people who produced the Bible. The emphasis is not upon words inspired by God, but on people moved by their experience of the Spirit, namely, these ancient communities and the individuals who wrote for them.

The Bible as Sacred Scripture

unlike the earlier paradigm, the emerging paradigm sees the Bible’s status as sacred, as “Holy Bible,” as the result of a historical process, not as the consequence of its divine origin. The process is known as canonization.

To be Christian means to be in a primary continuing conversation with the Bible as foundational for our identity and vision. If this conversation ceases or becomes haphazard, then we cease to be Christian, for the Bible is at the heart of Christianity.

A historical approach takes seriously that the Bible comes to us from the distant past. It was not written to us or for us, but for the people who lived then. It thus emphasizes the importance of historical context: the illuminating power of setting a biblical text in its ancient context. It helps us to see what these words meant for the communities that produced them. Indeed, this is the defining characteristic of a historical approach.

metaphorical meaning is not inferior to literal meaning, but is more than literal meaning.

the Bible contains both history and metaphor. It combines historical memory and metaphorical narrative. Some of the events it speaks about really happened, and the community preserved the memory. But even when a text contains historical memory, its more-than-literal meaning matters most.

emphasizing the historical factuality of the stories can distract from their meaning. When their factuality is emphasized, the miraculous elements are emphasized so that “believing” these stories means believing that all these spectacular events happened. This emphasis often produces a sterile debate between those who think they are factual and those who think they aren’t, an endless back-and-forth: “It happened this way,” “No, it didn’t,” “Yes, it did.” When this happens, the rich, more-than-literal meanings are most often lost.

preoccupation with factuality can obscure the metaphorical meanings and the truth of the stories as metaphor.

the story of the empty tomb may be a metaphor of the resurrection rather than a historical report. As metaphor, it means: you won’t find Jesus in the land of the dead. As the angel in the story puts it, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” The truth of the Easter stories is grounded in the ongoing experience of Jesus as a figure of the present who is one with God and therefore “Lord.”

perhaps metaphor can be a bridge between conflicting understandings of the Bible among Christians today. It would mean declaring a moratorium on the question of literal factuality, or at least agreeing to disagree on that issue. To repeat language I used earlier: believe whatever you want about whether the story happened this way; but now let’s talk about what the story means.

metaphor means “to see as.” Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought of as a “giant” metaphor. The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship. And 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 Bible is sacrament, a human product whereby God becomes present to us. Its words become a means whereby the Spirit speaks to us in the present.

being Christian is not primarily about believing, in the modern sense of believing certain propositions to be true. Instead, the emerging paradigm emphasizes the relational meanings of faith and leads to a relational and transformational vision of the Christian life. To be Christian means a relationship with God, lived within the Christian tradition, including especially the Bible as the foundation of the tradition, as both metaphor and sacrament. The Christian life is about a relationship with the one whom the Bible both points to and mediates—namely, a relationship with God as disclosed through the Bible as metaphor and sacrament. To be Christian is to live within this tradition and let it do its transforming work among us.

In a religious worldview, there is, to use William James’s term again, a “More.” In addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience and as disclosed by science, there is a “More,” a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality.

In a nonreligious worldview, there is no “More.” There is only “this”—the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

In the history of Christianity, there are two primary ways of thinking about God and the God-world relationship. In common with many others, I call these two concepts of God “supernatural theism” and “panentheism.”

Supernatural theism imagines God as a personlike being.

God is an exceedingly superlative personlike being, is indeed the supreme being. A long time ago, this personlike being created the world as something separate from God. Thus God and the world are sharply distinguished: God is “up in heaven,” “out there,” beyond the universe.

God occasionally intervenes in this world. For supernatural theism in Christian form, these interventions include the spectacular events reported in the Bible, especially those associated with Jesus:

Panentheism, the second way of thinking about God, imagines God and the God-world relationship differently.

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.

this concept of God does not reduce God to the universe or identify God with the universe. As the encompassing Spirit, God is more than everything, even as everything is in God. Thus, God is not only “right here,” but also “more than right here.”

Rather than speaking of divine intervention, panentheism speaks of divine intention and divine interaction. Or, to use sacramental language, it sees the presence of God “in, with, and under” everything—not as the direct cause of events, but as a presence beneath and within our everyday lives.

panentheism rejects the language of “divine intervention.” From its point of view, interventionism not only has insurmountable difficulties, but claims to know too much; namely, it claims to know that “intervention” is the explanatory mechanism for God’s relation to the world. Except in the very general sense of “divine intentionality” and “divine interactivity,” panentheism does not claim to have an explanation of the God-world relation. It is content not to know.7

The dominance of supernatural theism in modern Western Christianity has had serious consequences. When “out there” is emphasized and separated from “right here,” God’s relation to the world is distorted, and the notion of God becomes harder and harder to accept.

a panentheistic way of thinking about God is an alternative form of theism. It is just as biblical as supernatural theism. Indeed, in an important respect, it is more biblical and more orthodox than supernatural theism, for it emphasizes both the transcendence and presence of God, whereas supernatural theism in its modern form emphasizes only the transcendence of God.

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.”

God is the name we use for the nonmaterial stupendous, wondrous “More” that includes the universe even as God transcends the universe. This is God as the “encompassing Spirit,” the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,” the one who is all around us and within us. God is the one in whom the universe is, even as God is more than the universe; the Mystery who is beyond all names, even as we name the sacred Mystery in our various ways.

In the Christian tradition, as in most religions, God is often spoken of as “personal”—as a personlike being with personal characteristics. But is God personal? Supernatural theism unambiguously affirms this, whereas panentheism seems to some people to be disappointingly impersonal.

The “wholesale God” is God abstracted from the language of any particular religious tradition. This is the God of philosophical theology—

The “wholesale God” is what we talk about when we talk about what the word “God” means, what it points to.

The “retail God” is the sacred named the way it is done in the various religions. This is God (or the gods) as the central character(s) in the sacred texts and stories of the world’s religions.

God is a personal being separate from the universe and from other beings, personal in the sense of being somewhat like us, even though to a superlative degree. In short, the literalization of our personifications of God, whether in hard or soft form, leads to supernatural theism and to the problems associated with it.

Like many, I cannot myself think of God as personal in the sense of being a personlike being, even though I am very comfortable using personal language to refer to God.

Whatever God is ultimately like, our relationship to God is personal. This relationship engages us as persons at our deepest and most passionate level.

I am persuaded that God has more the quality of a “presence” than of a nonpersonal “energy” or “force.”

I see this sense of God as a presence, as a “you,” as grounded in experience. I also see it reflected in the centrality of the notion of covenantin the Jewish and Christian traditions.

I think God “speaks” to us. I don’t mean oral or aural revelation or divine dictation. But I think God “speaks” to us—sometimes dramatically in visions, less dramatically in some of our dreams, in internal “proddings” or “leadings,” through people, and through the devotional practices and scriptures of our tradition.

The various ways of seeing the character of God suggested by these questions crystallize into two primary ways.

In the first way of imaging God’s character, God is a God of requirements and rewards.

The second way of imaging God’s character sees God as a God of love and justice.

The God of love is also the God of justice. The two are related, for in the Bible justice is the social form of love. Thus the God of love is not simply “nice,” but has an edge, a passion for justice. God loves everybody and everything, including the nonhuman world—not just me, and not just me and you, and not just us. To take the God of love and justice seriously means to take justice seriously and to be aware that prolonged injustice has consequences.

Another way of putting this same contrast is the God of law versus the God of grace.

God as the lawgiver and judge is the God of “works” that Paul and Luther and the Protestant Reformation in general rejected. Instead, they affirmed radical grace: God’s acceptance of us is unconditional, not dependent upon something we believe or do. But radical grace has most often been too radical for most Christians. We most often put conditions on God’s grace: God accepts you if . . . And whenever an “if” clause is added, grace becomes conditional and ceases to be grace.