Demythologizing Marcus Borg of the “Jesus Seminar”

Introduction

While the fruits of orthodox scholarship go largely unnoticed, heretics seem to grab the headlines. Of late the Jesus Seminar has captured the limelight with its critical appraisal of the Gospels. Applying a methodology which they deem scientific, they have discounted over 80% of Jesus’ sayings as unauthentic.1 While orthodox Christians rightly dismiss these scholars as naturalists, one participant, Marcus Borg, does not fit this mold. As the husband of an Episcopal priest, Borg claims to be a confessing Christian and professes a strong belief in the supernatural. Yet, while his supernaturalism enhances his profession with many, Borg’s theology is far from Christian. Moreover, given the coupling of his supernaturalism with his ready access to the church, his potential for influence is greatly enhanced in comparison to naturalistic scholars.

As a result of this potential, it is necessary to critically examine some of his views in light of Scripture and Christian theology. in this regard a chronological approach will first be employed to show the development of Borg’s theology within the context of his life struggles.2 Once these views have been presented, they will then be analyzed in terms of their organic interconnection and their consistent opposition to Scripture. Due to the confrontational nature of this task, the present writer feels constrained to mention that Marcus Borg is a kind man who is quite sincere in his beliefs. Sadly, however, in those beliefs which are of eternal significance, he is sincerely wrong.

Theological Development

Born the youngest of four children in a Scandinavian Lutheran home, Marcus Borg grew up during the 1940s in a small North Dakota town of 1600 people. As a young man, church was an important part of his family life, and he accepted the Christian Faith in a manner he describes as “precritical naivete.” in his adolescent years, however, he began to doubt the existence of God and as a consequence was plunged into guilt, anxiety, and fear. Reflecting back on his experience, he now describes it as a collision of his precritical Christian faith with the naturalistic world view he had come to adopt. Yet, he describes himself as wanting desperately to believe, but as nevertheless being unable to do so.

After high school he entered Concordia College, a Lutheran school in Moorhead, Minnesota. During his college years, his doubts grew more intense with the fear and anxiety subsiding somewhat into a sense of mild perplexity. Relief finally came in a required religion course when a young religion professor introduced him to the works of both classical (Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm) and modern ( Barth, Bultmann, Tillich) theologians. However, what brought about this relief, he says, was not the resolution of his doubts, but rather the provision of a framework within which to take doubt seriously. At the end of his undergraduate study, therefore, he describes his literal faith as totally shaken but as having no non-literal substitute with which to replace it.

He then entered graduate study, the initial phase of which he describes as a period of deconstruction. For his first year of study, he chose Union Theological Seminary due to its reputation for social activism as well as the stature of former professors, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. It was here that he was first exposed to the central claims of critical Gospel scholarship, evidently with considerable effect:

The effect was, for me, dramatic. I realized that the message of Jesus from my childhood—the popular image of Jesus as the divine savior who knew himself to be the Son of God and who offered up his life for the sins of the world—was not historically true. Moreover, I learned that scholars had been saying this for almost two hundred years. This mind-boggling realization was based on the understanding of the gospels that has developed during the last two centuries. I learned that the gospels were neither divine nor particularly historical. They were not, as I had thought, “divine products” inspired directly by God, whose contents therefore were to be “believed.” And they were not “eye-witness accounts” written by people who knew Jesus and who sought to report what they had seen and heard. I was fascinated. In spite of the heavy work load assigned to Union students in those days, I did voluminous amounts of extra reading about the quest for the historical Jesus....

The news that “the Jesus of history” (as I learned to call him) was very different from the Jesus I had heard about growing up in church seemed important to me. It also seemed vaguely scandalous, and something I shouldn’t tell my mother about. But I was hooked.3

While at Union, Borg was exposed primarily to the claims of German Gospels scholarship, including form criticism.

After a year at Union, however, he went to study at Oxford among a group of professors who were slightly less skeptical regarding Scripture’s historical claims. Yet, while beginning to take Jesus more seriously again, his approach, like that of his professors, was naturalistic. Dominated in his thinking by the modern world view, he became a closet atheist and began to analyze Jesus in exclusively natural terms. in particular, as a result of the political ferment in the 1960s, he studied Jesus from the perspective of a social reformer, a perspective which is still retained in his thinking. Obviously, at this stage in his life, he viewed Christianity as the product of its immediate environment, thinking that its supernatural claims were fabricated to meet particular needs of the early church.

After receiving his doctorate in 1972, Borg returned to teach at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, his alma mater. Soon events in his life would trigger a radical change in his thinking. in his early thirties he divorced and left his teaching position at Concordia, moving to Carleton College in 1976 and Oregon State University in 1979. He relates that the move to secular schools forced him to develop ways to speak of Jesus in a non-Christian setting. Significantly, about this time he began to have experiences of nature mysticism that changed his perspective of God:

In my early to mid’ thirties, I had a number of experiences of what I now recognize as “nature mysticism”.... In a sense, these experiences were nothing spectacular, at least not compared with those described by William James almost a century ago in his classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Yet, the experiences fundamentally changed my understanding of God, Jesus, religion, and Christianity.... They were moments of transformed perception in which I saw the earth as “filled with the glory of God,” shining with a radiant presence. They were also moments of connectedness in which I felt my linkage to what is. They seemed similar to Rudolf Otto’s description of experiences of the “numinous,” the awe-inspiring and wonder-evoking “holy,” the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the tremendous mystery which elicits trembling even as it also attracts us in a compelling way).... These experiences, besides being ecstatic, were for me “ah-ha” moments. They gave me a new understanding of the meaning of the word “God.” I realized that “God” does not refer to a supernatural being “out there”.... Rather I began to see the word “God” refers to “the sacred” at the center of existence, the “holy mystery” which is all around us and within us. God is the non-material ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).4

Simultaneously with these mystical experiences, he was asked to teach a course on world religions at Carleton College, a subject for which he was not prepared. As a result of his preparatory reading for the course, he began to correlate his own experience with similar phenomena in other religions. Moreover, each religion was said to have its holy men who mediated “the sacred” to people in extraordinary ways, including healings. The combination of his own experiences and a cross-cultural study of world religions was to radically alter Borg’s approach to Jesus:

The context of religious experience, studied within both an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework, has deeply affected my understanding of Jesus. I can now take seriously those texts which speak of the centrality of God (or “the Spirit”) in Jesus’ own life. If one grants the phenomenon of the “Spirit person” it is obvious that Jesus was one of these figures, for whom the experiential awareness of “Spirit” was foundational for his life. Though we cannot be precise about the nature of his experience, it seems to fall somewhere on the continuum from mystic to shaman, with elements of the Enlightenment experience as well.

This perception has become central for me. Jesus’ experiential relationship to the Spirit seems to be the source of all that he was: his perspective as an “Enlightened One” who taught a subversive and alternate wisdom, his power as a healer, and his passion and courage as a social prophet and movement founder who challenged the purity system of his day with a social vision grounded in the compassion of God.... Like Socrates, he was a teacher of subversive wisdom who taught in his own way that the unexamined life is not worth living. Like the Buddha, he had an Enlightenment experience and taught the life of not-grasping and the life of compassion. Like a shaman, he was a healer. Like Gandhi, he protested against a purity system, deliberately siding with marginals and outcasts. And thus he was also like classical prophets of Israel, concerned with the shape of society and criticizing the elites. He was a most remarkable man.5

Here it can be seen that in spite of his supernaturalism, Borg’s estimate of the “pre-Easter” Jesus rises no higher than that of a Spirit-inspired prophet, healer, and social reformer.

With regard to the “post-Easter” Jesus, Borg’s conclusions are equally disappointing. in setting himself off from naturalistic scholars, the mystical Borg strays far from the mark with his peculiar accommodation to supernaturalism and religious experience:

This distinction between two referents of the name “Jesus,” common to this century’s scholarship, is most often made using different language, namely, “The Jesus of history” and “The Jesus of faith.” For the latter, I prefer “the post-Easter Jesus.” Whether intended or not, the phrase “the Christ of faith” suggests to many people a hypothetical or “iffy” reality, one that can only be believed in (whereas, in contrast, “the Jesus of history” was “real”). I seek to avoid this inference by stressing that the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. He is an experiential reality, not just an article of faith.... [emphasis in the original]6

Significant questions remain, however, concerning the nature of this resurrection, the mode in which it is experienced, and the manner in which this experience is defined and passed on to posterity. Orthodox Christian theology sets forth a bodily resurrection of Christ (Lk. 24:37-42; 1 Cor. 15:20-18)and a continuing experience of Christ through agency of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus himself to indwell his church (Ac. 2:32-36). Moreover, the experience itself is defined through the illumination of the Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:25, 26; 16:12-15) and inscripturated through the Spirit for posterity (2 Tim.3:16; 2 Pe. 1:21). For Borg, however, the resurrection is merely spiritual with the experience being direct and numinous. Moreover, his theory supposes significant latitude for believers in definition:

The process begins with Easter. I see the central meaning of Easter to be, in one sense, very simple: The followers of Jesus continued to experience him after his death, but in a radically new way. They no longer knew him as a figure of flesh and blood, but as a spiritual reality. They no longer experienced him as limited by time and space, but could experience him anywhere.... I have no idea if Easter involved anything happening to the corpse of Jesus or an empty tomb. Crucial to this remark is the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection. Resuscitation intrinsically involves something happening to a corpse: A dead person comes back to life, resumes the life that she or he had before, and will die again. Whatever the resurrection of Jesus was, it wasn’t that. Instead, resurrection means entry into another kind or mode of existence, one beyond life and death, beyond time and space. A resurrected person will not die again. Resurrection need not involve something happening to a corpse.7

In contrast to Scripture, then, Borg envisions Christ’s resurrection as transcending time and space, and thereby giving Christians a direct experience of him. Moreover, given the temporal limitations of living Christians, this experience of a timeless Christ must by definition be somewhat numinous and ill-defined. Furthermore, since Christians are left to their own devices in their interpretation of this experience. Biblical accounts and creedal formulations must be seen as human attempts to historicize and/or otherwise objectify this experience. As a consequence, the objective reality of these formulations is suspect.

In Borg’s opinion, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the post-resurrection accounts must be rejected as attempts objectify Christian experience. Yet, while these particulars may not be valid in an objective sense, the subjective reality they mediate is nevertheless real. As Borg explains it, “I do not think Emmaus happened, but I think Emmaus happens again and again.”8

Analysis

In evaluating Marcus Borg’s theology, it should be noted up front that as a member of the Jesus Seminar, his primary focus is in the area of Christology. Given this focus, it is particularly with respect to Christ’s person and work that Borg’s heresy manifests itself. in fact, the divergence between his position and Christian orthodoxy is so great that Borg’s Christology involves the elimination (either through denial or redefinition) of virtually the entire second Article of the Apostle’s Creed.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
On the third day He rose again.
He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Since this Article has summarized catholic Christology for nearly two millennia, Borg’s position places him beyond the bounds of Christianity. To evaluate his position, then, it is necessary to set forth this opposition in bold relief. To this end the discussion will begin at the source of the problem, the denial of Biblical authority.

The Denial of Biblical Authority

In tracing the source of Borg’s errors, it is evident that his false Christology derives from an autonomous approach to Scripture. Because Borg denies the infallibility of Scripture, his theological construction is hamstrung from the outset through a two-fold effect. To illumine this effect it is necessary to consider the relationship between God and Scripture.

Obviously, since Scripture is God’s Word, God and Scripture are related both metaphysically and epistemologically. On the metaphysical level. Scripture is grounded in the Trinitarian economy since the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:16,17,25,26; 16:7) to inspire it ( 2 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 1:21). As a consequence, the denial of Biblical infallibility impugns the Trinitarian economy as well as the sovereignty of God in communication. Moreover, on the epistemological level, the denial of Biblical infallibility obscures the knowledge of God since doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption are known only from Scripture. Therefore, when one severs the cord between God and Scripture, Scripture is severed from its metaphysical base even while theology is stripped of its epistemological base. Thus, in the absence of an epistemological benchmark, theology wanders aimlessly.

Having rejected Scripture as his norm, Borg views all religions as alike in kind so that the uniqueness of Christianity is ruled out a priori. Obviously, since his autonomous approach militates against the authority of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ is denied as well. To maintain the uniqueness of Christ, one must approach him theonomously (through Scripture) rather than autonomously (through unaided reason or mystical experience). The issue here is presuppositional.

Incarnation

Since Christ’s work is grounded in his person, the doctrine of the Incarnation is foundational to all aspects of Christology. Thus, the Incarnation is the logical point of departure for all subsequent discussion. Given this fact, it is necessary to consider the orthodox doctrine to provide an appropriate benchmark for the evaluation of Borg’s views.

With regard to Scripture, the Bible clearly attests the reality of the Incarnation. The Apostle John describes Christ as one in whom the eternal Word became flesh in order to reveal God to men (Jn. 1:1-18). Obviously, to so reveal God, Christ’s divinity had to be retained in the Incarnation, and he is presented as being conscious of this fact in Scripture Jn. 17:1-5; Lk. 20:41-44). At the same time, however, Scripture acknowledges the full humanity of Christ through his suffering in both body and soul (Mt. 27:45-50; Mt. 26: 36-39). Indeed, in the Lukan account Christ is seen to sweat blood in response to mental anguish over his coming ordeal (Lk. 22:44). Thus, in addition to Christ’s divinity, Scripture attests his full humanity (both body and soul) as well.

Yet, while Scripture clearly attests the two natures of Christ, the manner of their interrelation was not immediately clear to the early Church. The church wrestled with the issue, seeking to relate these natures in a manner consistent with the Biblical data. Finally, after centuries of struggle, the church fathers formulated the doctrine of the Incarnation at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) in a statement known as the Chalcedonian Creed:

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord. Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means annulled by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning him and the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

The essence of this position is to say that in Christ there are two natures in one person, and that the relation of these two natures is to be in union without confusion. Thus, they cannot be wrenched apart from Christ’s person nor blended together.

While such a formulation may seem abstract, it covers the Biblical data. Moreover, as will soon become apparent, it has significant implications for humanity. with respect to these implications, the doctrine of the Incarnation witnesses to the fact that God is both immanent and transcendent. As a result of His immanence, a bond is established between eternity and time. Yet, as a result of God’s transcendence, eternity remains distinct from time and thus retains the priority. To separate Christ’s two natures would break the bond between God and the cosmos, resulting in a world of flux. in such a world, salvation and meaning would be impossible. At the opposite extreme, the confusion of Christ’s natures would, collapse the distinctions between eternity and time, resulting in a world of pantheistic fate and yielding similar problems. (in reference to these two alternatives, the distinctiveness of Marcus Borg’s approach may be noted with in the critical camp. Whereas the naturalists take the former path, Borg together with the Hegelians choose the latter [the mystical alternative]. Essentially, in his denial of the Incarnation, Borg limits the depth of Christ’s divinity in order to universalize its extent). Yet, when the proper relationship is maintained in Christian orthodoxy, Christ’s theanthropic person is preserved and with it his mediatorial role in salvation. Calvin writes:

Now it was of the greatest importance for us that he who was to be our Mediator be both true God and true man.... Since our iniquities, like a cloud cast between us and him, had completely estranged us from the Kingdom of Heaven (cf. Isa. 59:2), no man, unless he belonged to God, could serve as the intermediary to restore peace. But who might reach to him? Any one of Adam’s children?.... The situation would surely have been hopeless had the very majesty of God not descended to us, since it was not in our power to ascend to him. Hence, it was necessary for the Son of God to become for us “Immanuel, that is, God with us” (Isa. 7:14; Mt. 1:23), and in such a way that his divinity and our human nature might by mutual connection grow together. Otherwise the nearness would not have been near enough, nor the affinity sufficiently firm, for us to hope that God might dwell with us. So great was the disagreement between our uncleanness and God’s perfect purity!9

In other words, apart from the Incarnation there can be no Gospel.

Yet, contrary to Scripture, the catholic church, and the reformers, the conception of a theanthropic mediator is entirely missing in Borg’s theology. Instead of a mediated relationship, he seems to favor a direct approach, as if a child of Adam (whose existence he surely can’t accept) could reach out to God. After all, it was on the basis of direct mysticism that he sought out his version of Christ. On the other hand, he also speaks of the grace of God in baptism, so perhaps he attributes the active role to God. In either case, however, a direct, unmediated relationship is in view since the Incarnation is denied.

Virgin Birth

Given Borg’s denial of the Incarnation, it comes as no surprise that he also denies the Virgin Birth. He sees both doctrines as a logical unit growing out of the early church’s attempt to objectify its “post-Easter” experience. As a result of this experience, Borg says, the title “Son of God,” originally used as a relational metaphor to express the intimacy between Jesus and God, began to acquire biological and then ontological status. Given this fact, the Virgin Birth became necessary as Christians sought to project their experience back onto history. Rightly, Borg sees the necessary connection between the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. However, in his Biblical criticism he wrongly rejects both.

In view of Scripture and theology, however, Borg’s position must be seen as un-Christian. with respect to the former, the Virgin Birth, like the Incarnation, is clearly revealed in Scripture (Lk. 1:26-38; Mt. 1:18-25). But from a dogmatic perspective, the issue is broader than a single datum of Scripture since the Virgin Birth stands in organic relation to the person and work of Christ. in particular, as the mode of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth is most consonant with the singularity of Christ’s person, providing a unique origin that attests his theanthropic personality from day one. Moreover, it provides a matching between Christ’s human and eternal Sonship, causing Sonship to permeate his entire person. Additionally, it points to the divine initiative in the process of Christ’s origin.

But beyond the provision of a spotless humanity, it is through its role in the Incarnation that the Virgin Birth guarantees Christ’s sinlessness. in this regard, it must be understood that the previous development had reference to Christ’s humanity alone. As a result of Christ’s unique birth, he was born in a state of moral rectitude in regard to his humanity. And while it is a matter of the Biblical record that Christ did not sin (2 Cor. 5:21), an upright character considered in regard to his humanity alone would not suffice to keep him from sinning. After all, Adam was created morally upright (Gen. 1:31), and yet he fell (Gen. 3). What guaranteed Christ’s sinlessness was the union of divinity with his spotless humanity in one person.

A result of the incarnation through the Virgin Birth, Christ was not only sinless, but absolutely unable to sin. Yet, Marcus Borg rejects both the incarnation and the Virgin Birth as fabrications of the early church. By implication, then, he must deny Christ’s absolute sinlessness and impeccability as well. Thus, it can be seen that a rejection of Christ’s unique person will imply a rejection also of bis work.

Substitutionary Atonement

Because Marcus Borg denies the basis of Christ’s sinless perfection, namely the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth, he is also forced to deny Christ’s substitutionary Atonement (2 Cor. 5:21). And of course, he sees this doctrine as part of an organic theological whole, stemming from the church’s attempt to objectify its experience. Once again, though wrong, Borg is consistent:

Christians who have become aware of the differences between Jesus as a figure of history and the Christian estimate of him often find some of the language used about Jesus in Christian worship to be problematic. To use the creeds as an example, saying them is often not easy for such Christians. To put the issue in bold form, if one thinks, as I do, that Jesus was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his own purpose as dying for the sins of the world, what do I understand myself to be doing when I recite the creeds?

For me, the key lies in the preceding analysis of language used for the post-Easter Jesus and the relationship of that language to early and on-going Christian experience. Among other things, it means that one should not take literally something that is metaphorical and that one should not understand a much later ontological claim as a historical statement about Jesus. Jesus would not have thought of himself as the only begotten son of God, and if one of his disciples had spoken of him with words of the Nicene Creed, one can only imagine him saying, “What?”10

Here, the denial of Christ’s substitutionary atonement is seen to be part of a self-conscious, consistent, and total rejection of the orthodox Christology. Given this fact, it comes as no surprise that Borg’s religious program is works-righteousness:

What would it mean to take the God of Jesus seriously? It seems to me, from what I have been able to see thus far as a historian who is also a Christian, to include the following: It means to see God as an experiential reality, not simply an article of belief. It means to live by an alternative wisdom, whose primary content is a relationship with the same Spirit Jesus knew. It means to actualize compassion in the world, both as an individual virtue and as the core value of the alternative social vision of Jesus. And it means to be part of a community of memory that celebrates, nourishes, and embodies the new way of being that we see in Jesus.11

In other words, Borg’s position is essentially a mystical version of the social gospel where in addition to providing a moral focus, Jesus becomes a glorified guru as well. By thus eliminating the uniqueness of Christ’s person, his experience is broadened to encompass all the faithful for whom Christ functions as a model in the process of ascent. Of course, Christ truly is a spiritual and moral example. The problem is that Borg limits him to these roles. Thus, it can be seen that a mystical social gospel is no gospel at all.

Bodily Resurrection

Given this viewpoint, it is not surprising that Borg also rejects the bodily resurrection. in fact, this denial is the proximate source of the problem. Borg has so spiritualized the resurrection as to de-historicize Christ in the resurrected state. As a consequence, a radical dichotomy is introduced between the pre-Easter and the post-Easter Jesus that severs the relation between the two. in Borg’s view this dichotomy is natural.

Of course, Scripture affirms a bodily resurrection in the clearest terms (1 Cor. 15:42-49). In fact, the Apostle Paul claims that apart from the resurrection, Christian preaching is useless and Christian Faith is futile. Indeed, apart from the resurrection, people are still in their sins (1 Cor. 15:14,17). Behind these statements lies the organic connection between the person and work of Christ, namely, that the Word became flesh to save the world.

Given the connection between Christ’s person and work, it is no wonder that Borg rejects the bodily resurrection. Essentially, Borg and Paul agree on the stakes. Paul says that the denial of Christ’s bodily resurrection implies a similar denial of his atoning work as the Incarnate Son of God. Borg agrees, and then unflinchingly denies the totality of orthodox Christology. To use an optical analogy, it can be said that Borg’s entire Christology (both person and work ) has been refracted through the false prism of a spiritual resurrection.

Conclusion

In spite of his supernaturalism, Marcus Borg’s position must be seen as un-Christian. while his mysticism evidently led him back to the church, it has not led to a Christian understanding of Christ or the Gospel:

Finally, my personal journey has led back into the church. My decade-long self-exile ended about ten years ago. Since then I have become more and more involved in the life of the church in my own Christian journey. My exile ended because of my religious experiences, and because of my desire to be part of a tradition and community which celebrated and mediated the reality of the Spirit.

But it is an understanding of Christianity (and Jesus) quite different from the one I acquired as a child. When I was a child, I thought that being a Christian was about “believing,” and belief was no problem. When I was an adolescent and young adult, I struggled with trying to believe, and finally was no longer able to do so. Now I see that it is not a question of belief, and there is much that I do not believe. I do not believe that Christianity is the only way of salvation, or that the Bible is the revealed will of God, or that Jesus was the unique Son of God. Rather, I now see that the Christian tradition—including its claim about Jesus—is not something to be believed, but something to be lived in. I see the Bible and the tradition as “icons,” mediators of the sacred. The point is not to believe them, but to be in relationship to that which they mediate: God, the Spirit, the sacred. My own journey has thus been “beyond belief.”12

As should be evident from the above quote and the previous development, Borg’s position runs counter to the Apostle’s Creed which has summarized the church’s confession for two millennia.

When Borg’s position is examined, the reason for its failure is clear. First, having rejected Biblical authority, Borg approaches Christ in an autonomous (rather than theonomous) fashion through mysticism. Then as a result of this mystical approach, the entire person and work of Christ are refracted through an overly spiritualized resurrection. Having thereby eliminated the Gospel of a substitutionary atonement, Borg’s theology reduces to a mystical version of the social gospel.

1. Robert B. Strimple, The Modern Search for the Real Jesus: An Introductory Survey of the Historical Roots of Gospels Criticism (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1995).

2. Marcus J. Borg, “The Journey Home,” The Fourth R (Sonoma, CA), vol. VI, no. 4, 3-9.

3. ibid., 6.

4. ibid., 8.

5. ibid., 8, 9.

6. Marcus J. Borg, “The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus,” Theology Today (Ephrata, PA), vol. 52, no. 1, 7.

7. ibid., 11.

8. ibid., 12.

9. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia, n.d.) II: xii: l.

10. Borg, op. cit., 15.

11. ibid., p. 16.

12. Marcus J. Borg, “The Journey Home,” The Fourth R (Sonoma, CA, 1993), vol. VI, no. 4, 4.