Crossing Blogs

When Marcus Borg presented the First United Methodist Lyons Lectures in Madison in April, 2008, there was a good delegation of students from The Crossing present among the 400 attendees.

Some of them had met once a week the semester before to discuss Borg’s 2001 book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time in preparation for the lectures. In that pre-study, a common feeling was that the views he presents sound very good to the modern mind—sometimes almost too good to be true, in fact—and that we don’t know therefore if we can trust them to be Christian. Are they an accommodation to the modern world, and therefore an abandonment of authentic Christian faith?

Borg’s response, and the stance of this blog, is that yes, indeed, this is a restatement of the faith so that it can be credible to modern persons, so that modern, educated persons can affirm our faith with full integrity, and this progressive restatement does not abandon authentic Christian faith. It takes us nearer to authentic Christianity, not farther from it.

A handout Borg used with his first lecture, to which he referred extensively as he spoke, had two columns, in which two different Christian paradigms were presented; (1) “An Earlier Christian Paradigm: Belief-Centered Christianity,” and (2) “An Emerging Christian Paradigm: Transformation-Centered Christianity.” (I summarize some of the contrasts here.)

EARLIER EMERGING

It’s about “believing”// It’s about “a way”, “a path”

Afterlife-centered “This life” centered

Requirements and rewards// Relationship and transformation

Christianity the only way// Affirms religious pluralism

Literalist or semi-literalist// Beyond literalism to metaphor

Creation vs. evolution// No conflict between the two, some mutuality

Centered in one’s own well-being (in this world or the next)// Centered in God

The two groups have sharply differing views of the Bible:

*a divine product, or the human product of two ancient communities; *authority grounded in origin or in canonization;

*to be interpreted literally, factually and absolutely (although selectively) or to be read in historical context and with metaphorical (more-than-literal meaning.)

Borg concludes his presentation of these two views with these comments: (1) “The Spirit of God can and does work through the belief-centered paradigm, and has for millions of people, but . . . for millions it has become an obstacle, a stumbling block.” (2) “The transformation-centered paradigm is not an accommodation or reduction to modern thought. It is neo-traditional, a new statement in a form we haven’t seen before, but a recovery, a retrieval of what was most central before the collision with modernity.”

There is more, much more, to say about these two views, and I propose to use this space to discuss them and to defend Borg’s and my preference for the emerging view as the more authentic Christian voice, and the one that many people need to hear if Christianity is to be a viable option for them. (I do not intend this interaction to be about Borg, but about us and our faith.) This restatement in terms that are both faithful to Jesus and his movement and credible to the modern mind has long seemed essential to me as we seek to witness in Madison in the midst of a great university in the twenty-first century.

Join in the discussion with thoughts you think we might profitably discuss.

Cecil

Cecil Findley

Campus Minister Emeritus

  I was recently reminded that I was coming upon my twentieth year of ordained ministry. I decided to take a quick trip down nostalgic lane. In the process, I went back and found the sermon given at my service of ordination; a service that included the laying on of hands by many of my colleagues. This particular message was given by my friend and mentor, J. Coert Rylaarsdam, whose book, Revelation in Jewish Wisdom Literature; I still consider a classic in the field of biblical studies. I was pleased and honored that this was one of his last public presentations. Using as his two biblical texts, Psalm 90 and John 16: 13, here is what he had to say—-

  Almost forty years ago Robert Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer Adler, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, published the Great Books of the Western World, the classic authors of ancient Greece and Rome and of the so-called western world that took their place. It was an event that stimulated a lot of discussion; articles in the public press, lecture series, and evening courses for busy citizens. In the midst of all the excitement someone asked Mr. Hutchins why the Bible was not included in his set of great books. He responded by saying that it was presupposed. I have often wondered what he meant by that. Surely, the Bible was not presupposed by the authors of Greece and Rome; they had never heard of it; and by no means did all the later writers presuppose the greatness of the Bible in what they produced. Some had been pretty rough on it! I suggest that the Bible is so different from all others books in the western world that it may never have occurred to Adler and Hutchins to set it alongside them. If so, more power to them.

  How shall we speak of this difference of the Bible that sets it apart? We are reminded that it is the Book of the Synagogue and of the Church. And it is true, I think, that just as the Bible is different from all other great books in our world, so Synagogue and Church also stand apart. We know, of course, that it is possible to excerpt literary bits and pieces from the Bible that speak directly and powerfully to the cultural scene; also I have a good neighbor who often speaks of the Churches as one among the many voluntary organizations. Nevertheless, just as the Bible is fundamentally different from all other literature in the western world, so Synagogue and Church are different.

  We have just attended the reading of Psalm 90: O LORD, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations, it begins; and it ends with the prayer. The work of our hands, establish thou it. The poet who composed those lines had a theocentric outlook on life; he assumed he lived by the grace of God. Only the LORD, the divine Mystery, whose servant he is, can bring his little projects to fulfillment. God comes out as the center in the psalmist experience of life. Some years ago, on a Sunday evening, I was playing with an old radio, to learn what Chicago was being taught. I hit on a black service: a very loud anthem was just ending, and the minister leading the service called the congregation to pray with her. I can only remember how she began: “We thank ye Lawd; you been might good to us Lawd; No complaints, Lawd; no complaints!” The themes and the mood were those of our psalm. God was addressed as the living one, the Mystery who acts.

  At this service today our Gospel is a few lines from the so-called farewell discourses in the Gospel of John. We note the beginnings of what was to become the doctrine of the Trinity: Jesus Christ is the word of God, the action of God in the world. The Father and I are One, he says. And he promises the coming of the Spirit of truth, the active, guiding presence of God in the world for the time to come. Like the psalmist, the evangelist assumes that the divine Mystery comes to the top in human consciousness and experience. The theocentricity of Israel, in which the prophet was the key figure, is maintained. This radical theocentricity of the Bible, and of our Christian faith, is never entirely at home in our western world, as, in principle, it was in Jerusalem. Our world is a hybrid that, in paradoxical fashion, holds together the theocentricity of Jerusalem and of the Bible with the anthropocentricity of Athens. Our world tries to hold together science and faith, human power and human dependence, and the two are always in tension. We glory in human power and possibility; and we confess our weakness and need. We are pilgrims who want to follow in the way of the Savior, but also heroes in the quest for freedom and independence. We set the school and the university close by the church and the cathedral. So we accent the tension! We venerate the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels but also concentrate on Aristotle and his successors. We find it impossible to devise an enduring synthesis between Jerusalem and Athens, though we acknowledge both our sin and mortality and the divine image in us. We pray the divine spirit to guide us into all truth, but we retain some projects of our own.

  That is as it should be. Scripture says we are created in the image of God. We possess the gift of creative thought, speech, and action. But it also makes clear that this gift of freedom and creativity is to be used as a response to the divine visitation of that Spirit of God our Gospel reminded us of. Scripture tells us that ever since Adam we have tended to forget that. There has always been a bit of Athens in all of us. In the midst of our acknowledgements of dependence we tend to grasp for independence that places us at the center of the action. Abraham Lincoln was on guard against that in the Gettysburg Address: that this nation, under God, may have a new birth in freedom, he said. The temptation to forget it is all the greater in our hybrid culture, in which the perspective of Athens permits unlimited anthropocentric vistas. That is both threatening and enriching: it can make us forget about the status of servant hood conferred upon us by Jerusalem; but, with divine help, it can make us see the greatness of the Mystery of the divine image in which we are created. When a century ago, Harvard changed its motto from pro Christo et ecclesia to Veritas (Truth) it did not necessarily deny the hybrid character of our culture. It tried to state the perennial tension in our hybrid world, a world in which the church speaks for Jerusalem and the University for Athens. 

  This is an ordination service, a service in which the Church speaks for itself and its theocentric role in our hybrid world.  Jerusalem, Scripture, and Church/Synagogue stand apart in our hybrid world as the unqualified input of what we have been calling Jerusalem. That makes them unique.

  Doug tells me that you like the term Hirt and Lehrer as the title for your pastor. I like it too. A pastor among us is the recognized custodian of the legacy and witness of Jerusalem: the Scripture and the Church. His is the role of relating their witness the witness we hold primary as Jews and Christians to the common life and hybrid culture we all affirm in one way or another. One Book; one Fellowship: they all stand apart in our world. The salt of the earth. Pastors set out from Jerusalem, testing the spirits in our world; and listening for the voice of the Spirit, the voice which the LORD’s people are called to respond.