Friday, March 16, 2012

Borg Revisited

When we read Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time we were introduced to the idea that how we modern – post-enlightenment -- people use the word “believe” in our religion and how pre-enlightenment folk used it are very different.  WE associate it with the head – propositional truth, factual truth, reasonable and scientific truth.  We want "evidence" for our religion, even if that means sometimes tortuous argumentation.  A “believer” is one who intellectually assents to a set of statements, as in the creeds of Christendom.

What Borg – and Meyers after him – argues is that a “believer” in the New Testament sense is one whose heart has been grasped (Kenneth Haught spoke in this way in Is Nature Enough?) by an experience of God, a “spiritual” experience.  One does not come to it by argumentation (although that might be part of the journey), but by experience.  Meyers (p37) says,   “Marcus Borg reminds us that there are four meanings of the word “faith” in the history of Christianity, and only one of them, assensus, has anything to do with intellectual assent, or faith as a “head trip.”

 The other three meanings  “ . . . are faith as fiducia (radical trust in God), as fidelitas (loyalty in one’s relationship to God), and as visio (a way of seeing creation as gracious).


That concept is foundational to a new understanding of faith – key to what the progressive, emergent Christian movement is about.

Meyers in Chapter Two goes on to give a sketch of the historical Jesus of the Gospels (differentiated from the post-Easter cosmic Christ of the Gospels): 

“Jesus of Nazareth was born just before 4 BCE to Joseph and Mary in a tiny hamlet. He was perhaps the firstborn, but more likely not, and had at least six siblings.
. . .   It is reasonable to assume that Jesus went to school in the synagogue in Nazareth to study Torah and became a woodworker.

. . .   He was dirt poor, living just a notch above the degraded (outcasts) and the expendables (beggars, day laborers, and slaves) . . . most likely illiterate,  . . . and he knew, like the vast majority of his contemporaries in an oral culture, the foundational narratives, basic stories, and general expectations of his tradition but not the exact texts, precise citations, or intricate arguments of its scribal elites.”


Meyers goes on – 

“If his family was reasonably devout, Jesus would have been raised in the practices of “common Judaism.”
 But  one day, without question, Jesus left home to became a follower of the most famous, most eccentric, most apocalyptic wilderness preacher of his day—John the Baptist.


Even though Jesus was a follower of John, there came to be a great difference in their messages:  “John preached grim justice and pictured God as a “steely-eyed thresher of grain.” Jesus preached a God of love and forgiveness and compared him to a father who throws a party for a prodigal son. John said the hour is growing late. Jesus said it is never too late.”

The mistake of traditional Christianity is  that we have made Jesus' message to be about himself, when it was about God:  “His message was theocentric, not Christocentric—centered in God, not centered in messianic proclamations about himself. . . .   He was charismatic, a gifted speaker, and a teacher of wisdom. He taught the “narrow way” as opposed to the broad way of convention and tradition . . . . life is seen as a joyful return from the exile of law and judgment to the unconditional love of a recklessly gracious God.


In the end, Jesus had undercut the power and purpose of religious professionals, excited the poor and empowered the powerless, and quickly attracted large crowds in an occupied territory that was smoldering under Roman occupation. Then, as now, the solution to this problem was simple.  (p. 54)

That solution was the crucifixion . . . which is the subject of Chapter 3.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. Ralph,

    Are you talking about revealed truths? According to Parfit, a "belief [such as the belief that morality is not an illusion] might, for example, be implied by some set of religious beliefs that we could rationally accept, and claim to know, as revealed truths." See:

    Parfit, Derek. On What Matters : Two-volume set (Kindle Location 5,006). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
    http://books.google.com/books?id=CaTCWUvNr_EC&lpg=PT273&vq=%22Having%20the%20resources%20to%20practice%20such%20beneficence%20as%20depends%20on%22&pg=PT273#v=snippet&q=%22religious%20beliefs%22&f=false

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  3. “Revealed truth” in my theological training referred to concepts – moral codes, laws, stories that communicate propositional belief statements like, say, “God is good” – that come not from rational thought but from “revelation” through observations of the natural world (some don’t accept that as legitimate, though), or more especially the written revelation – holy scripture, inspired by God, and therefore “true.”
    Some say that rationality could never come up with Truth that only God can reveal, through inspired words spoken and then written. Meyers, Borg, Spong and company, it seems to me, are not talking about “revealed” truth as inerrant sacred story. Having seen far too much evidence that argues against any sort of “inerrancy,” they want to take the scriptures as what they are – human records of human responses to the presence of God in the world. As such these records (and the responses too) are subject to error, misunderstanding, and abuse.
    The thing is not to arrive at inerrant propositional “truth” (doctrine, dogma) because any statements about an infinite Holy One are necessarily incomplete and misleading. Rather, what we look for is an encounter with the Holy, an experience of the Spirit. That is “revealed” in the sense that before the encounter the Holy is ‘hidden.’ The relationship with God gives us at least a peak at what lies beyond our meager words – the gracious, unconditional care of the One who is Love.

    -- Ralph

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  4. Ralph,

    I confess that I haven't read those chapters yet, because I had to return my copy to the library, but I hope to check it out again, soon enough.

    In the meantime, I have been thinking about the rationality of religious beliefs, and trying to understand what Parfit may mean by:

    "some set of religious beliefs that we could rationally accept, and claim to know, as revealed truths" (for the citation, see my comment regarding your previous blog post)

    For example, someone might claim that it has been revealed to them that the circumference of a circle is exactly 3x its radius (I seem to recall hearing that the Bible actually does say something like that), or that 2+2 is not equal to 4. I don't think we could "rationally accept" those beliefs, because they have been proven to be false.

    The phrase "revealed truths" makes me think of dreams. It is well known that some people have claimed to have solved some mathematical problem, for instance, in a dream. (I am one of them.) Perhaps such a truth could be claimed to be a revealed truth, and counted as a religious belief, but once it is proven to be true, it would be odd to call it a religious belief. So, perhaps the concept of a "religious belief" ordinarily refers to beliefs that have not been, or cannot be, proven to be true, and religious beliefs that we could rationally accept may be limited to those that have not been proven to be false.

    My understanding is that mathematical truths are not, strictly speaking, in the empirical domain, but in the analytical domain, similar to logic, and I think that an analytical truth refers to claims that are essentially beyond doubt. Perhaps some, if not all, genuine religious beliefs are properly understand as members of that domain, too, and not in the empirical domain. I think Parfit believes that ethics is within the analytic domain, too.

    Forgive me for boring you, but those are my thoughts.

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