On the Retirement of Marcus Borg

Marcus Borg has announced his retirement. After completing his current class at Oregon State University, where he has been the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, he will retire, and may even slow down a bit! He does have a few books in the works and other outlines in mind, according to this story in the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

I have watched a little bit of Christian discussion (CompuServe Christian Fellowship Forum) of this retirement with some interest, though I haven’t gotten involved in any of the debates there. I think it is pretty much pointless for us to debate Borg’s state of grace or to pray for him more, or less for that matter, than anyone else in a similar relationship to us. I can observe that he is a person who diligently seeks, speaks honestly, and doesn’t give up.

I have long recommended that if you are going to read just a single book on the life of Jesus from the liberal perspective–and Borg is doubtless liberal–then let it be one of Borg’s, preferably Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I prefer him for this purpose to John Dominic Crossan, though I think Crossan is a bit more thorough in discussing his sources and methodology. Crossan seems to dry his Christianity out, while Borg maintains an active spirituality that is reflected in his works.

I recall one time as I was preparing for a sermon dealing with historical Jesus studies. I wanted to find readings that would include a short statement from a conservative and a liberal perspective just what the essence of Jesus actually is. I wanted to put on display what, at the core, a good representative from either side of center would see as the right answer to that question. As I often do when looking for words that communicate, I read a couple of selections to my wife to get her reaction. Both were from The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Borg and N. T. Wright. Now I have to say that while I have a generous dose of agnosticism regarding our ability to prove historical events, and even question the use of the term “proof” at all, and don’t believe that one can ultimately prove a miracle in any case, since historical study involves some sense of probability, I still would tend more in the direction of Wright than Borg on the historical issues. Wright is a wonderfully thorough–some would say too thorough–scholar. Yet after reading the two passages, my wife’s suggestion was simply to read Borg’s. It caught the essence for her.

Now I don’t claim the mantle of orthodoxy, less because of massive disagreements with orthodox doctrine. I am a trinitarian Christian. My own answer, theologically, to who Jesus was is that he was both son of man and son of God, fully divine and fully human, and that this simple point is at the core of Christianity. I am a supernatural theist, in the sense that I believe God can and does intervene in the natural world, though I believe he does so rarely and only for very particular purposes. But the claim of orthodoxy, in my view, requires that someone spend more time defending a doctrinal standard than one does being a spiritual person. By “spiritual person” I mean one who is in communion with God and filled with God’s Spirit. Now there is nothing about orthodox that prevents such spiritual living, and in my view much that helps. But an obsession with orthodoxy can and often does prevent us from keeping our focus.

In the same way, someone who is reading Marcus Borg from the conservative side of the spectrum can spend all of his time determining what is wrong with everything that Borg teaches. If you are conservative, there is no doubt that you will find plenty, and you will doubtless find lots of reasons to object. From your perspective, you should. In fact, from my perspective, I do as well. But nonetheless I have found reading Borg’s books to be an educational experience, and a spiritually challenging experience.

Though I don’t think any of the three fall on the extreme, which I reserve for folks who deny the existence of a historical Jesus at all, I think it’s instructive to compare Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Bishop John Shelby Spong. All react to an orthodox Christianity that they think is failing. When I look at their works, I ask myself just why it is that people see that orthodoxy as failing, and since I hold more orthodox doctrines than any of the three, I have to ask myself whether those orthodox doctrines are, themselves, problematic. As I said above, I don’t think so. I think an obsession with doctrine can be problematic, but I know people who seem, to me at least (and I must guard against judgment, favorable or not), to be genuinely and truly spiritual in the sense I’ve discussed, who hold many different doctrinal positions including ones with which I have little sympathy. I know conservative, hard-line Calvinists with whom I could join on a broad range of social and spiritual issues, provided we could trust one another sufficiently to do so.

Spong takes a few root ideas and runs with them, often making massive reconstructions based on very limited evidence. I should, of course, note that pretty much all purely historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus and the early Christian church operate on the basis of very little evidence. I think Spong’s concern is genuine, but I think his reactions are not so well considered. (I make these comments simply to bracket my reaction to Borg. Discussing Spong’s views would require a great deal of time on their own. Crossan is the dry scholar. I truly enjoyed reading his longer works on the historical Jesus and early Christian history, and yet there I find that while I get a good deal of food for my mind, especially in responding to the methology, I find very little food for soul and spirit. Borg manages to do both careful scholarship, avoiding Spong’s flights of fancy and at the same time Crossan’s dryness.

I do need to note that another favorite of mine, N. T. Wright, is drier than Crossan and so extremely thorough with his details that he can drive you nuts while you’re agreeing with him! A similar book from the conservative perspective is Darrell Bock’s Jesus According to Scripture which sets out with the fairly basic task of presenting a picture of Jesus based purely on the canonical gospels, and winds up as a potential cure for insomnia. Yet Bock’s work is an essential, in my view, precisely because of its thoroughness in dealing with issues in the canonical gospels. I would no longer discuss the historicity, the meaning, or the setting of any saying or event in the life of Jesus without having read Bock’s outline on the subject.

I welcome Borg’s retirement, not because I have longed to see him out of academic life, but because I hope to have the opportunity to read and be challenged by many more of his books. Perhaps he’ll even give a lecture somewhere near where I am so that I can go and listen. Interacting with his work has been a growing experience for me.