Borg on the Bible

Week of Monday, November 4, 2002

My friend Charles who works in solar physics once remarked that whenever he gets bored with science, he likes to read something by his favorite science writer, the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). I would guess that Charles disagrees with some if not much of Gould's views on science and faith, but that he nevertheless finds Gould's writings so provocative and engaging that they rekindle his love for science.

I feel a similar way about the writings of Oregon State professor Marcus Borg, a New Testament scholar and leader of the controversial Jesus Seminar who wrote a best seller called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994). Borg is unapologetically liberal, he believes that evangelicals are badly wrong, and much of what he writes I find exasperating. But his writing is so affable and irenic that it is a pleasure to read. He is one of the few highly regarded theological scholars who writes for the ordinary person in the pew without jargon or condescension. He also writes with candor about his own personal journey with Jesus—from a conservative Lutheran experience that lasted for thirty years, to a decade of agnosticism, to his current affiliation in the Episcopal church: “I describe myself as a nonliteralistic and nonexclusivistic Christian, committed to living my life with God within the Christian tradition, even as I affirm the validity of all the enduring religious traditions.”¹

So if you want to read an accessible, important New Testament scholar who writes from an irenic and liberal viewpoint for a non-specialist audience, try Borg's recent sequel called Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (2001). Borg believes that conventional, traditional and conservative ways of reading the Bible are wrong, so wrong that they are no longer compelling for many if not most modern people. That point is debatable, but the goal of his book is nevertheless commendable; he wants to help people to understand and love the Bible, to read it in ways that capture all of its might and power to relate us to the living God.

Borg suggests that there are two very different ways to read the Bible. What he calls the ”literal-factual” approach reads the Bible simplistically, uncritically, and naively. But, to its credit, this approach also reads the Bible with an expectant faith. A more critical approach, perhaps one you encountered in a university class, reads the Bible in a scientific, detached and even dismissive manner. Borg finds both ways of reading the Bible unacceptable; he commends an approach that reads the Bible both faithfully and critically. Thus the subtitle to his book indicating that he wants to take the Bible seriously but not literally. He calls his approach the “historical-metaphorical” way of reading Scripture.

In Part I of his book Borg describes these two very different “lenses” with which people read the Bible. In particular, there are three foundational questions about Scripture that separate these two ways of reading—its origin, its authority and its interpretation. These conflicting views find expression in any number of very divisive issues today, like homosexuality, matters of science and faith (especially the doctrine of creation), the ordination of women, and the historicity of the Gospels and especially Jesus.

The “literal-factual” approach to Scripture believes that the Bible has a divine origin. It is God-breathed or inspired, thus the Word of God. It is not a human book but rather “comes from God in a way that no other book does” (9). Indeed, most all Christians until about a century ago, Borg admits, have understood the Bible's origin in this way. Because of its divine origin, the traditional reading also takes the Bible as true and authoritative. It is the “ultimate authority about what to believe and how to live” (9). Finally, as to its interpretation, conservatives believe that the Bible is historically and factually true (except for those clear instances where the Bible uses metaphors). In conjunction with this way of understanding the Bible, Borg says there is also a way of understanding Christianity that he describes with six adjectives: literalistic, doctrinal, moralistic, patriarchal, exclusivistic, and afterlife-oriented.

This was the tradition, says Borg, that he himself grew up in. But it is also a tradition that he has left far behind, and that he believes most of western culture has left behind. Why do these older lenses to read the Bible no longer work? Borg mentions four factors: religious pluralism, historical and cultural relativity, modernity, and postmodernity. Because of the cumulative effect of these four factors, we need “a re-visioning of the Bible and Christianity...Being Christian, I will argue, is not about believing in the Bible or about believing in Christianity. Rather, it is about a deepening relationship with the God to whom the Bible points, lived within the Christian tradition as a sacrament of the sacred” (18).

As to its origin, Borg sees the Bible not as a divine book but as a human product, the responses of the Hebrew and Christian communities to their experiences of a real, loving God. What about its authority? Rather than a text standing over us, Borg argues for a “dialogical” model of authority. Our conversation with the Bible must always remain “definitive and constituitive of Christian identity,” he says, otherwise we cease being Christians. The Bible, then, is our “primary, ancient conversation partner.” As to its interpretation, we should read it critically, making judgments about the text, but we also let the text make judgments about us and question us. Borg uses three metaphors to describe this historical-metaphorical way of reading Scripture. Scripture is a “finger pointing to the moon,” it is itself a lens through which we look to see God, and a sacrament that mediates the sacred to us. We want to see the moon, not the finger pointing to it, to look through the lens and not at the lens, and to experience the effects of the sacrament (eg, the bread and wine) rather than focusing only on the sacrament itself.

The bulk of Borg's book then applies his approach to portions of the Bible. Chapters 4–7 examine the creation stories, the Pentateuch, the prophets, and the wisdom literature. Chapters 8–10 explore the Gospels, Paul's writings, and then the book of Revelation. In his Epilogue he concludes that the Bible speaks with many voices, and that these different voices sometimes conflict. For example, the “royal theology” of much of the Old Testament clearly supports the divine monarchy whereas the prophetic literature criticizes and protests against it. Some voices, he argues, endorse what he calls the “conventional wisdom” of life, whereas other portions subvert conventional human wisdom. Thus we must always read Scripture “critically.” But these many divergent voices generally share three key convictions: God is both real and knowable, our lives are made whole and right by living in a conscious, deliberate relationship with God, and this God is a God of justice and compassion. Thus, we must read the Bible “seriously.”

There are few pages in Borg's book that do not contain characterizations, generalizations, oversimplifications, false dichotomies, and so on with which I would disagree. Still, like my friend Charles who loves to read Gould, I enjoy Borg because he succeeds with me by helping me to read the Bible seriously and with the expectation that through it God will speak to me.