Marcus Borg on Christianity

Here are excerpts from The Heart of Christianity: Re-discovering A Life of Faith (2003). He is discussing three affirmations that are central to Christian faith, those being "the reality of God, the centralty of Jesus, and the centrality of the Bible."

--"God is real. There is a 'More,' to use language I will also use in Chapter 4. . . ."

--"Christian faith means affirming . . . Jesus as the decisive disclosure of God and of what a life full of God looks like. It means affirming Jesus as the Word of God, the wisdom of God, the light of the world, the way, and more, all known in a person. . . . Affirming the centrality of Jesus for Christians need not lead to Christian exclusivism."

--Just as Jesus is for us the Word of God disclosed in a person, so the Bible is the Word of God disclosed in a book. Being Christian means a commitment to the Bible as our foundational document and identity document. The Bible is our story. It is to shape our vision of life---our vision of God, of ourselves, and of God's dream for the earth" (pp. 37-38).

Borg goes into depth on these three foundational aspects of Christianity. The following is under the sub-heading "Metaphor as Bridge":

A Metaphorical approach to the Bible has the potential to be a bridge between the earlier and emerging paradigms. In Christian history, the more-than-literal meaning of biblical texts has always been most important. Only in the last few centuries has their literal factuality been emphasized as crucial.

Moreover, much of conservative Christian preaching today emphasizes the more-then-literal, the more-than-historical meaning of biblical texts. From my recent experience, I provide two brief examples.

The first was in a Pentecostal church. The preacher's text was the story of Jesus healing a paralyzed man in the second chapter of Mark's gospel. The "punch line" of the text and his sermon was, "Jesus said to the paralytic, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk.'" The preacher told several brief and moving stories of people paralyzed, immobilized in their lives, by addictions of various kinds, by long-term unemployment and giving up on ever finding a job, by abuse the prevented intimate relationships, and so forth. And after each story, he paused dramatically and then said emphatically, "And to that person Jesus says, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk!'" It occurred to me that he was preaching the text as metaphor; that is, he was preaching the more-than-literal, the more-than-historical meaning of the text.

The second was an Easter sermon in a conservative Baptist church. The pastor's sermon repeated one sentence over and over again, with great emphasis on the last four words: "They went to the tomb, but the tomb was empty!" In between the repetitions, he told stories of people who had encountered what felt like the "end" of their lives and hopes bitter disappointments, devastating griefs, tragic betrayals, children killed in accidents or imprisoned, financial catastrophes--the whole terrain of human trouble. And after each, often with his eyes getting big, his voice lowering to a hushed but loud whisper filled with amazement, he said, "And they went to the tomb---but the tomb was empty." His point was clear: what they had feared was the place of endings and death was the place of beginnings and new life. It was enormously effective (pp. 56-57).

Prince of Tides, A Novel by Pat Conroy

Two Thought-Provoking Quotes

[Black children in the segregated South] who have tested their resources in the bitter milieus of white kids trained from birth to love Jesus and hate niggers with all their hearts (400).

That night we lay on our backs on the floating dock and felt the whole river fill up with the grandeur of completion as it neared the headwaters of the sea. In the scant light of a new moon, we could see every star that God meant the naked human eye to see in our part of the world. The Milky Way was a white river of light above me and I could lift my hand in front of my face and annihilate half of that river of stars with the palm of my hand. The tide was dropping and the fiddler crabs had arisen from their mud caverns and the males waved their large audacious claws in eerie harmony. They moved their claws in synchronization with the tides and stars and winds. They signaled with their ivory arms that the world was as it was always meant to be. Thousands of them gestured to God that the tides had fallen, that the Pagasi shone with the proper magnitude, that the porpoises were singing of the hunt in the racing waters, that the moon had been faithful to its covenant. This movement was a dance, a trust, a ceremony of divine affirmation (409).

HAUNTING LINES FROM EMILY

EXCEPT the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’T is lost, and lost to me.

I don't begin to understand what dear Emily Dickinson meant by these lines and I can't find any interpretation, so I'll take a stab.

It is well known that Emily resisted conversion during a revival when she was enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Of those converted, she wrote, "They seem so very tranquil, and their voices are kind, and gentle, and the tears fill their eyes so often, I really think I envy them."

I wonder if the above poem speaks to this kind of revival that came so close to home ("seemed to choose my door"). Is she saying that God's distance, in light of this new closeness, haunts (or hurts) her? Did she have hope on this occasion that she had never hoped before? Did God's grace depart once the revival was over? She implies this elsewhere. Is the loss double because the grace (perhaps meaning the revival) has ended and her opportunity to accept the grace has passed her by?

Here's another poem that may have a similar theme:

JUST lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.

Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal,—
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.

Jim Harrison, SAVING DAYLIGHT

This morning I'm reading some poems from Harrison's 2006 book of poetry. Here are some lines worth pondering.







I can freely tie myself up without rope.
This talent is in the realm of antimagic
and many people have it. . . . (p. 10)

He's [God] so tired of hearing about this ditzy Irishman,
Bishop Ussher, who spread the rumor that creation
only took six thousand years when it required twelve billion.
Man Shrunk himself with the biological hysteria
of clocks, the machinery of dread. You spend twelve billion
years inventing ninety billion galaxies and who appreciates
your work except children, birds and dogs, and a few
other genius strokes like otters and porpoises, those humans
who kiss joy as it flies, who see though not with the eye. (72)

The church says God is spy
who keeps track of how we misues
our genitals. . . . (115)

Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW

John, in his wonderful down-home Kentucky accent, just finished reading Jayber Crow this morning. I had read it years ago, but it's well worth reading a second time. Here is a quote (p. 321) that's worth pondering. Jaber, after more than thirty years, has been pushed out of his barber shop by government inspectors and has moved to a little shack on the river:

I kept on as janitor of the church, which is scheduled work. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don't attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don't want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn't want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I'm a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

A Thought-Provoking Poem

John read some poetry to me last night and began reading The Picture of Dorian Gray all from an anthology of Oscar Wilde (1854-1099), born in Dublin. Here is a cartoon drawing of him. He was a most controversial character and often made the news. He was also a profound writer. Below is a poem that we both thought to be most profound.





"On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria"

Christ, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!

Reasons A Reverend Resists Church Attendance

"One reason I don't [go to church] is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. They're not telling me anything I haven't heard before. They are not moving my heart. Plus it gives birth in me to the worst of me. I keep thinking how much better I could do it. And what a terrible thing to go to church and come away thinking, "God, I wish I had gotten up there. I could have really told it the way it is." Rev. Frederick Buechner