Resisting the Borg
Alien Worldviews and the Bible

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Marcus J. Borg. Harper San Francisco, 2001, 321 pp., $24 (Hardcover).

Marcus Borg wants to save the Bible. He wants to save it the way his own life has been saved. Coming from a Scandinavian Lutheran home in North Dakota, Borg first received his Christianity in a condition he calls “precritical naiveté.” This believing-without-questioning form of faith was then blown apart by a required course in religion at college. Here Borg learned the accumulated lessons of 200 years of post-Enlightenment modernism. These lessons included discovering the true path to knowledge through scientific study, the rational objections to traditional Christian belief and the critical study of the Bible.

Temporarily satisfied by the discovery of this new “map” of reality, Borg delved into a fully modernist study of the life of Jesus by focusing on Jesus’ relationship to the social and political realities of his day. Years later, however, Borg had a series of deeply spiritual experiences that would transform his understanding of God, Christianity and the Bible. Borg describes this as an encounter with the mysterious and wonder-inspiring “numinous” that Rudolph Otto wrote about in The Idea of the Holy. It was, for Borg, a rediscovery of the indescribable sacred that is at the heart of the universe. He had passed through the dry skepticism of modernism and come out on the other side with a renewed appreciation for the reality of spiritual experience.

But, as Borg notes, there is no going back to innocence. His study and experiences had now placed him in a state of postcritical naiveté in relationship to Christianity. He knew that there is a reality that can be called “God”—not a person, or concept or article of belief—but simply the name we put on our personal experience of the sacred. But he also knew that scientific and rational truths cannot be ignored. The notion is bizarre, says Borg, that what God wants most from us is belief in things that otherwise we would never believe—walkings on water, mysterious bread multiplications, resurrections from the dead, etc. Borg prefers the approach of that old Native American storyteller, who, after finishing his tale, said, “Now, I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” The key discovery here is that spiritual truth can and must be separated from concerns about “what really happened.”

Thus was Borg’s spiritual life saved, a saving that in his view does justice to the reality of the sacred as well as the reality of the scientific. And thus does Borg seek to save the Bible. Too much of our cultural reading of the Bible is conditioned by those obsessed with “historical factuality,” leading to never-ending debates about the historicity of this or that purported biblical event. Borg’s project is to free the Bible from this bondage and point to another way of reading that highlights its real spiritual potential and value.

Once the obsessions of traditional Christians have been overcome, he says, the way is open to rediscover the gift that the Bible really is. This is done, according to Borg, by following what he calls the “historical-metaphorical”method. The “historical” refers to the continuing importance of rational, historical biblical criticism and study. The “metaphorical”refers to the need to see beyond the confines of such modernist study of the text and read deeper to find important spiritual truths in these ancient stories.

After setting out this foundational view of the Bible in Part One of Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Borg then sets out to briefly outline what this “historical-metaphorical”reading of the Bible looks like in practice. Parts Two and Three provide samples of how Borg would read the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, respectively.

Borg’s reading of Scripture is always closely tied to his personal spiritual journey, and he frequently contrasts his earlier inadequate or even illegitimate readings (read conservative or precritical) with later readings now critically informed and more authentically spiritual.

For instance, Borg tells the story of how as a child he was taught to see the Hebrew prophets primarily as predictors of the coming Messiah. The prophecy-fulfillment model dominated his thinking. Later in his life (while Borg was a socially-aware college student in the 60’s) he latched on to the social justice aspect of their messages. Borg learned that the so-called predictive element of prophecy was not really there, but had been written into the New Testament by Jewish authors familiar with the Hebrew Bible who then created various “fulfillments.”

But a this-worldly emphasis is not all there is to the prophets. They consistently report having visions of God and of having received their prophetic commissions directly from God. The modernist Borg simply overlooked or dismissed these claims. But the spiritual Borg came to realize that the prophets really did have personal experiences of the sacred that grounded their social protest. In this way, Borg claims to pay proper dues all around—to the real historical message of the prophets and to their real spiritual message. We are urged to do likewise in our Bible reading.

In response, we can admit that there is a certain appeal in Borg’s approach. After all, who doesn’t want to live consistently? If Enlightenment rationality has set the boundaries as to what is possible and what is not in our world (and Borg would claim we all acknowledge this in our daily lives in multitudes of ways), and yet we also know that somehow, somewhere there is a “sacred center” to the universe, don’t we all desire to organize our lives according to a unified sense of this reality? It’s hard to go on living as if two sets of contradictory ideas are both true, as if physical miracles and virgin births and incarnations really happened in the Bible but don’t happen today.

The question is whether Borg has posed the choice the right way and whether such an approach actually does justice to the spirituality of the Bible itself. In practice, Borg’s approach results in reading into biblical texts the kind of “pan-spirituality” that is so popular today. Here it is not the specific beliefs and practices of a particular spiritual tradition that matter so much as what any individual spiritual quester can make of them. Borg combines his modernist reading of the Bible historically with a “new age” reading of the Bible spiritually. The personal encounter with the sacred is what matters, regardless of the specific symbols, practices or teachings utilized in that encounter. It is surprising indeed that such an approach is referred to (in the book’s subtitle) as “taking the Bible seriously.” It is difficult to imagine the Hebrew prophets happily sharing the symbols, practices and teachings of the alternative spiritual traditions of their day.

Taking the Bible seriously is, of course, what everyone in the debate wants to claim. The first step to this, by both sides, has to be a truly historical reading of the text without the strictures of an alien worldview being allowed to distort that reading. The greatest effort should be put into “getting inside” the worldview of the biblical writers themselves. What did the Bible mean for those who wrote it? (And remember, they were neither Enlightenment rationalists nor postmodern pan-spiritualists.)

The problem here for Borg is that he himself does what he accuses biblical conservatives of doing. Borg rightly notes that the tendency toward an overly rationalitistic, context-ignoring, proof-texting biblicism by conservatives results from the imposition of an alien worldview on the Bible. But while Borg claims to have “passed through” modernism to a re-discovery of the sacred, in fact his essentially modernist view has forced the spiritual out of history and into the vague mists of the “numinous.” This is not taking the Bible seriously, because the Bible is first and foremost, from front to back, about what happens in history. In the end, Borg’s is an ad hoc use of the Bible, different not in principle but only in direction from that of literalistic fundamentalists. Both have drunk too deeply of rationalism.

What is needed on both sides is a recovery of the art of reading the Bible as a collection of Jewish stories and early Christian interpretations of those stories in light of Jesus. These are stories that, once one lives inside them for awhile, will be seen to make their own claims about how we should view the world and what God is capable of doing in it. After all, modernism was not the first word about these matters. It will not, perhaps, be the last word either.

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