Theologian Sees Jesus the Beloved, Not a List of Beliefs

by Nancy Haught

Oregon's leading theologian walks his dog up and down the trendy streets of the Pearl District. His neighbors know Henry, the shaggy gray Glen of Imaal terrier, whose short legs set the pace. But few recognize Marcus Borg, the graying guy in the wool cap, as the spokesman for a different approach to Jesus Christ.

At 64, Borg is a public theologian and a private mystic.

He writes best-selling books on theology and reads murder mysteries. He was trained at Oxford University and teaches at Oregon State. He lives in a neighborhood overflowing with espresso but drinks Taster's Choice instant decaf.

But mostly, his is a polite and progressive voice in an often intense conversation about who Jesus was and what his life may mean to his modern followers.

Borg talks, primarily, to three decidedly different groups: his students, who are mostly undergraduates; his readers, who are mostly Christians who question long-held beliefs about Jesus; and his critics, who are mostly evangelical or orthodox Christians. They confess their beliefs in familiar terms. Jesus was, the last say, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, suffered for human sins, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will come again.

As a historian and a biblical scholar, Borg was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly group that spent years evaluating the historical evidence of Jesus' life and sayings. Borg emerged from the process with deeper faith in Jesus and a different understanding of Scripture.Borg interprets the Bible and its descriptions of Jesus as a mixture of memory and metaphor, better suited to preserving meaning than as a list of beliefs fashioned by Jesus' followers into a list that Christians must believe.

"For me, to believe a set of statements is impossible," Borg says. What is possible, he argues, is to "belove" Jesus and walk in his path.

"For the past 300 years," Borg says, "faith was a matter of believing a list of beliefs about Jesus. The list varied among Christians--that Jesus was the son of God, that he was born of a virgin, that the tomb was empty on Easter morning.

"But in the pre-modern world, before about 1600, the object of belief was never a statement," he says. "It was always a person. To believe meant to belove a person.

"To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity."

Faith, Borg says, is a matter of living in relationship with Jesus and working politically, first for justice and then for peace.

Borg has taught religion at OSU for 28 years. He'll retire this spring and continue his writing and speaking, but says he'll miss his encounters with undergraduates.

"There is something wonderful about their openness," he says in his office, brimming with books and papers, on the Corvallis campus.

His fans, the ones who read his books and fill church halls as he travels the country talking about Jesus, express their admiration with a sense of humor. They wear T-shirts proclaiming themselves "Borg Again Christians" and, borrowing from "Star Wars," "May the 'phors (as in "metaphors") be with you."

"There is a hunger for something other than a fundamentalist, literal understanding of the Bible," says the Rev. Tom Tate of Portland's Rose City Park United Methodist Church. Tate says he doesn't always "buy" the traditional viewpoint. "Borg has given me the courage to come out and say certain things."

Borg's critics are his toughest audience, but one he is determined to engage. He says he accepts every chance he has to talk to them in public settings, preferably with an opportunity for questions and answers from an audience.

In February, Borg debated OSU history professor Gary Ferngren in front of 750 people. Their back-and-forth exchanges on the heart of Christianity sparked a few good-natured jibes and an unexpected measure of laughter.

In a characteristic quick show of hands, Borg observed that fewer than a third of the audience members were sympathetic to his position, a third were already in Ferngren's camp, and the others had come to listen.

"I'm not so interested in changing people's minds," he says, "as to let them hear and see a Christian like me instead of reading people who are critical of us."

Paul Metzger, a theology professor at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, is very clear about where he disagrees with Borg.

"I appreciate Professor Borg's emphasis on Jesus having been crucified for his identification with the poor and oppressed, a point often lost on many conservatives," Metzger says. "But there is more: Jesus' suffering was part and parcel of his dying for the sins of the world. Jesus was also raised bodily from the dead to bring new life."

That said, Metzger appreciates the serious and civil debate that Borg encourages. The alternatives are dangerous, he says.

"If people don't dialogue because they think that only their ideas matter, or if we put all the ideas to the side and just go for some neutral frame of reference, neither is meaningful."

And meaning, Borg would say, is the point of the Bible, of Jesus and of Christianity.

Jesus "is for us the decisive revelation of God--of what can be seen of God's character and passion in human life," Borg says. "But for followers of Jesus, the unending conversation about Jesus is the conversation that matters most."