SA: Right, on that note, now let me read to you from an email that crossed my screen just this morning. Because I think this somehow relates to all of the above: “Bible Goes High Fashion” — that’s the headline I guess in the London Daily Telegraph: “A group of Swedish entrepreneurs, going by the name Fishtank, is planning a magazine-style version of the Old Testament. . .”
MJB: Really?
SA: It gets better: “. . .with images by leading fashion photographers and poses by models.” Says here Claudia Schiffer is signed to play Eve and Markus Schenkenberg will be Adam. [Borg chuckles] “A member of the group said their goal is to ‘contemporize the Bible and make it accessible to fifteen- to thirty-year-olds.’ ” And the article concludes by saying they’ve turned down one publisher’s £30,000 offer in hopes of signing a deal with Virgin.
MJB: Interesting. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I was aware of the project, I think it started in England, where a publisher issued single books of the Bible in little paperbacks.
SA: Right, with introductions by a mix of celebrities.
MJB: Okay, two obvious things: on the one hand, these are market-driven decisions. That is, there’s an awareness that the Bible continues to sell very well, so new ways of packaging the Bible will capitalize on a market that’s always there. I guess that’s the cynical take. But the second thought that occurs to me is that there might be some advantage in people encountering the Bible as something other than a sacred text — in terms of its packaging. Now, of course it remains a sacred text whatever package it’s put in. But we are so accustomed to encountering the Bible in a certain form that to encounter it as a magazine or as a thin paperback of one book of the Bible — that might help people to become acquainted with the stories of the Bible without a sort of holy reverence getting in the way.
SA: And of course you observe in this book that the collecting of the different scriptures into one volume or two halves of a seeming whole is itself a kind of packaging/marketing decision made during the 1400s with the invention of the printing press.
MJB: Sure. And I think one result of such “packaging” is that our almost natural way of approaching the Bible is in a pious kind of way. And this can actually get in our way of hearing what is really there. So if these unconventional ways of packaging the Bible help people to encounter it as they would any classic, that might actually be helpful.
SA: I mentioned Jim Crace’s novel Quarantine at the start of our conversation — do you know of it?
MJB: No, no I don’t.
SA: Well, let me describe that book briefly in preface to a question I’d like to ask you about being both a scholar and a person of faith.
In Quarantine, we meet a wicked man, Musa, a merchant, who becomes stranded in the wilderness while deathly ill. He soon recovers, and comes to believe that he has been cured by a strange, young Galilean. This man is named Jesus, and he has journeyed into the wilderness “to find a place where he and god could meet in privacy. . . . He preferred the pious habitats of lunatics and bats where he could live for forty days, hanging by his toes if need be, and not have any excuse for shifting his eyes from heaven for an instant.”
Jesus finds such a place, and without food or water soon enough dies there, but not before making a convert of sorts out of Musa, who nonetheless remains a wicked man. In the end, Musa descends from the wilderness and realizes on his journey back to civilization (during which he has or thinks he has a vision of the risen Jesus) that he can make quite a handsome profit out of the good news racket: “[T]his would be his merchandise. . . . He’d trade the word. There was a man who had defeated death with just his fingertips. ‘I am the living proof.’ He’d travel to the markets of the world. He’d preach the good news.”
Now, Crace is attempting and accomplishing many things in this novel; it’s a gorgeous book and I love returning to it, but for me its main service is in rendering the wonderment of what we believe of Jesus from what little we know of him — with a nod to the Jesus Seminar’s eighteen percent. Maybe nothing will come of Musa’s Jesus except profit to Musa, but maybe this is something like how it began. The meanest of us spreading the meaning of the best of us. So the question — I think there’s a question here! The question is, how is one a historian and a person of faith at the same time? The one man, the historian, having so little, really, and the man of faith having so much.
MJB: Yeah, it’s a big question and an important question. Let me come at it this way: I think Christianity as a religion is obviously true. And by that I mean Christianity works. Christianity as a religion is a way in which people are put in touch with the sacred. To say the same thing only slightly differently: Christianity is a mediator of the sacred; its scriptures, its practices, its rituals, can function as a sacrament of the sacred. So in that sense I would argue that the truth of Christianity is independent of the truth of any historical statement.
Now, I don’t have any worries when I do my historical work that I might find something that would lead me to the conclusion that Christianity is a mistake. History cannot disprove the truth of Christianity — history and historical research do not have that kind of absolute significance. But I do think history matters, and I take the history that we read about in the Bible seriously: that ancient Israel really did have its origins in an event of liberation from the imperial domination system of ancient Egypt; that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible really did speak against the ruling economic elites of their day; that Jesus really was executed because he was a voice of religious social protest against the powers that be.
The connection to history that we have in each of these examples gives to Christianity a social and political edge that it would not otherwise have. And that connection to history is important because without it, Christianity could risk becoming simply a quite individualistic form of internal spirituality. And that’s a risk that all religions face in the American marketplace. In short, I think the connection to history that we see in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus, helps to keep Christians in touch with the fact that the God of the Bible cares passionately about justice and history. The historical approach makes that connection.
SA: Lastly, as an editor, I can’t help reminding you of an epigraph in your book The God We Never Knew [1997]: “Tell me your image of God, and I will tell you your theology.” And the endnote says: “A remark made by a character in a novel I imagine writing.” Do you have a novel?
MJB: I have, oh, a file folder full of forty or fifty pages of notes ranging from individual scenes to possible plots to short character sketches of people I might populate the novel with. I don’t know if I have any gift for writing fiction or not, but I would love to write theological novels, in fact. They would be didactic, which I know is a dangerous aspiration for a novelist.
SA: Would they be contemporary? Biblical?
MJB: The novel I imagine writing would have a number of characters in it, all of who are preoccupied with C.S. Lewis. It would be set in the present day, so C.S. Lewis isn’t alive but the problem of C.S. Lewis is.
SA: How’s that?
MJB: Well, there’s the early C.S. Lewis who is a hero for conservative evangelicals today, and then the later C.S. Lewis who, to a large extent, disavows his earlier almost dogmatic certainty. My characters are trying to make sense of C.S. Lewis and they’re also on their own spiritual journeys. I think it would be a wonderful way of teaching people not only about C.S. Lewis but about the central issues of theology. If I go with that novel, I’d build a conflict into it between one character who is a brilliant conservative evangelical and another character who is much more moderate-to-liberal and part of it will be their squabble about how to interpret C.S. Lewis.
SA: That sounds wonderful. I really want to encourage you because, as you describe it, it sounds like something I’d like to read.
MJB: I would love to do it. We’ll see, we’ll see.
About the Author
Marcus J. Borg is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Relig
ion and Culture at Oregon State University and author of many books, including the bestselling Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, The God We Never Knew, and Jesus: A New Vision.
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1. The point is made in a remark I have heard attributed secondhand to Peter Gomes, author of a recent best-selling book on the Bible, The Good Book (New York: William Morrow, 1996). Because I am uncertain of Gomes’s exact words, I do not use quotation marks, but the gist of the statement is this: Has the Bible become a hindrance to the proclamation of the gospel?
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2. Mainline Protestant denominations include most of the older Protestant churches: the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the largest Lutheran body), the Christian Church (Disciples), American Baptists, Quakers, and some others. On the Bible, the Catholic Church has more in common with mainline Protestant churches than with fundamentalist and conservative-evangelical churches.
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3. For an important essay on variations within conservative attitudes toward the Bible, see Gabriel Fackre, “Evangelical Hermeneutics: Commonality and Diversity,” Interpretation 43 (1989), pp. 117–29.
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4. See L. William Countryman, Biblical Authority or Biblical Tyranny? (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. ix–x: “These Christians imagine that the nature of biblical authority is perfectly clear; they often speak of Scripture as inerrant. In fact, however, they have tacitly abandoned the authority of Scripture in favor of a conservative Protestant theology shaped largely in the nineteenth century. This fundamentalist theology they buttress with strings of quotations to give it a biblical flavor, but it predetermines their reading of Scripture so thoroughly that one cannot speak of the Bible as having any independent voice in their churches.” Countryman’s book as a whole is strongly recommended.
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5. I do not mean that the number of mainline Christians is increasing. As virtually everybody knows, membership in mainline churches has declined sharply over the last forty years. Among the reasons: when there was a cultural expectation that everybody would belong to a church, mainline denominations did very well, for they provided a safe and culturally respectable way of being Christian. Once the cultural expectation disappeared (as it did in the final third of the twentieth century), membership in those denominations declined. But among those in mainline churches, the appetite for modern biblical scholarship is remarkable.
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6. Attributed to Jerry Falwell by George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 1. Marsden himself expands the definition slightly: “[A]n American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values and mores.” Marsden affirms that “fundamentalists are a subtype of evangelicals.” For American fundamentalism and its relation to evangelicalism, see also Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980). Both books strike me as particularly illuminating and fair.
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7. See the important new study of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalism (all understood as reactions to modern culture) by Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (New York: Knopf, 2000).
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8. See the books by Marsden cited in note 6. The origin of a movement explicitly known as “Fundamentalism” is usually traced to the publication between 1910 and 1915 of twelve paperback volumes known as “The Fundamentals.”
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9. See the very helpful and interesting article on “Scriptural Authority” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 5, pp. 1017–56. The article is written by a number of authors. On page 1034, Donald K. McKim notes that the second- and third-generation Reformers affirmed “plenary inspiration,” the notion that the Bible was directly inspired by God, “. . . in essence a ‘dictation’ theory of inspiration.” Roughly a hundred years after Luther, the Lutheran Johann Quenstedt (1617–88) wrote that the books of the Bible “. . . in their original text are the infallible truth and are free from every error. . . . [E]ach and every thing presented to us in Scripture is absolutely true whether it pertains to doctrine, ethics, history, chronology, topography,” and so forth.
On page 1035, Henning Graf Reventlow notes that this was a significant change from Luther: “[W]hereas for Luther the Bible becomes the living word of God in being preached and heard, in the orthodox systems Scripture in its written form is identified with revelation.”
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10. For natural literalism and the distinction between it and conscious literalism, see Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), chap. 3, esp. pp. 51–53.
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11. I owe this very useful phrase to Huston Smith, “Jesus and the World’s Religions” in Jesus at 2000, ed. Marcus Borg (Boulder: Westview, 1997), pp. 116–17. In his Forgotten Truth (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1976, 1992), especially the first chapter, Smith speaks of modernity as marked by scientism, which he carefully distinguishes from science. Scientism affirms that only that which can be known by science is real. To which I would add that modernity is also marked by historicism: historicism affirms that only that which is historically factual matters. Both perspectives are serious mistakes.
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12. For this and other meanings of faith, see my The God We Never Knew (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 168–71.
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1. I cannot demonstrate this, of course, though I think I can make a persuasive case against those who think they can demonstrate God’s nonreality. My study of religious experience in many cultures over many centuries and my acquaintance with contemporary religious experience have led me to the conviction that God is real and can be experienced, and that such experiences occur across cultures and religious traditions. See chapter 2 of my The God We Never Knew (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
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2. Among recent books, see Paul J. Achtemeier, Inspiration and Authority: The Nature and Function of Christian Scripture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999); John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), esp. pp. 1–36; L. William Countryman, Biblical Authority or Biblical Tyranny? (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 1–15.
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3. See chap. 4.
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4. Lev. 18.22 and 20.13.
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5. Lev. 19.19.
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6. Exod. 4.24–26
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7. I Tim. 2.9–15. Virtually all mainline biblical scholars see I and II Timothy and Titus (known together as “the pastoral epistles”) as relatively late documents written around the beginning of the second century, some forty years or more after the death of Paul. In antiquity, it was acceptable practice to write in the name of a revered figure of the past.
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