God of the Burning Bush
For a great many modern liberal theologians God, if there is a God, is not the God of the Bible, the God of the burning bush, the God whose name is Yahweh. They find the God of the Bible too anthropomorphic to be believable. Where the tradition of Judeo-Christianity has been to speak of both the transcendence and the immanence of God, liberal theologians prefer to think of God solely as transcendent –– as a spiritual energy or cosmic consciousness that is totally benevolent. Of course, as soon as they speak of benevolence or love they are logically themselves engaged in the use of anthropomorphic language. In Process Philosophy (a form of modern liberal theology) God is a creative process, a process in which we are all participants, making the world –– making ourselves. The influential theologian, Paul Tillich, thought of God as the “ground of all being.” God, he thought, is not a being but rather is the ground or basis upon which all being exists. He understood God as a symbol, as a good way for people to talk about that which concerns them “ultimately.” Tillich thought that to speak of God as a being, or as personal, easily led to our having small thoughts of God –– reducing God to no more than a human person –– a super person but still just a person. And, in fact, this is often seen to be true in the preaching of fundamentalists. But, I find myself more in tune with the great Jewish mystics and scholars Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber who both argued, similar to Tillich, that God is not a being but a mysterious reality,  in the face of which all our descriptive words and phrases become mere clichés. However, both Heschel and Buber also  insisted that the only meaningful way of talking about this reality is in the sort of language that pertains only between persons.

One of the things most liberal theologians want to avoid is any suggestion that there is a God “out there” who intervenes in human affairs. I love the movie O’ God starring George Burns, and I think it makes some important points. The scene in which God shows up as a Bell Hop is marvelous––as is the one in which John Denver is sent as God’s messenger to tell the self-aggrandizing evangelist to shut up and quit taking people’s money. But the overall portrayal of God in this film is as a heck of a nice grandpa who wants us to be nicer to each other, and to take better care of the planet; but, who is irrelevant and impotent in the presence of real suffering and useless to humanity in crisis. This, it seems to me, epitomizes quite well the God of liberal theology. Now, if you prefer George Burns’s film version of God rather than that of the ancient patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism or of Christ, and Saint Paul and all the Apostle’s, I have nothing mean or derogatory to say –– the world could certainly use a lot more congenial cigar smokers. What I am rather curious about is why the bother to claim the Christian “brand?” Humanism is a perfectly respectable, positive, and compassionate philosophy to live by –– and you don’t have to explain all the Christian stuff you don’t really believe.

Paradigm Christology
The attempts of liberal theology over the last 250 years to discover through logical analysis of the Gospels who Jesus was as a historical figure, have resulted in numerous variations of what is known as paradigm Christology.  A paradigm is a pattern or model, so paradigm Christology looks for something unique, “special” is perhaps a better word, about Jesus which constitutes some higher ideal to which human beings may aspire. It might be said , for instance, that “Jesus was truly the person for others,” especially, the poor, the outcasts, and the oppressed, that “Jesus loved as no other has loved,” or that “Jesus was a completely authentic existential person.”

The famous German theologian. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1835), who was in a sense the father of paradigm Christology, said that what was special or unique about Jesus was that he represented the perfect consciousness of God. The essence of the Christian religion, he argued, is the feeling of “absolute dependence” on the Father that Jesus felt. This, thought Schleiermacher, was the pattern to be followed in living the Christian faith; that is, he did not believe Christ to be “true eternal God,” but he did think Jesus had a unique spiritual consciousness we ought all to cultivate. Since the time of Schleiermacher modern liberal theology (modernity) has come up with a long list of ways in which Jesus serves as a model, pattern, or paradigm for humankind. Marcus Borg’s picture of Jesus as a wise philosopher, as a holy or “spirit person,” and as a political activist is a more contemporary example.

Borg is actually a fairly good example of contemporary liberal thinking about Jesus. But before going further let me say that what I am about to say is my best understanding of Marcus Borg, and I hope not to misrepresent him in any way. Borg was an emotionally compelling writer whose books resonated with many. Having said that, his work was also confusing at times. He frequently caricatured Christian tradition and parodied what he called “the old model or paradigm” of Christianity. He would then present a new model or paradigm, what he referred to as an “emerging” Christianity; and, then, at times pivot again to acknowledge that what he had been criticizing was not the actual ancient Christian tradition itself, but the harsh, authoritarian, and intellectually unsophisticated perspective of the conservative Lutheran Church of his youth in North Dakota.

At other times it is difficult to logically hold Borg’s ideas together. In one online exchange he accuses another theologian of misrepresenting him in saying he does not believe in the resurrection. There he seems to assert that while he does not believe in a “bodily” resurrection he does believe in a “spiritual” resurrection. He also noted that he had affirmed many times that Jesus’s disciples experienced him, as have many since that first Easter, as living. Yet, I once asked Borg in an e-mail if the disciples experienced Jesus as alive because he is in fact alive, or whether that was simply a mistaken psychological experience. His rather coy response was that “we cannot know Jesus’s present ontological state” –– the state of his current existence or non-existence. In his brief response Borg simply ignored the question of whether Jesus was experienced alive because he was indeed alive, or whether those who have claimed to have experienced him as the Living Lord were merely describing an entirely subjective psychological state. It is difficult to see how, other than in some purely metaphorical sense like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, one can think of Jesus both as having been resurrected in any real sense, even “spiritual,” and yet as nonexistent since that dark Friday afternoon. So, Borg is not always easy to understand, and I do not want to misrepresent him. Nevertheless, he is something of a portrait of contemporary theology in the following respects:

For liberal Christianity Jesus Christ differs from other men and women only comparatively, and not absolutely. Certainly Jesus was not, according to modernity,  in any sense divine. He may have healed some people through psychological means but did not perform any “spectacular” miracles, and did not rise from the dead. Borg saw Jesus as an extraordinary person, “one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived,” but again only different or extraordinary comparatively speaking. In response to a reader who wrote asking if he believed Jesus was God, Borg replied like this:

No. Not even the New Testament says that. It speaks of him as the Word of God, the Son of God, the Messiah, and so forth, but never simply identifies or equates him with God. . . . He is the Word incarnate—not the disembodied Word. . . . He shows us what God is like—reveals God’s character and passion. But none of this means that the New Testament teaches that Jesus was God—as if all of God was in Jesus during his historical life. To use the language of the Trinity, God the Father did not cease to be while Jesus was alive. Jesus was “God’s Son,” not God the Father. Was the Son like the Father? Yes. Was the Son the Father during the life of Jesus? No. Are they in an important and complex sense one? Yes. But to equate God and Jesus during his historical lifetime is bad history and bad theology.

Borg was not a top tier scholar, but he possessed excellent academic credentials (an M. A. in Theology and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Oxford university, and was a professor of Religion at Oregon State University. But when he writes this sort of thing it just boggles the mind. It is absolutely stunning because Borg most certainly knew that what he wrote to this inquirer was not true––not true historically, biblically, or theologically. Well, I suppose it is possible to say in one’s opinion it is just bad theology but in that case one is arguing that bad theology has been the norm for the Christian faith for two thousand years.

Thomas G. Long comments on Borg’s own theology as expressed in the above letter like this:

If we are to give any weight to Borg’s use of trinitarian language here, two things become clear. One, Borg unsurprisingly finds it important to distinguish his vaguely Arian view of the pre-Easter Jesus from traditional trinitarian thought (which he would undoubtedly have seen as an unfortunate development of the post-Easter view of Jesus), and two, Borg misunderstands classical formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity. He seems to assume that claims about the divine nature of Jesus carry the implication that Jesus was God the Father walking around in history and that divinity is a zero-sum formula such that, were Jesus to be divine in any sense, then God the Father would have to cease being so. The result is a misrepresentation and a reduction of the Christian tradition.

Modern liberal theology by interpreting the Gospels as stories and sayings of Jesus composed by the church and projected backward has provided the means by which modern liberals have been able, with pseudo intellectual sophistication, to discredit the primary themes of classic Christianity. As Thomas Oden noted: “According to such “Christ”–ological speculation, the memory of Christ is largely a history of mistakes. There is a strong smell of hubris that accompanies this sort of critical pretense. It seems to be historically sophisticated while putting a spin on the historical evidence so as to make it align with presuppositions acceptable within certain circles of modern consciousness.

Scripture
For modernity the Bible is not a divine record of revelation, but a human record of the religious experiences of a nation. Doctrinal or creedal statements based on Scripture are therefore of no continuing significance for Christians. Only the broadest moral and ethical teachings of Scripture remain relevant. Not only that, but the New Testament, in particular the Gospels, have undergone such extensive editing that they are hopelessly corrupted. Borg therefore wrote:

The Bible is thus both Sacred Scripture and a human product. It is important to affirm both. To use stereotypical labels, both conservative and liberals within the church have sometimes been reluctant to do so. Conservative Christians resist affirming that the Bible is a human product, fearing that doing so means it will lose its status as divine authority and divine revelation. Liberal Christians are sometimes wary of affirming that the Bible is sacred Scripture, fearing that to do so opens the door to notions of infallibility, literalism, and absolutizing. But a clear vision of the Bible and its role in the Christian life requires seeing it as both sacred Scripture and human product. It is human in origin and sacred in status and function.

I agree somewhat with Borg––it is important to see the Bible as both a sacred and human book.Where the person rooted in the ancient orthodox faith will find Borg unsatisfying is in his defining down the meaning of “sacred” as the Bible’s “status” and the way in which it “functions” in the Christian community, rather than having originated in the Spirit of God.

What Borg does not want to say, perhaps because he erroneously believes it will lead to literalism, notions of inerrancy, and absolutizing, is that Scripture is holy because its origins are to be found in the Holy One––in God. He cannot allow himself to say Scripture is sacred because it is inspired––or as the writer of 2 Timothy 3:16 literally put it––”God breathed”. It can, of course, be a tricky business to say that Scripture is true because it comes from God. Indeed, it should be noted that in the original Greek Paul does not say all Scripture is inspired, but that all Scripture that is God breathed is spiritually transformative. Be that as it may, what I want to emphasize here is that if God is not passive but active in any way in the divine human encounter, and if true truth ultimately comes from a source deeper than or from beyond the human condition, then the Bible is sacred, not because I give it a cherished status or find it foundational for my tribe, or because it is inerrant, but because it has been breathed forth by the Mysterious Beyond.

Liberal Christianity like conservative American fundamentalism trivializes Scripture by focusing on a literal factual understanding –– in spite of its claim to read Scripture metaphorically. Here are two examples of what I mean:
(1) Barth Ehrman tells how as a graduate student at Princeton he was asked to write an interpretive paper on Mark 2:25-26. In that pericope, Jesus asks the Pharisees, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, he and those who were with him; how he entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?” Jesus was referring to the story in 1 Samuel 21:1-10 where in fleeing from King Saul who wanted to kill him, David entered the tabernacle and ate consecrated bread. However, in 1 Samuel it is not Abiathar but his father Ahimelech who assists David. Later Saul murders Ahimelech in revenge and Abiathar then succeeds his father. Ehrman found this technical discrepancy so troubling that he became an agnostic. Now, there is a logical explanation but that is not my point here. The simple point I want to make is that while Ehrman lost his faith that day he did not lose his fundamentalist attitude and perspective; that is, the idea that Scripture is either absolute word-for-word truth (inerrant) or it is not true at all. This, it seems to me, defies ordinary reality––defies common sense. There are very few places where we look at things in such all or none terms–– maybe when reading a bank statement which must be true to the last decimal to be really true. But not in the telling of anecdotal stories.
(2) In his intriguing book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture  Has Made Us Unable to Read It, Peter Enns tells of an intellectual turning point in his own life that came in a class taught by a Jewish professor. The professor turned to an episode in Exodus where at a place called Rephidim Moses miraculously provides water for the people in their desert trek by striking a rock with his shepherd’s staff. Later in Exodus, the professor pointed, out there is a similar story of Moses again striking a rock with his staff and obtaining water, this time at Kadesh. The professor, as Enns explains it, informed them that some ancient Jewish interpreters believed that the rock at the end was the same as the rock at the beginning. He then had Enns and his fellow students turn to 1 Corinthians 10:4 where Saint Paul says of the wandering Hebrews, “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” That moment was, for Enns, as if he were watching his whole view of the Bible collapse like “a house of cards.” What Enns seems to miss is that his essential problem then and continuing into now, is not with the text itself but with reading every line as a literal fact to be accounted for in the work of interpretation. I can’t imagine, even as a young conservative boy, thinking that a stone drinking fountain, as Enns’s parody goes, followed the Hebrews around the desert. I grew up with two much older mischievous sisters and a brother and so I have been, before a time I can remember, quite a skeptical person. I never believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny; or, that Lash LaRue was a real character. If someone had told me that Saint Paul believed there was a magic rock fountain that travelled around the desert on its own, kind of like the chest of gold in The Color of Magic, I would have assumed I was being teased. I knew that Moses had spent forty years tending sheep in the wilderness so naturally I assumed that, like many of my Native American and mountain men heroes, he was good at finding water in the desert. As a child I also heard lots of sermons on Biblical typology (a type in scripture is a person or thing in the Old Testament which symbolizes or foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament), and so would have quickly grasped from my mother, who was always explaining such things, that Paul wanted me to think about how Christ is always with us in whatever desert we find ourselves–– how Christ is our drink and very breath.

The liberal orientation to Scripture, as Marcus Borg acknowledged, can be just as literal and one dimensional as any conservative fundamentalist. And fundamentalism, whether of the conservative or liberal variety tends to trivialize, misunderstand, and misuse Scripture.