JESUS, MARCUS BORG, AND BLINDERS CHRISTIANS [M, 8-15-22]

 

Marcus Borg was a real believer. To “blinders Christians,” that made him a real enemy.

I have written about Marcus before, but I want to again because I just finished Borg’s 1987 book, JESUS, A NEW VISION: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship, for the fourth time. I read it about every ten years. It renews me every time.

I read it first around 1992, not long after I was diagnosed with colon cancer and told I’d die “in a year or two.” I was at a conference at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, and picked it up off the book table just because I liked the title.

I knew nothing of Borg. He was just another obscure Bible prof, teaching at the unlikely spot of Oregon State U. I mean, shouldn’t a major Bible scholar be teaching at some place like Harvard or Yale or Union or U of Chicago? He had published a couple of books earlier, by legitimate but little-known presses. They had not caused enough stir to reach small-town pastors in the Midwest. The furor over “The Jesus Seminar” was yet to come. But I always liked to buy a new book when I went to a conference. Made me think I was a scholar myself.

It was because he was a real scholar that blinders Christians could not accept Marcus as a real believer.

I guess I was one of the last kids to grow up with a horse to pull the wagon and the plow. Prince was a saddle horse who thought it beneath his status to be a work horse. Our harness did not have blinders, which allowed Prince to continue his claim to high status. He could see too much.

Blinders are flaps attached to the harness beside the horse’s eyes. With blinders on, horses can’t see to the sides, so they are less likely to get spooked. And since their eyes are on the sides of their heads instead of the front, it means they can’t see much at all. They are not scholars [observers] but only believers. They go along on faith.

Blinders Christians believe that if they believe irrational stuff, like “Jesus wrote every word of the Bible himself,” then they are better Christians than rational people, like Borg, who say things like “the Bible was written by fallible people like us and that is why God is able to use it for our benefit.” The point becomes not the activity of God but the activity of the believer, and the less reasonable the belief, the more that proves the fidelity of the believer.  

Marcus Borg believed because he thought it was the most rational thing to do, not the least.

I can’t say that Borg changed my life with …New Vision, but he changed my thinking. Here was a deep and insightful scholar, who clearly had a deep and meaningful faith. I had always been more of a God believer, and a Christ believer. Borg was those, but also a Jesus believer. He got me acquainted with a Jesus I thought I knew but really did not. His 1994 book was entitled Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Borg helped me do that with Jesus, a New Vision.

He wrote several more volumes on Jesus and the Bible. Probably the most comprehensive, and a good place to start reading him, is The Heart of Christianity, published in 2003. That was when his scholarship and thinking reached its mature zenith.

I was so impressed with …New Vision that Helen and I began to go to conferences where Marcus was speaking. The first was at Concordia College, in Morehouse, MN, where Marcus had gone to college himself. Our faith was challenged and deepened with every sentence he spoke. We didn’t really get acquainted with him that time, though, because my book for cancer patients [1] had come out, and I was doing seminars for nurses and others at the Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, ND, just across the state line from Morehead.

Later, though, we became… more colleagues than friends, I guess. His wife, an Episcopal priest, used my book with cancer patients. We’d chat around the edges of conferences. Whenever he published a new book, he’d send me a copy, and I would do the same for him with mine. Helen didn’t like the available confirmation materials when she mentored our granddaughter, so she asked Marcus to do another version of Heart… for junior high confirmands. He said he couldn’t write at that level, but she could, being a teacher of teens, so if she revised the book, he’d put both their names on it and get Harper SanFrancisco to publish it. Alas, she was busy with many things and did not get that done. 

Through the years, so many people have said to me, “Marcus Borg made it possible for me to be a Christian.” He tore off blinders so that we could believe for real. At a time when my life was at its lowest ebb, he gave me “a new vision.”

John Robert McFarland

1] NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them