Spirit in Action
Marcus Borg, Author of Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time
Marcus Borg is a renowned author of numerous books on various aspects of Christianity and a view radically different from those who uncritically approach religion as a one-size-fits-all straight jacket. His thought and teaching require no suspension of our minds, but offer an invitation to an encounter the universal Spirit in a personal and transformative way.
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- 21 Jun 2009
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I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am up and up is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give and make, give the ragged and the morn So be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done The enders have I none to help undone The tangled nuts and twisted chains that strangle fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands Being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind What a privilege it is for me today to share with you a spirit in action visit with Marcus Borg Marcus is a renowned author of numerous books on various aspects of Christianity and a view radically different from those who uncritically approach religion as a one-size-fits-all straight jacket His thought and teaching require no suspension of our minds, but they offer an invitation to an encounter with the universal spirit in a personal and transformative way His books include "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", "The God we never knew beyond dogmatic religion" to a more authentic contemporary faith and "Living the heart of Christianity, putting your faith into action" He writes and speaks of taking the Bible seriously, but not literally, and about Jesus as a religious revolutionary Welcome Marcus to spirit in action Thanks, nice to be here I feel fortunate that you made time in your very busy schedule here at the Friends General Conference gathering to speak to me and the assembled masses, can you all say something so they all know you're here? [laughter] You know what I'm going to do, rather than start with my own questions, I'm going to start with a couple of the questions that members of the audience have submitted Here's a serious one. It says, "Do you have any suggestions for working in the religious community with those who take the Bible literally?" Well, people who take the Bible literally cover a broad spectrum There are people who might think of as hard, literalists, insistent literalists And by this I mean people who insist that everything in the Bible is literally and factually true and that you must believe this in order to be a true Christian, let's say But then there are what I would call softer literalists and I suspect my own parents who would be very old if they were alive I suspect they lived within the framework of softer literalism all their life And softer literalism means you don't worry very much about whether the Genesis stories of creation are literally scientifically accurate, you can lengthen those six days of creation to six geological epochs very easily But softer literalists are still inclined to think that the really important things in the Bible happened pretty much as they are spoken up That Jesus really was born of a virgin that the sea really did part into at the time of the Exodus and so forth Now softer literalists typically do not use the Bible to beat up on other people And millions of Christians through the centuries had led their Christian lives within the framework of softer literalism and the spirit and able to work through that magnificently Now with hard literalists or insistent literalists in our time I think there's very little possibility for dialogue I don't think we write them out of the church but I think we must recognize that if they're going to change God's going to have to do it There's nothing that you and I through persuasive presentation and so forth could do to get them to change their minds Last comment, generally speaking in our time hard literalism or insistent literalism goes with political conservatism as well And so the 20% of the Christian church in the United States that might be seen as the hard Christian right Would typically be politically conservative and religiously fundamentalist I don't know that there's any way that those of us who see things differently can get through to them I could have all the hours of dialogue in the world with a Pat Robertson or a James Dobson or with Jerry Falwell of recent memory and it would be a sheer waste of time If they're going to be changed, the spirit of God is going to do it In your book reading the Bible again for the first time You talk about some, I'd call them developmental stages and you talked about it a bit about it yourself that as a child you take things you believe it literally, naively, you just accept, oh of course that's what it says in the Bible that's what I believe You talked about not only personally but as a society We had the enlightenment and all of a sudden we get into factual stuff And then you talk about post-critical naivete and I was wondering if you went through those stages yourself I'm wondering how that worked internally for your spiritual life Very much so and the language I use which sounds kind of jargony but it actually names something that I think we all would recognize I speak of that early childhood stage that lasts at least into early elementary school as a state of pre-critical naivete And what I mean by that is very simple, it's that stage in childhood in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us is true is indeed true And because I grew up in a Christian family I assumed that the stories in the Bible were all true It was effortless, didn't take faith at all If somebody had asked me, well do you think they're literally true or metaphorically true? I don't think I would have understood the question The distinction between literal truth and metaphorical truth had not entered my mind So I simply heard the biblical stories as true stories without worrying about factuality at all I took it for granted there really was a star of Bethlehem when Jesus was born I took it for granted that angels sang in the night sky to the shepherds and again as I've said it was effortless Then the next stage is critical thinking which everybody enters into not just intellectuals or highly educated people Critical thinking is that stage in late childhood that goes on all the way into adulthood and through life in a way in which we sift through all the things we learned as a child Is there really a tooth fairy? If you step in a crack will you really break your mother's back and so forth And we all have those things that we remember from childhood And the process of doing this is utterly natural This means that most people begin to wonder now how much of what's reported in the Bible Especially the really spectacular things really happened And so this stage of critical thinking is oftentimes a stage of doubt and skepticism It's possible entering this stage to step back from it When it comes to the Bible and that's where fundamentalism begins Fundamentalism is not childhood naivete Fundamentalism is having seen where the road of critical thinking leads And stepping back from it and refusing to apply critical thinking to one's religious convictions Many people remain in a state of critical thinking all of their lives And it's a state as I say of skepticism and doubt And though it can be experienced as a liberating stage in our teenage years In the 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond It can become an increasingly erred and bare and place in which to live Then the third stage to use the technical language again post-critical naivete It's an adult stage, not everybody gets there And that's not an elitist statement, simply a descriptive statement But the state of post-critical naivete is the ability to hear the central stories of the Bible Once again as true stories Even as one knows that many of them are not factually true And that their truth does not depend upon their factuality One might speak of metaphorical truths or parabolic truths Using the parables of Jesus as a model I don't know anybody who insists that the parables of Jesus have to be factually true stories Or we should dismiss them We all know that the point of a parable is its meaning And so the state of post-critical naivete is the ability to hear the central biblical stories As parables, without needing to affirm their factuality Nor to deny their factuality And finally I note that post-critical naivete brings the critical with it But integrates it into this much larger frame of meaning So yes, I can hear the stories of Jesus' birth As true stories once again, even though I don't for a moment Think that there was a magic star of Bethlehem or angels singing in the night sky I see those as the use of rich archetypal religious symbolism To say, amongst other things, that Jesus is the light of the world The light shining in the darkness And the angels singing to the shepherds in the night sky The first century version of joy to the world, the Lord is come So I hear these stories as true stories But not as historically factual stories Last comment, of course, I do think that some of the things reported in the Bible are based in history That some of the things that Jesus is said to have said Were really said by him, and that some of the things that he has said to have done Were really done, they're based on memory But for me, the primary significance of the Bible is not its factuality, but its meaning When did you go through those stages in your own life? I mean, I think you were raised Lutheran, right? Right. You're raised Lutheran, so you got confirmed. And not crazy Lutheran, mainstream Lutheran. The LCA or the LCA or something like that. So if you're a typical Lutheran, you got confirmed and stopped going to church. I mean, that was the experience of my stepbrothers and sisters. Did you go through this phase where you didn't... I mean, you went into your rational phase, this is no longer factual, so I don't want to be part of it. Did you go through a separation like that and then come back? Yes and no. The yes part is that I certainly entered a stage in a way without knowing it, of being increasingly thoughtful about the Bible and subjecting it to reason. And I remember in high school, church attendance became somewhat more irregular, though it was still a good place for meeting girls. But I would always go to Sunday school because it was fascinating. And it's not that we had, this is like in 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade, it's not because we had a radical Sunday school teacher or something. But we had a Sunday school teacher who would give us space to, I suppose, do the equivalent of late night bull sessions in a college dorm room about religious questions. And I found that fascinating and it seemed exciting and kind of daring and even maybe kind of dangerous to express problems about the Bible. So I never completely dropped out, but I realized in retrospect that the seeds of my, well in my 20s, I entered a state of agnosticism. And by my late 20s, I was probably a closet atheist. And the seeds for that were already there by age 13 or 14, I think. And the reason was simply the collision between the childhood understanding of the Bible and Christianity that I had received and what I was learning in school. And it wasn't that I had teachers who were anti-religious or anti-bible or anything. It's just that once you learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric people and so forth at some point you begin to wonder now, how does that fit together with the story of Adam and Eve? Where Adam and Eve around before the dinosaurs, during the dinosaurs, only after the dinosaurs, and how do you put together? That's what Behemoth was, right? That's Behemoth, right. Yeah, Behemoth and Leviathan from the book of Job, of course. By the way, I love the King James translation of Behemoth and Leviathan. The King James translators didn't realize that these were mythological monsters. And so they translated Behemoth as the Hippopotamus and Leviathan as the crocodile. And so here God is in the last part of the book of Job saying to Job, "Behold the Hippopotamus, anyway." But back to the collision between just what I was learning in school as a late elementary school kid, I suppose. Once you start learning about Neanderthal, man, and then humans much earlier than Neanderthal, man, you start to wonder, so we're Adam and Eve Neanderthals? What would it mean to think of the first two people who seem in the story to be very much like us, but they're somehow predecessors of all these prehistoric people and so forth? So those were the kinds of conundrums that I began running into, and I figured that, of course, there's an explanation, even though I didn't have it. And the last phase, you said maybe your late 20s or something, you're a closet atheist. Did you come out of the closet, or did you put some clothes on? I think not. I don't think I ever said to anybody, "I'm really an atheist," or "I'm really a closet atheist." I was, by this time, finishing a doctor's degree in religious studies and had been teaching college religion courses for a while. And I don't know if that's why I would have found it difficult to say, "You know, I'm really an atheist." But what changed all of that and what ended my atheism was a series of religious experiences in my early 30s, over about a two-year period from 32 to 34 or so. I had about half a dozen what I now recognize as mystical experiences. But at the time, I didn't know that was what they were. I simply knew that these were experiences like I had never had before. In my case, they were eyes open mystical experiences. Technically, those are called extrovertive. Eyes closed mystical experiences are introvertive mystical experiences. But mine were eyes open mystical experiences, which means that I saw the same room or landscape that I would be seeing in any case. No angels, no Virgin Mary's or anything. So I would be seeing exactly what was there, but it looked different. Hard to describe, but it's as if everything was suffused with light so that objects had light inside of them as well as being illumined from the outside. On a couple of occasions, the light turned yellowy or lemony or golden. And there was also a momentary falling away of that dome of the ego that we live within most of the time. By the dome of the ego, I mean just that sense that I'm in here and the world is out there. That subject object distinction of ordinary everyday consciousness would vanish so that I wasn't aware of my separation from things but of the connectedness with everything. And those moments also felt like the truest moments of my life that I was seeing more clearly than I ever had before. That of course this is the way things are, wondrous. And we are all connected. I don't mean that just as a hallmark greeting card slogan. I experienced that sense of, I mean I couldn't even see you if there wasn't all this stuff connecting us. I didn't know at the time to call those experiences of God. But then about six months after these experiences started happening, I had to teach a course at the college level. On subject matter, I'd never taught before, which included some mystical texts from other religious traditions and from the Christian tradition. And I was amazed to find in these books about Christian mysticism and other forms of mysticism my experiences described in considerable detail. That these, according to these books I was reading, were what is meant by the experience of God or the sacred. And until then I'd never thought of God as a reality who could be experienced but only believed in. And I suddenly thought oh my God, this is what the word God refers to. This luminous, radiant presence that suffuses the whole of creation that we are most often blind to. And in these extraordinary moments our eyes are opened and we behold. It's like once I was blind but now I see or I had heard of you with the hearing of the ear but now my eye beholds you. One of those quotes of course being from the ninth chapter of John, the other one from the 42nd chapter of the book of Job. So those experiences gave new content to the meaning of the word God for me. And ever since then doubting the existence of God has just never been an issue for me. I would even go so far as to say that if when a person uses the word God they are thinking of a being who may or may not exist then they're really not thinking of God. The atheism of my twenties was really rejection of what I now call the God of supernatural theism. And what I mean by that phrase is thinking about God as a super powerful authority figure separate from the universe who created the universe a long time ago and who occasionally intervenes within the universe even to this day. That was the God I stopped believing in in my twenties. I never started believing in that God again. What I did instead was to discover this equally ancient understanding of God as the one in whom we live and move and have our being who is all around us as well as within us. But for me it's even more important that we are within God. And the religious life, the Christian life as I understand it is centrally about reconnecting in a conscious intentional way with that reality in whom we live and move and have our being. I'm halfway stunned that you didn't recognize that you're a teacher of religion and you didn't recognize this experience. You'd been raised as a Lutheran, you'd had all this experience. What is there wrong in our system that we do not prepare every person to open to that experience of God? And is it still wrong? I mean you were a child long enough ago that things may have changed since then. It's a very good question. I think most people who have grown up in Western culture over the last century at least and perhaps further back have grown up with what the British and Anglican theologian Kenneth Leach calls conventional Western theism. The most common Western understanding of God and conventional Western theism is something that has emerged largely in the last four centuries because of the enlightenment that began in the 17th century in Europe and then spread to all of the Western world. And prior to the enlightenment the majority of Christians thought of God as present everywhere even as God is more than the sum total of things, God is everywhere. The enlightenment of the 17th century began to bring about what has been called the disenchantment of nature. The removal of the sacred of God from the natural world because the natural world was increasingly becoming the object of study of science and manipulation by technology. So that most people in the Western world think that the word God refers to a person like being out there separate from the universe. Now I stress that this is a modern notion of God. The roots of it are old of course. There are personifications galore of God in the Bible where God is spoken of as if God were a person like being. But the Bible like other ancient religious traditions also speaks of God as the ever present spirit all around us and within us. But since the 17th or 18th century most Western people whether they are believers or non-believers think that's what the word God means. For example the three or four books on the New York Times best-selling list right now that are making a strong case for atheism. All of those basically are rejecting the God of supernatural theism. Their arguments do not work at all against this more mystical understanding of God. The authors I think assume that the only meaning of the word God is to refer to a person like being out there super powerful who intervenes in history. And they don't see any evidence for that and therefore they think the case for atheism is made. So I guess I'm simply saying that our culture Western modern culture in particular is one that encourages us to think of God in very unhelpful ways. Last comment. During my 20s I tried to read some mystical texts. They were absolute gobbledygook to me. I kept thinking why can't these writers write more clearly? What are they talking about? And it seemed like the mystification of language for the sake of obfuscation. And it was only after these experiences that I realized, oh that's what they're talked about. Like the dau that can be named is not the eternal dau. Well in my 30s that became so patently obvious and true. Whereas in my 20s I didn't know what to make of something like that. We're visiting today with Marcus Borg, author of a number of books that have radically transformed how many people think about Jesus, Bible and religion. Challenging narrow-minded conceptions and leading us to heal the world from the center. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host of this northern spirit radio production called Spirit in Action. Marcus Borg is speaking with us today at the Friends General Conference Gathering where he is to be our plenary speaker tonight. And I'm so pleased that you're giving me this early opportunity to hear from you Marcus. I imagine that some of your words strike people on both sides and by both sides I mean fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists as fighting words. I don't know if you get the feedback from them, maybe you get hate mail because you're denying their God. It's so threatening what you say because when you described your experience, your initial spiritual experiences, I was wondering is if there had been a fundamentalist Christian there to say, "Ah, here's what you're experiencing and here's what it means. God's forgiven you for your sins. You have faith in God." And just put it in that package. If maybe you would be debating yourself today instead of advocating what you do advocate. So do you get that kind of feedback from fundamentalist and why is it that their package is so powerful? They take a spiritual experience, which I think is real. They're born in experiences real. It's the one that I think the apostles had, the post-heaster experiences you describe it, but they put it in a package. Why didn't it work for you? Perhaps because I had grown up with a soft form of the fundamentalist package. My parents and my church were not fundamentalist, but they were soft literalists and to use that language I used earlier. That language simply never worked as a means of mediating the reality of God for me. I don't know what would have happened if I had had an experience like that in the context of a fundamentalist or Pentecostal or evangelical worship service. I don't know if I would have seen the words as being indispensable to the experience. I simply don't know that. I do know that a good number of my conservative Christian brothers and sisters, and I include within that category of conservative fundamentalist Pentecostals and many evangelicals, have had an authentic experience of God, and they've had it in the context of the language system used by their community of devotion. For many of them, the language and the experience are virtually impossible to separate from each other. They're into soluble. I actually don't have any problem with Pentecostal Christians or fundamentalist Christians or evangelical Christians as long as they don't use their certainties as a way of beating up on other people. It's when the language of a religious tradition is absolutized that the seeds of that religious tradition becoming judgmental, even violent, are sown. Of course, there's both verbal violence as well as physical violence. I would rather be verbally attacked than physically attacked, so it's a meaningful distinction to say that they're not the same. But I think verbal violence certainly includes, to use the most obvious example, this anti-gay minister. I'm not sure he's ordained, except maybe by himself. In Kansas who takes a small group of people around with him to funerals of gay people and they'll hold up signs saying Matthew is burning in hell or God hates faggots and so forth. When you absolutize the language of your own tradition, even if it's the language of the Bible, you're not too far from that kind of verbal violence, only we are saved and so forth and so forth. So I think it's really important that we always realize that God or the sacred is always more than any words or language system or set of doctrines can capture. And I think that there are many people in all of the major religions of the world who have difficulty separating the language from the reality behind it. And I don't judge them unless, again, they use that in hurtful and harmful ways. Number of years ago, 20 years ago, I was in Milwaukee, and a woman who was an ex nun now a Quaker, she told me that Luke, the book of the Bible, Luke, that when they voted on the canon of the Bible, that they took the four highest vote getters. And Luke was number four, and the next one after that did not include the tale of the shepherds in the field that is in Luke, that's the only place that is in the Bible. So she said, we have this canon of our Bible, and everybody talks about the shepherds in the field, but we have it by one vote. Can you document or not document that? Do we have that kind of specificity on the decision-making process of the canon of the Bible? Are we on the air? We can erase any question that you don't like. No, no, I'll just respond, and you can decide what you want to use of it. So far as we know, there was never an official meeting at which the canon of the New Testament was decided upon. That is, there was never a gathering of the bishops or other church figures to discuss and vote upon which gospels got in and which ones didn't. The process whereby this all happened was almost like a survival of the fittest process. To explain briefly, the four gospels that did make it into the New Testament were the ones that were most widely used in Christian communities of the first three centuries. Now, why were they the most widely used ones? Because they spoke to people. And so when the canon finally comes into existence, it was not through an official meeting. There's some mistaken notion out there in the general public today that the bishops at the Council of Nicaea decided on the canon of the New Testament for political reasons excluded a whole bunch of things. Well, I don't know where that notion came from, but it's completely wrong, completely without basis in fact. The first time that the 27 books that are now in the New Testament are listed in a Christian writing happens in the year 365, and it's in a letter by Bishop Athanasia to his bishops in Egypt. These are the 27 books that are accepted everywhere in the church. So sometime before 365 it happened, but we also know it had not happened by 330. In the year 330, a Christian writer says there are 22 books that all churches recognize as being sacred, and then there are a number of disputed ones. But never an official meeting. It's more that by general consent, almost a Quaker process. Probably. By general consent, these are the ones that we recognize. And quite frankly, the ones that didn't make it, you know, there are a lot of people today who are really excited about the non-canonical gospels. They are valuable for what they tell us about the diversity of second and third century Christianity. It was not a unified movement even back then, so they're valuable for that. But there isn't a one of them that I'd like to see in the New Testament. You anticipated my next question. That was going to be my next question because I thought you wanted the book of Thomas. No, I think anybody who reads these would say, "Oh my God, I thought the New Testament was obscure at times." Now, there are some gems in the Gospel of Thomas, and there are a few sayings in the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus that I hope he said. But there are also passages in the Gospel of Thomas that make the most obscure passages in the other gospels look luminous. And so sometimes I thought, "Well, it'd be nice to have Thomas in the New Testament just to make the point that there's really crazy stuff in here." I think that's an important point to be aware of. I think people sometimes treat the Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament alike, with too much reverence and with not enough seriousness. Treating it seriously means recognizing there are some things in here that I'm convinced never were the will of God and never could have been the will of God. So maybe there's value in having a few documents that make it very hard to believe that this is the inherent inspired will of God. We probably have enough in the Bible already to make it hard to believe that. Were you talking about the Song of Solomon, Song of Songs? I've never heard that preached from the pulpit, and I thought Church would be a lot more exciting if it was preached. Well, your reference to the Song of Songs is, of course, is absolutely marvelous collection of erotic love poetry that is profoundly and beautifully sensuous in the Christian Old Testament, the Jewish Bible. I think it's marvelous as sensual love poetry. I think it's also marvelous as an allegory of the divine human relationship where God is the lover and we are the beloved, and sometimes we are the lover and God is the beloved. But no, the parts of the Bible that I can't imagine ever were the will of God were parts that speak of God having commanded King Saul to kill all the men, women and children and animals and everything that breathes of the Amalekites. And then when Saul shows mercy on some of them, God condemns Saul, I can't believe that was ever the will of God. Or the portrait of God in the Book of Revelation as annihilating, destroying most of humankind and most of the earth for that matter. There are some marvelous things in the Book of Revelation, but the Book of Revelation, to a large extent, speaks about the killer God and of the killer Son Jesus. I don't believe that's the nature of God. Or another quick example, in letters attributed to Paul but not written by him, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus, slaves are told to be obedient to their masters. I don't believe that slavery was ever the will of God or that God wanted slaves to be obedient to their masters. I don't think God wanted slaves to kill their masters, but the point being to provide regulations for slavery is like providing regulations for a brothel. I don't imagine that God would do either. Or trivial stuff, but it's trivial stuff that gets important real quickly. In the Book of Leviticus, we're told that God commanded the ancient Israelites not to wear garments made of two kinds of cloths, not to wear blends. I don't believe God ever cared about such things. So, I think we sometimes take the Bible too reverently and don't pay enough attention to what it says. Because if we pay attention to what it says, we realize that we have this treasure in earthen vessels. The earthen vessels being the thought and words of the two ancient communities that produce the Bible, ancient Judaism producing the Old Testament, early Christianity producing the New Testament. And that in these earthen vessels, we have this treasure of the Spirit of God as it were that can still speak to us today. But to elevate the Bible as the absolute and inerrant will of God, I think is to give to the Bible a status that belongs to God alone. And so, one of the ironies of our time is that the more elevated status one gives to the Bible, the more to use a very harsh word. One is involved in idolatry rather than centering in the God who is beyond all of our words and who at best can only be pointed to by our words. Amen. Another thing I wanted to check out with you because I've said it enough times and I just want to know if there's a biblical scholar who's going to contradict me someday. I've been told and I understand that basically Christians for the first couple centuries were essentially what I understand to be pacifist. That change away from that is a subsequent thing that happened. Is that your understanding of church history of the early Christian church for the couple centuries there? Every scholar who has studied the church of the first three centuries has reached the same conclusion. The Christianity for the first three centuries of its existence was committed to nonviolence or you could use the word pacifism. And it's very interesting that Christian writers during those centuries consistently ground their refusal to take up violence in the teaching of Jesus. So it tells us not simply that this group of people were non-violent but they perceive Jesus to be non-violent and that's why they were. And then it's important to add that the non-violent teaching of Jesus was not simply about being a doormat, you know, about being passive in the face of evil. It was non-violent resistance to evil. And here the translation of a verse in the Sermon on the Mount in most English versions has really betrayed us. It's that passage that goes, "You have heard it set of old and I for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And then in most English translations it continues, "But I say unto you, do not resist one who is violent." And so that is sounded to most people as a council of perfection, as a council to let people do whatever they want to do to you and not to offer resistance at all. And then most people have dismissed that as unrealistic and therefore have said well that only applies to personal relationships and so forth. The right translation of that verse would be, "Do not resist evil, but do not resist with violence one who is evil." And then Jesus taught various means of non-violent resistance and that remained the church's teaching until the 4th century. And as many people, though perhaps not enough, know, in the 4th century Christianity became a legal religion within the Roman Empire in 313. And then by the end of the 300s Christianity was not only legalized, but it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And this faced Christians with a new question. What do we do when the Empire, where we are now a majority, is attacked? Does it mean we do not resist that? Are we obligated to resist that, not only for the sake of protecting our own homes and lives, but maybe even for the sake of protecting the homes and lives of our non-Christian neighbors? And so what is known as just war theory developed. And that's around the year 400. And it's important to note that just war theory has several criteria that must be satisfied. I'll mention only two of them. One, must be a war of self-defense. You may not start a war. Not even a preemptive war? No. And preemptive war is always starting a war. Absolutely forbidden by the history of Christian teaching about war and peace. How is it that our president and the vast majority of Christians in this country did not know that? I mean one of the stunning things about our decision to go to war with Iraq is that the demography group in this country giving the highest percentage of support to starting a war with Iraq. This is in the months before March of 2003 was white evangelical Christians. 84% favored initiating a war against Saddam Hussein despite violating every bit of Christian teaching about war and peace. How is it we can have a born-again president who apparently doesn't know that teaching? And I suspect it's because of his inadequate socialization into what it means to be Christian. But to go back to just war theory for a moment, must be a war of self-defense, must be a last resort. You must have tried every other way of settling the dispute. And then there are other rules about proportionality and civilian immunity and so forth. But the major point I want to make right now is that some people see just war teaching as a betrayal of early Christian pacifism as a fall. And I understand that case, but what I want to point out is that just war teaching and early Christian pacifism have something very important in common. Both are deeply concerned to minimize the use of military violence. Just wars, if there are such things, should always be the exceptions. And unfortunately in Christian history, I think the majority of Christians for the last 1500 years have assumed that if their country goes to war, of course their cause must be just. And the irony is that every European war for over a thousand years has been fought between Christian countries, both of whom were quite confident that God was on their side and that just war theory justified their position. So just war theory has too often in history been used in such a way that refusal to go to war is supposed to be the exception. But just war theory really was intended to make a case. Going to war must be the great exception. Part of the work of the Jesus Seminar has been to try and sift out and find out what was really, really from Jesus. And I'm wondering if you can share with us a couple statements that you feel quite confident are original Jesus statements. There's actually quite a few I would put in that category. Let me preface it briefly by saying, though, that I think it's useful to have some idea of what goes back to Jesus and what is the voice of early Christians in the decades after Easter. Useful, but it's not crucial. I don't think a saying is worth less because it is the early movements testimony to Jesus rather than something that he said himself. Having said that, and here I express what most of my colleagues would say within the Jesus Seminar and outside of the Jesus Seminar. Most of the parables in their original form go back to Jesus. Jesus was a great storyteller, and those stories are for the most part subversive stories by which I mean the undermine or subvert conventional ways of looking at things. He was a magnificent speaker of the memorable one-liner, and it's just because those one-liners have become quite familiar to us that we lose track of how marvelous they were. For example, "Leave the dead to bury the dead." That's a marvelous one-liner. The core of his teaching radically challenges our ordinary way of living and our ordinary way of seeing. Then another body of material that I'm confident goes back to Jesus is his teaching about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is probably the phrase, the single phrase that is most central to the message and activity of Jesus. What's the Kingdom of God? It's what life would be like on earth. If God were king and the rulers of this world were not, if the Herod's of this world, the Caesars of this world, the powers of this world were not. What would the Kingdom of God be like? In a phrase, it's about economic justice and peace. It's about bread. Think of the Lord's Prayer. Thy Kingdom come on earth. God's Kingdom is for the earth. Heaven's in great shape. The Kingdom is about daily bread, enough bread for everybody, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of justice. Then Jesus' teaching about nonviolence, God's dream for the earth is a dream for a world of justice and peace where everyone shall know the Lord. Not in the sense of believing the same set of doctrines, but it is precisely through knowing God that the path to justice and peace becomes most profoundly open. I have a personal question here for you. I imagine you go to church. I was raised Catholic. I learned you can't miss or else. My question is, how does that work out for you to sit in the parish? I've got to figure it's got to be held for whatever ministers in front to know that there's an expert there who knows it a lot better than he does. For you, sitting there, you've just got to sit on your hands the whole time. How does that work out for you? It works out fine. Half the time when I'm in church, I'm preaching. Actually, that's true because I do a lot of lecturing on the road and that oftentimes includes preaching. But to take the question seriously when I'm in church, not as the preacher, but as a worshipper, I don't have any problem at all. Part of that is because I'm an Episcopalian where there's great latitude within the tradition of the Episcopal Church for a wide variety of beliefs. What holds us together is a common liturgy. There's this great story about Elizabeth I who became queen right after, you know, bloody persecutions of Protestants under Queen Mary, and before that persecution of Catholics under Edward and Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth gathers her bishops together, who are now the Church of England, of course, what many of them have Catholic longings or tendencies, and she says to them, "I really don't care what you believe. Just use this book." And then the new edition of the Book of Common Prayer was distributed. And there's a seriousness to this for me. What unites us as Episcopalian and what unites me with Episcopalian is are being centered around the Eucharist and using these familiar words as part of our worship service so that we understand that these words bring us into communion, point us to the reality of God, and we're not all that concerned about how precisely you understand these words. For example, the creed. I have absolutely no problem saying the creed, and I see in creed of 325. Among the reasons I don't is that I'm enough of a historian to know that those are the culturally conditioned words of the fourth century, that all language is historically relative. The best it can do is point beyond itself. And it's also because I think of the creed as one of the things that we as Christians, or at least as Anglican Christians, do when we come together. I've been told that when the elks or the moose get together, there are certain words they say together and unison. The creed is kind of like that. I mean, it's not exactly like the elk or the moose oath or whatever they call it. But you do wear a special head here, right? Yeah, and you wiggle your fingers like antlers. So I identify with a community that uses this language together. I sometimes think that being Christian is to a large extent about talking Christian. Now, I don't mean in a hypocritical way where it's just words with nothing inside. But just as being French means speaking French and knowing the French ethos. So being Christian means speaking Christian and knowing the Christian ethos. And so it doesn't bother me at all when traditional Christian language is used because that's part of what it means to live within this tradition. Now, if somebody wants to absolutize the language, then I'll challenge that just as if somebody wanted to say French is the only language in the world. Anybody who uses another language quite frankly should be exterminated. Obviously, one fights that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you have to go very shortly. One last question. Jesus and Buddha, the parallel sayings you co-edited wrote that with Jack Cornfield. Why did you do it? Well, I did it because I was invited to do it. Then you could ask me why did I accept the invitation. For a long time, at least for 30 years, I've been struck by parallels between stories about the Buddha and stories about Jesus, the teaching of the Buddha and the teaching of Jesus. I think they have a couple obvious differences as well. But the Buddha's message about enlightenment, which is a new way of seeing, is grounded in his own mystical experience of enlightenment. So the foundation of the Buddha's way of seeing is grounded in his experience of the sacred. The same is true for Jesus. He was a wisdom teacher like the Buddha who invited people into a new way of seeing. There are those who have eyes but do not see. If the blind lead, the blind won't they both fall into a ditch and so forth. And I think the stories of Jesus giving sight to people, whatever the historical basis behind them, are also metaphorical narratives of the importance of seeing. And I think Jesus had his own mystical enlightenment experience at the beginning of his adult ministry. I think it's what impaled him to go into the ministry. So here we have two figures, both in their early 30s, having these powerful mystical experiences that profoundly change the way they see things, and they both become wisdom teachers. Now the difference between the Buddha and Jesus, not the only one, but one of the big ones, is the Buddha lived into his 80s, and Jesus was executed by the powers that ruled his world within a year to three years of his going public. I think there is a political edginess to the message of Jesus that wasn't there in the message of the Buddha, and that's not to claim superiority, it's about difference. And even that difference may be explained by the difference in social class between the Buddha and Jesus. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha was born into a class of privilege, and though he saw suffering, he never was a victim of injustice himself. Jesus was born into the peasant class, and I think a passion for justice most often comes from the experience of injustice. And so in Jesus we see this passionate indictment of the domination system of his time, which is what led to his execution, of course, the authorities quite frankly don't care for that kind of thing. And why was he filled with such passion for justice and non-violence? Partly it was he was in touch with the prophets of his own tradition, and partly I think it was because being from the peasant class, he was aware of the enormous suffering in the peasant class that came from the oppressive system, the oppressive imperial system under which Jews and the Jewish homeland in the first century lived. Last comment or two, there's a story of the Buddha walking on the water. There are stories about the birth of the Buddha that include the sky being filled with a great light on the night of the Buddha's birth. According to one voice in the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha was conceived by a divine conception. I think I've heard of that before. Yeah, okay. And then, in one stream of the Buddhist tradition, the historical Buddha, whose name was Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha is spoken of as the incarnation of the cosmic Buddha, and the cosmic Buddha in turn is seen as an emanation of the Dharma Buddha were awfully close to a Trinitarian pattern here. And I don't think these similarities are accounted for through cultural acquaintance or cultural borrowing. I think the similarities between Jesus and the Buddha are accounted for, in part, by the similarities of their religious experience. And I think the similarities are accounted for in part by the kinds of stories that are naturally told about an immensely significant figure in the traditions that grow up around that figure. Some wonderful stuff. I know you have to run off to the bookstore now and speak there. You haven't produced a lemon of a book yet that I've found. And I just thank you for coming speaking to us. Everyone there can you applaud loudly so they... Thanks so much, Marcus. You betcha, and thank you, Mark. You've been listening to a spirit in action interview with Marcus Borg, author of a wide assortment of writings to radically transform and confront our views on Jesus, Christianity, and the Bible, recorded before our live audience at the 2007 Friends General Conference Gathering. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor. Enjoying selflessness. [Music]