At Christianity Today, some Christian scholars fondly remember the recently deceased Dr. Marcus Borg, liberal Bible scholar. Dr. Ben Witherington praises him as a “Christian churchman.” I guess I have no objection to that description, so long as we supplement it with this observation: Dr. Borg was a longtime atheist, who had moved from monotheism to agnosticism to atheism, like so many. It’s just that his atheism is not the naturalistic atheism which is has become so popular since about the mid 19th century. Let me clear that I’m not hereby criticizing him; my interests here are classification and understanding.
Here he is in a video posted in 2013, talking about what he means by “God.”
- He starts with “God” – the word. Obviously, different people mean different things by this word. :50 two understandings
- his first 30 years – “God” refers to a super, person-like being, in some way separate from the universe – omnipotent, omniscient, loving, an authority who gives laws, someone who intervenes by miracles. “Supernatural theism”.
- Comment: This is what nearly all traditional Christians mean by “God.” This is what any New Testament author meant by “God” (ho theos).
- 3:00 By the end of his 20s, he’s moved from his young “Supernatural theism” to agnosticism – doesn’t believe that there or is not such a being.
- Comment: Why?
- 3:20 – He “now came to think of God very differently” – rather, a second understanding of “God.” Now “God” is “the encompassing reality” or “encompassing spirit” which infuses the cosmos. “The one in whom we live and move and have our being.” We are in God like fish are in water.
- Comment: by “spirit” I think he means a non-physical reality – he doesn’t mean to imply that it is a self. It is an It, not a He. It is the ultimate reality which as it were lies behind the cosmos, and is more real than it, or at least is somehow the source of it.
- 4:30 This was an insight gained in religious experiences in his early 30s, which he describes. Light infusing everything, “a kind of falling away of the sharp boundaries between the self and the world,” strong feelings of amazement, wonder, joy, feeling that he has a better insight.
- Comment: these experience are fairly common, and there’s a large literature on them. They are especially common with “mystics” in the monotheistic traditions, and notably in neoplatonism, Zen Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. They are sometimes described as “unitive” – where all is seen as, or as in, One, one indescribable ultimate. It is problematic, actually, how one draws any substantial, metaphysical or theological conclusions from them, given the contents of the experiences, as described by the people who have them.
- 6:00 what he inferred from these experiences. They were experiences of “God”, as with the mystics. He’s never doubted the existence of “God” since then.
- Comment: It is interesting that he invested these experiences with such epistemic weight; he’s sure they were perceptions, not hallucinations, imaginations, brain farts, etc. I wonder on what grounds he dismissed people who claim to have experienced the ultimate as a glorious self?
- 7:00 “God” is a name that points at this wondrous reality. This dissolves all the problems with the first, super-being meaning of “God.” Unlike it (!!) this experience reality is sacred, wondrous.
- Comment: The super-being concept of God is literally boring to him. It is a mere relic of childhood. I’m not sure what all the “problems” are he’s referring too… perhaps he thinks there is something incoherent in “Supernatural theism,” and perhaps he think that we all know now that miracles do not occur. But I’m just guessing.
- 7:45 What kind of reality does he mean by “God”? He tells us there are 2 ways of thinking about what God is like, his character.
- God loves us, but we can’t take that love for granted. If we reject him, he might send us to hell. God is basically punitive here. (!?)
- God is gracious, compassionate, loves all creation.
- 9:45 These produce, respectively, fear-based, and love-based Christianity. These use similar language, but are profoundly different.
- Comment: If I understand him, he thinks of himself as in the second camp. Not being a self, his “God” can’t disapprove of anyone or anything. Thus, we can (and this is natural, in his view) imagine that this ultimate looks kindly upon us.
- 9:45 These produce, respectively, fear-based, and love-based Christianity. These use similar language, but are profoundly different.
10:30 evil is real. But the problem of evil disappears when we realize that God never “intervenes.” Sure, we can pray for interventions, but this is a just a natural expression of caring for friends, and of my own dependence on God.
- Comment: God, not being a self, can’t be praised or blamed for anything at all. So, he can’t be held accountable for evil. “God” doesn’t intentionally do anything at all – that is the domain of selves. This ultimate, Borg’s “God” just is.
- “When I pray, I address God as if God were a person.” Because even though God is not a person, my relationship to him is “personal.” This personification of God is natural.
- Comment: Note the “as if.” Pretending is fun, natural, perhaps beneficial. But it doesn’t involve any human-God communication or fellowship; there is no I-Thou relationship is taking place in any prayer. This relationship is “personal” in the way that a child’s love for her pet rock is “personal” – it involves exactly one self, not two.
- 12:45 – His childhood mistake was to literalize Christian personifications, leading to the super-being understanding of “God.”
- 14:00 faith/trust (properly understood, knowing that God is not a person) is like “floating on the surface of the void” i.e. fear-free resting in “God”
- Comment: no worries, all is OK. There is no one to hold us accountable. How freeing! No one to help us, either. Hence, political action is everything – it is everything that can really help our troubled world. Still, it can help, a little, to turn one’s mind towards this glorious reality – that can help you to be a nicer person.
- his first 30 years – “God” refers to a super, person-like being, in some way separate from the universe – omnipotent, omniscient, loving, an authority who gives laws, someone who intervenes by miracles. “Supernatural theism”.
It is no wonder then, that he wanted to see Jesus as primarily about politics. About Jesus’s actual interest – the heavenly Father – Borg couldn’t care less. That was a natural but juvenile interest, for Borg, something that he’d long grown out of.
This is atheism to be sure – the number of perfect beings is zero. The number of intentional creators of the cosmos is zero. But it is not naturalistic atheism. It is similar in some ways to Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, on which the ultimate reality is an inconceivable something, which is rarely experienced. For them too, any devotional religion is for the uneducated, the unenlightened. The actions of devotional religion, for both, are easily accommodated, so long as we keep in mind that it’s all play-acting, not real interaction with the ultimate. The ultimate don’t do dat.
This is, historically, the much more important kind of atheism. Naturalistic atheism was always a tiny minority view until after Darwin. This, what I call ultimist atheism, has long been among the heartiest competitors with belief in the heavenly Father.
Relatedly, here’s a presentation of mine in which I attempt to clarify this family of concepts. I still agree with most of this analysis, but I’ve since changed my terminology a bit, trying to find terms which are less confusing. But that’s another paper and another post.
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Ultimately the question is that of mysticism. Even if some Christians try to distinguish “christian mysticism” from other forms of mysticism, ALL mysticism has to do with an impersonal “god”. ALL mysticism, without exception.
This is why theology has to be fitted to scripture, the God of a bible is a person With a story and plan, not a shroom style trip experience. If you define God down to the God of the philosophers (I don’t mean offense to philosophers here, that’s just the term used for deist and patheistic forms of God), there is no reason to think of God as having personal qualities if he cannot be described as a person, and I don’t know if philosophically, one can seperate personhood from being, a person is a being, a person thinks about things, has a will, has relationships to Things. If you’re treating a non person as a person, then the atheists who mock christians as having an “imaginary friend” are right. If God is just a some spiritual reality, some paganistic inpersonal force, then all you have is a strange form of neo-paganism.
I don’t think Christianity Works without a hisorical personal god, that acts in history, and has a plan, if you break that all down into pure metaphore, you might as well become a neo-pagan pantheist.
Hi Roman,
Good point about “being” and “person.”
The biblical Hebrew and Greek languages didn’t have any vocabulary to conceptualize the difference between “being” and “person.” This is one of the critical underlying problems with the way Trinitarians try to define God as “one being = three persons” in order to make their exegetical arguments seem plausible.
Unfortunately, I’ve always found it difficult to get my Trinitarian friends to think critically enough to realize that just the terminology they use to describe the “Godhead” requires a departure from any semantics that the biblical writers even had to work with. Thus, it’s unlikely that they could have even conceived of anything like a “multi-personal being.”
Dale
This is a quotation from the Greek poet Aratus (ca. 310-245 BC), in turn quoted by Paul in his speech at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:28) to refer to the “unknown god”. Do you think that Marcus Borg was implicitly suggesting that also Paul was a “transcendental atheist” like himself?
How could Borg speak of an impersonal “God” “loving” and/or “being gracious”? One is seriously led to wonder if his “mystical experiences” had not impaired his thinking capabilities …
With the addition of your comment about the “pet rock”, isn’t this precisely what idolatry is all about?
“Do you think that Marcus Borg was implicitly suggesting that also Paul was a “transcendental atheist” like himself?”
No, anyone who thinks there’s a being beyond the natural world, who in some sense or other is everywhere, can use that quote. So the monotheist like Paul can use it just as readily as Borg, but it fits Paul’s theology better (“in whom”).
“an impersonal “God” “loving” and/or “being gracious”
I take it that we are supposed to imagine “God” this way, since (1) it is helpful, and (2) this “God” is incapable of any sort of disapproval.
I don’t think Borg’s view is literally idolatry… it’s consistent with idolatry, to be sure. It’s not clear to me that he actually believed in *worshiping* – as opposed to wondering, or being amazed at this “God.” His view is atheism – the God of monotheism, he thinks, is unreal. But he wishes to re-interpret and re-use the outward forms of traditional Christianity.
Dale,
I get the impression that Borg simply lost his way as he got older. It seems that he moved away from a rational acceptance of the historical evidence behind the Christian faith to a lot of pseudo-intellectual theoretical speculation that suited his own desire to redefine “God” according to his own experiences.
Borg’s “God” could just as well be the air that we breathe, or the electricity that energizes our cells, or the plasma sheath in which our whole solar system “has its being.”
I’d be interested to hear more of his story. In this video, there’s not a lot of evidence of critical thinking. In particular, there seems to be a yawning gap between his reported religious experiences and his unclear, ultimist theology.
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