A few thoughts on the Teachings of Marcus Borg

A friend posted on the death of Marcus Borg yesterday. She called him an inspirational and thinking theologian. Here are some of my thoughts regarding the theological thoughts of Marcus Borg.

I really have issues with his take on the events surrounding the birth of Christ. When speaking of the miracles concerning the birth of Christ Borg wrote:

"To be candid, I do not think that any of this happened. Of course, there is some historical memory in the stories. Jesus was born. He really lived. He was Jewish. His parents’ names were Mary and Joseph. They lived in Nazareth, a very small peasant village, perhaps as small as a few hundred. But I do not think that there was an annunciation by an angel to Mary, or a virginal conception, or a special star, or wisemen from the East visiting the infant Jesus, or angels filling the night with glory as they sang to shepherds.

Yet I am not a “debunker” of these stories. I do not dismiss them as “fables” or “fabrications” or “falsehoods.” Many in the modern world do see the two options as “it happened this way” or “it didn’t” – and if it didn’t, then we are dealing with delusions and deceptions. A few years ago, a television special on these stories posed the question that way: are they “fact or fable”?

There is a third option. Namely, the Christmas stories with their miraculous elements were not intended to be “factual” in the sense of reporting what actually happened. Rather, they are early Christian testimony, written roughly a hundred years after Jesus’s birth. They testify to the significance that Jesus had come to have in their lives and experience and thought. The stories are parabolic, metaphorical narratives that can be true without being factual" (From Dr. Borg’s blog on Patheos:http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marcusborg/).

Seems like many brilliant people cannot believe in the miraculous. They want to explain it away but still call themselves Christian theologians. Yet, the very creation of the earth was a miracle. Scientist cannot explain it. They try and they fail. A finite being cannot create something out of nothing. If you prefer to think it all began with a Big Bang, a lingering and sobering question still remains. Where did the elements come from that produced the bang? The cosmos had to have a beginning and the beginner of it (the creator), had to be one of superior intellect and with the ability to create out of nothing, which seems to suggest that the miraculous was involved.

Borg and others in his camp want to take this amazing fact away from God - God can do anything He desires to do. Man cannot begin to understand the mind or the workings of the Father. Yes, I have many questions. I want to know how God operates in the miraculous. But, for now I have to trust and wait.

1 Corinthians 13:12 sums up my attitude on many issues.

"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known" (NASB).