One of the presenters at the conference I attended was Marcus Borg, a prolific writer and favourite of so-called "progressive" Christians. It strikes me as a rather smug, self-important way of describing one's self, but Borg is neither smug or self-important. I do not share his conclusions about the metaphorical nature of the gospels and letters, but I have read several of his books and appreciate his thoughtfulness.
For that reason I wanted to actually hear him and he didn't disappoint. His latest book is Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power --AND HOW THEY CAN BE RESTORED. That's quite a mouthful for a book title, but it does describe his mission.
He offered that an increasingly secularized society is one reason that we are losing the ability to "speak Christian" and another is the misunderstanding and distortion of Christian words by those who assume they are fluent.
Borg shared with us that half of his first year students in the New Testament course he teaches have never attended a church service other than for weddings or funerals. He gets these students to take ten minutes to write an essay called Me and Christianity. He gets responses such as "I don't know much about the Bible, but I think there's a story in it about a guy in a fish." And "I don't know much about Christianity, but I think that Christians are really against trespassing." Apparently we Christians have major boundary issues! Borg points out that these are bright students, but they are Christianly illiterate.
He figures that we begin our literacy program "in house" by reconsidering the key words and phrases. I could say more, but maybe you should just read the book.
Are you fluent in Christianity or do you feel that you just have a few snippets of the language? I tell people I speak cereal box French -- I could never carry on a conversation even though I have some vestiges of public and high school French. Do you wish you were more conversant? Does it matter?
2 comments:
This author's point of view reminds me of my first year history class at Queen's. HIST 121 was a survey of the major philosophical writings from Biblical times to Betrand Russell. The swing of it was to basically examine major texts and tease out their obvious (and not-so obvious) historical implications.
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that at the end of the course, many of my classmates complained that their lack of Biblical knowledge was a handicap for them. They just had no way of connecting to St. Augustine, Martin Luther or others because of their lack of Christian knowledge.
It blew my mind at the time, because that knowledge base was what I had grown up with.
I look forward to Borg's progressive viewpoint. What I have read of his confirms my view of a God that expands life, not limits it. For many the only notion they have of God is of shalt nots, sin, and an angry God waiting for us to "mess-up", and a God that if we do okay in life will take care of us in death....and frankly I get the growing disconnect in modern society to this God. So I am grateful for Borg sharing his take on his God as one who wants to know us, walk with us everyday and whose expectations of us aren't huge and restrictive, but to be in loyal relationship with "Him" and to live with compassion.
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