Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | by nathan

The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg

I finished reading Marcus J. Borg’s The Heart of Christianity awhile ago. I’d read the first three or so chapters in 2004, and then I started grad school, and in a rare bit of procrastination, I never picked the book back up.

I read Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time for a college class in 1999. The class was titled "The Search for Jesus" and dealt with what is known in religious-academic circles as the "historical Jesus" quest. Most of the scholarship in this field is a bit silly - I won’t get into the reasons, but the "Jesus Seminar" in particular leaves me feeling pretty irritable, despite the fact that my pastor is a member of it - but in the midst of all the ridiculousness I found Borg’s book to be fascinating and compassionate.

Marcus J. Borg is a man who wrestles with what he calls a "traditional paradigm" of Christianity versus an "emerging paradigm." The traditional is what you’d expect, and his problem with it is nothing in the faith itself but rather its tendency to ignore or write off the people who, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to sign on to it. This book is an exploration of this struggle.

I experienced this schism myself when I came out. Through a long, personal quest I’ve realized, among other things, that I am not an evangelical Christian. I understand and appreciate evangelical belief in a way that many who’ve come out of it do not, but I cannot be a part of the evangelical community.

This book is for people whose story and struggle are like mine. Unlike other books which describe a different perspective on Christianity, however, it is compassionate, kind, and not dismissive of traditional or evangelical Christianity, and it does not covertly embrace a necessarily secular-humanist agenda. It encourages an active faith, one that engages God and the Bible, one that requires prayer and community and social action, one that fundamentally changes the believer. Where Borg occasionally lapses into liberal-political rhetoric he can be forgiven; his faith, after all, has implications for his political beliefs and he makes no apologies for this, nor does he imply that anyone else should, whether or not they reach the same conclusions that he does.

This is going to take a place of honor on my shelf along with the work of Brennan Manning, C.S. Lewis, Anne Lamott, et al.