Peace, Mother

Today's service at ECOOS featured an "Instructional Eucharist." This entailed several interruptions of the regular flow of worship for various "instructions" from our curate. This also unfortunately caused more than the usual number of Episcopal calisthenics for those of us with creaky knees. One good thing that came of all this was a shorter sermon from the rector. He focused on the Collect and John 14: 23-29.

The collect and the reading from John brought Mother's Day home for me.

The Collect for today was,

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

It is not enough that he has given us his son, there is more to come that we cannot even begin to imagine. What has he prepared for us?

John 14:23-29 (NAB) reads,

Jesus answered and said to him, "Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; yet the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me. I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name--he will teach you everything and remind you of all that (I) told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me tell you, 'I am going away and I will come back to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it happens, so that when it happens you may believe."

I always wish they would include the last two verses of that chapter:

I will no longer speak much with you, for the ruler of the world is coming. He has no power over me, but the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me. Get up, let us go.

Thankfully, Jesus continues to speak to us, but we tend to listen to Satan's voice over the Lord's.

Jesus leaves us his peace. He gives this gift to us.

I fused the collect and John's gospel today in my prayers for my mother on this Mother's Day. You see, my mother is no longer able to speak, walk, use her arms, or hold her head up for long, but she can smile, cry, and sometimes get out a "yes" or "no" appropriately in response to a question. She is aware of her situation. She showed infinite patience during my agnostic teenage years. She must have been praying all the while for God to work things out in His own time. She must be drawing on that gift of patience, and saying those same prayers now. This week, I dreamed that she was young again, talking, walking, and doing things for me as she used to do. I had been praying recently that somehow, in her dreams, she might find herself able to do all those things. I also prayed that in her waking hours, she might find peace, that peace that surpasses all understanding. That is the Mother's Day gift I wish for my mother. A peace that I, thinking of her situation, cannot imagine possible except through a loving gift from God. Please join with me in praying for all those who can no longer express themselves, and for all those who are living with losses of function and cognition.

Dear Lord, help us in our attempts to provide comfort to others. When we see this, the condition of your children, we stumble and are lost. Only you can provide for their unspoken desires. Please Lord, bless them and keep them in your loving embrace, and send them your comforter so that their hearts may be filled with love for you. In Christ Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

What Happens When A Church is Listing to the Left?

All the loose nuts roll to that side causing the church to capsize.

This is what has been happening to the Episcopal church. The latest example is the case of the Rev. Matthew Fox. According to a report by Jeff Walton at the Institute on Religion & Democracy Fox was expelled from the Dominicans in 1993 after 34 years for refusing to respond to a summons to discuss his heretical writings. He promptly landed a spot in the Episcopal Diocese of California. This April he gave a lecture and workshop on “Earth Spirituality and the Mystical Tradition” at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockville, Maryland. Here is part of Walton's report:

"In addition to creating his own theology independent of Scripture, Fox waded into science, authoring his own physical laws for the universe.

'Matter is frozen light,' Fox asserted, also adding that plants and animals had souls, as they share the properties of being 'living, sensory and intelligent.'

Fox conducted elements of the 'cosmic mass' during the seminar. Among them was a grieving ritual, which Fox equated with confession during the traditional mass. In preparation for the ritual, Fox invited participants to place their feet, knees, hands and forehead in direct contact with the floor, in order to increase connection with the earth below. Seminar participants then were instructed to release their grief into the earth in three stages: anger, sorrow, and concluding with 'bottoming out.'

As the 'grief work' began, animal-like barking and growls punctuated guttural wails and whimpering that filled the church sanctuary, rising to a crescendo and then concluding. Fox pronounced the 'grief work' as authentic, saying that which came from the gut was correctly in line with the third chakra, a point of spiritual power located along the body in yoga.

The clergyman also prescribed another practice of grieving: 'Find a rock, dig a hole, ask the rock if it is willing to do this, and then you get a bandanna or some piece of cloth that means something to you, and you put your grief into that rock and wrap it, wrap the bandanna around it and bury it, and then cover it up. The Earth is so generous and large that she can absorb our grief for us.'

Despite Fox’s efforts to correlate portions of the cosmic mass with the traditional mass, such as having a modified communion service, he seemed eager to jettison the theme of the Eucharist.

'We’ve been told by bad preachers that Jesus died on the cross for your sins,' Fox said. In the place of sacrificial atonement, the Episcopal priest argued that liturgy and worship was about the Universe itself, 'veneration of the sacred.'"

Read it all here, just be sure your ship is on an even keel before you go there.

The Mud Swamp of the Episcopal Church

I spent a fair amount of time fishing, hunting snakes, and collecting animal skulls and bones in the swamps of my youth, but I always preferred the air conditioned comforts of home. I was fortunate to have never gotten lost in the swamp, but if I had, perhaps I would have had a chance to pray to God for deliverance, and maybe I would be able to look back at those swamps in the light of a religious experience. All I think about now is the smell, the muck, the snakes, gators, and the bugs, and I always carried more of the swamp back home with me than my mother cared for. As far as she was concerned, nothing good came out of the swamp, and to that end she never went there.

Why would anyone deliberately walk into a swamp anyway? I read a book recently that told the tale of Portuguese missionaries to Japan and the tests to their faith that they found there.

In this 1969 book Silence, Shusaku Endo's character, an apostate 1600's priest named Ferreira talks about the "mud swamp" of Japan as a place where the sapling called Christianity seemed to grow, but it died because the roots were planted in wet ground. This reminded me of the parable of the sower of the seeds in Luke 8:5-8,

"A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown."

Ferreira's swamp is the opposite of the moistureless rock in Jesus' parable. When I read Silence, I also thought of the Episcopal church as something of a mud swamp where Christianity is suffering due to root rot. Soft, mushy theology such as we see in TEC does support certain types of life: Heretical intellectuals such as Marcus Borg grow into lofty Canon Theologians shading the light from any nascent Christian growth in the undergrowth. Creepy gay divorced men crawl out of the primordial alphabet soup to spread their gospel of sanctified perversions, fouling the surrounding waters. Purple breasted deniers of the resurrection sing their siren songs to lure unsuspecting pewsitters into the muck. Vacuous oceanographers jump into this ooze and are quickly mutated into unblinking, ruling predators eager to devour small orthodox parishes and dioceses. What hope does Christianity have in such a morass?

Near the book's conclusion, Endo's character Ferreira presents a picture of the church after its roots have died in the following analogy:

"But in the churches we built throughout this country the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine...

... It is like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton."

Shusaku Endo, Silence, 1969 p. 149

The mud swamp we call the Episcopal church is already a skeleton, or a parade of skeletons covered in the colorful clothing of Presiding bishop, bishops, and priests, all pretending to be a living church in the apostolic tradition. Watch the parade, the Danse Macabre, on May 15 as the skeletons gather in Long Beach to consecrate the newest denizen of the swamp.

Holbein d. J.; Danse Macabre. XXIV. The Nun

The spider has done her work well. Plant Christianity in a swamp, who could have thought of that?

Well done Screwtape, well done.

Borg: I am a committed Christian and a complete agnostic about the afterlife

Marcus Borgisms have been floating around the ECOOS e-mail lists the past couple of weeks and provide an endless source of amusement to this simple pewster.

The latest emanations included his famous "I am a committed Christian and a complete agnostic about the afterlife." Of course if he really meant it he would have said "an" afterlife (note to Marcus, you might want to update that page).

He continues,

"I use 'agnostic' in its precise sense: one who does not know."

That might be a good stopping point. After all if you don't know, then what is there to say?

For those interested in the term agnostic, I think we should look back to its origins. A-gnosis is the opposite of knowing, or the opposite of gnosis. A quick web search always leads back to Huxley:

"When Huxley first coined the term agnosticism, he had in mind a methodology which limited our claims to knowledge to only those ideas which are adequately supported by evidence and logic." (Austin Cline @ about.com)

As I said earlier, if you define agnostic as one who does not know, then one should not say anything more, and one really does not need to hold the job of Canon Theologian of the Episcopal church of Washington, does one? Agnosis does not stop Borg from pontificating about others gnosis,

"There is more to say. I think that conventional Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife for many centuries is one of its negative features. I have often said that if I were to make a list of Christianity’s ten worst contributions to religion, it would be its emphasis on an afterlife, for more than one reason.

When the afterlife is emphasized, it almost inevitable that Christianity becomes a religion of requirements and rewards. If there is a blessed afterlife, it seems unfair to most people that everyone gets one, regardless of how they have lived. So there must be something that differentiates those who get to go to heaven from those who don’t – and that something must be something we do, either believing or behaving or some combination of both. And this counters the central Christian claim that salvation is by grace, not by meeting requirements."

It is not enough to say that I don't know if there is an afterlife, Borg has to create his own structured afterlife building in "unfairness" into his construct. Who could therefore believe in that?

"Another problem: the division between those who 'measure up' and those who don’t leads to further distinctions: between the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the unsaved."

And you thought life was unfair. Borg's afterlife is doubly so.

"Another problem: an emphasis on the afterlife focuses our attention on the next world rather than on this world. Most of the Bible, on the other hand, focuses our attention on our lives in this world and the transformation of this world. At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is the petition for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth: your kingdom come on earth, as it already is in heaven. There is nothing in the Lord’s Prayer asking that God take us to heaven when we die."

Oh dear, so he is using the Lord's prayer in his argument and the prayer comes from where? Oh yeah, the Bible, that illogical, unscientific, and unverifiable compilation that no one could possibly use as a foundation of faith.

As long as he has it open, he might want to turn to Luke 23:42-3 (verse 42, by the way, was sung by the children's choir today during communion),

Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."
Jesus answered him, "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise."

I may not know what paradise will be like, but that promise is something that most of those "common Christians" that Borg disdains hold onto.

"As yet another reason for my agnosticism about an afterlife: does it involve the survival of personal identity and reunion with those we have known in this life? Are family reunions part of the afterlife? For some people, this is much to be desired, for family has been the primary source of love and joy in this life. But for perhaps an equally large number of people, family has been the primary source of pain and unhappiness. So, are we going to be with those people forever?"

This reminds me of the Saducee's question for Jesus about the widow with seven husbands. (See Mark 12:18-27, Matthew 22:23-33, Luke 20:27-40 )Didn't Jesus drop a little hint about the afterlife there?

"At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."

If only we could have one of those angels to dissect. If only we had an example of someone who came back from the afterlife.

Borg concludes,

"What I do affirm about what happens after death is very simple: when we die, we do not die into nothingness, but we die into God. In the words of the apostle Paul, we live unto the Lord and we die unto the Lord. So whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s."

Wait just one second, I thought he was agnostic about the afterlife! Isn't an affirmation based on scripture closer to gnosis than agnosis?

"For me, that is enough. My not knowing anything more does not bother me at all."

But "not knowing anything more" means Borg does know something. He is not completely agnostic about the afterlife after all.

So what has he got against the afterlife as believed in by common Christians?

"And I am very wary when the Christian gospel becomes a message about the afterlife. I am convinced that it invariably leads to distortion. This is not the Christian gospel."

Here he goes again creating a straw man gospel, and it is not worth getting dragged into that type of argument.

This page from Borg's site reminds me of the common Christian woman who told me that this kind of stuff ain't bad preachin, it's just wrong preachin!

From what I have read, Borg's approach is the one that invariably leads to distortion. Oh well, I guess it does sell books.

Confessions 1: Anne Rice

I did not like the first vampire book of her's that I was given, and I did not follow her career except when she started buying up familiar properties. I was intrigued when she purchased Saint Elizabeth's as I had walked past the chapel at Saint Elizabeth's so many times that the exterior image is burned into my memory. I remember wondering what it looked like on the inside. As the picture below shows, she apparently restored it lovingly.



She has returned to Christ, and she describes her journey in the video below. It is well worth watching.
h/t Texanglican



I am so happy for her. Thanks be to God.

Starting Points

Today's readings were full of launching points for a sermon. We started with Psalm 23. You remember,

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake..."

And Acts 9:36-43 with the miracle of Peter's prayer resulting in Tabitha returning to life.
Then Revelation 7:9-17 with it's remarkable imagery and this interesting exchange,

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?’ I said to him, ‘Sir, you are the one that knows.’ Then he said to me, ‘These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
For this reason they are before the throne of God,
and worship him day and night within his temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.
They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;
for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’

And finally, the sharp words of Jesus included in John 10:22-30

"The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one."

Our Deacon, Rick Hanners did an excellent job bringing in all the texts with the exception of Peter's work on Tabitha. Rick focused on us as sheep, something we really would rather not be if we had our druthers. Since we do not want to be led, what would make us follow this Shepherd that the scriptures testify to?

This was one of those rare, "Follow Jesus" sermons that we needed to hear and listen to attentively, anxiously, yearningly, for us to forget for the moment our selfish thoughts and cares, and to begin anew and follow Him. I hope my readers were blessed with a similar Sunday.

Marcus Borg's Palliative Care Plan for the "Common Christians," or Why I Want Marcus Borg to Come to My Funeral

Because I want at least one person to be happy, or maybe because then, and only then, will I allow myself to be assimilated into the collective.

From the Washington Post:

"Q.1 What should pastors do if they no longer hold the defining beliefs of their denomination?"

This may not apply to the Episcopal church as it is hard to define the beliefs of the denomination.

"Q.2 Do clergy have a moral obligation not to challenge the sincere faith of their parishioners?"

I am trying to understand this question. I guess the problem the question is trying to address is where the clergy's notion of sincere faith is at variance with the parishioner's notions of sincere faith. For example, (which shall become clear later) if an enlightened theologian, bishop, priest, or deacon, say someone like retired Episcopal Bishop Spong, develops a sincere faith that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that Jesus was not resurrected in a physical sense, does someone like Bishop Spong have a moral obligation to withhold these heretical ideas from simple believing pewsitters? All I can say is that if simple parishioners have a sincere faith, their clergy should remember Matthew 18:6,

"But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

That sounds like a moral warning which a pastor should have an obligation to obey.

The converse situation can be imagined as an orthodox preacher facing parishioners who are getting caught up in the latest unorthodox wave. Is there some sort of moral obligation to remain silent on the issues? I think not.

"Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables." (2 Timothy 4:2-4 (King James Version))

Next question, please.

Q.3 "If this requires them to dissemble from the pulpit, doesn't this create systematic hypocrisy at the center of religion?"

We don't need any more systemic hypocrisy, but I think the questioner is leading the respondent to imagine a preacher who believes he has a superior grasp on things that those ignorant pew people could never understand and might cause alarm or flight if he preached the new thing from the pulpit. If the preacher hides his new knowledge, wouldn't he be giving his sermon with his fingers crossed behind his back? What about crossing his fingers while saying the creed? Should he cross them in the open or hidden so none of his congregants can see? The poor unorthodox pastor cannot maintain that charade and remain in good health. What is he to do?

My hypothetical orthodox preacher, on the other hand, when faced with doubts might turn to scripture and his spiritual advisor, but would not use the pulpit as either a vehicle to espouse radical new ideas or as a means to work the problem out.

Q.4 "What would you want your pastor to do with his or her personal doubts or loss of faith?"

Easy, don't preach about it until he has recovered, undergo counseling with an orthodox clergyman, recant those false doctrines, pray for understanding and forgiveness from the Lord, immerse themselves in Bible study and prayer, and continue to be mentored by an orthodox clergyman. Failing that, consider another line of work.

Now, I want you to come up with your own answers, and then read Marcus Borg's responses:

Borg: "If a pastor/priest loses his/her faith in the sense of agreeing with 'the new atheism' as expressed in the recent bestselling books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, then I think it would be hypocritical for them to continue in their professional role. Or they might give themselves a brief period of time to see if this is their settled opinion."

I think it would be beyond hypocritical, and might be better categorized as sinful for a new atheist to continue as a pastor/priest.

Borg: "But I don't think this is the issue that many clergy face. Rather, the issue is what they learned in divinity school versus what they think that many in their congregations think. Contemporary seminary education -mainline Protestant and Catholic - leads to a different understanding of what it means to be Christian than what much of 'common Christianity' affirms."

I get the distinct impression that what they are teaching in seminaries is superior to what "common Christianity" affirms. I am also afraid that Borg is creating a straw man named "Joe Common Christian" which he will proceed to define in the next few sentences.

Borg: "By 'common Christianity,' I mean what most Christians took-for-granted until a generation or two ago - and perhaps about half (or more) of American Christians still assume to be the heart of Christianity. This 'common understanding' sees the afterlife as the central issue that Christianity addresses. Our problem is that we are sinners and deserve to punished, indeed condemned. This is where Jesus comes in: his death was the payment for our sins, and those who believe this will be forgiven and thus go to heaven."

It probably would not make a difference to Marcus Borg because it is not out of the mouth of his historical Jesus, but 2 Corinthians 4:13-18 came up in the lectionary cycle as I was typing this post.

"But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—‘I believed, and so I spoke’—we also believe, and so we speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal."

Common Christians just don't get it, but seminarians have been re-educated and enlightened.

Borg: "In most mainline Protestant and Catholic seminaries, with varying degrees of intensity and clarity, this understanding is undermined by what candidates for ordination learn about the Bible and the Christian tradition. Christianity is not primarily about the afterlife, despite the emphasis placed upon life after death by much of common Christianity. It is about transformation this side of death - the transformation of ourselves and of the world."

Transformation on this side of death is a visible sign of the power of, among other things, the resurrection and the promise of life beyond death. No cross, no crown. Transformation of the world comes about through the actions of these transformed, redeemed, and what common Christians would call "saved" souls. Transformation of our sinful world cannot be completed by creatures such as us by ourselves because, even though baptized, we are always falling into sin. We just can't get it right. We still have to pray, "Thy kingdom come," and not, "Thanks Lord for the baptism and all that, but we can take care of things from here."

Borg: "When clergy sense a difference between this understanding and what their congregation thinks, I encourage them to be discerning."

Please don't give any advice on how to be discerning...uh oh here it comes anyway,

Borg: "If their congregation is mostly elderly and unlikely to survive beyond the death of its members, and if their elderly flock is not using 'common Christianity' to judge and beat up on other people, then there may be no need to try to change them. Clergy in situations like this might see themselves as chaplains in an old folks home."

Great advice, "Humor the poor demented creatures." Or, "That generation will die and then we can be free of "common Christianity." That is what made me think that Borg might be happy at my passing. Why not just go ahead and euthanize the common Christians. Or maybe they are slowly poisoning us. I have a term for that, and I call it "Episcopathanasia."

Borg: "But if clergy are in intergenerational churches with a potential future, then I encourage a different approach. Seek to bring your understanding of Christianity into your congregation. This can be done in sermons, but especially in adult theological re-education."

Hey, we have heard some of those sermons right here in little ole Rock Hill! I call it "beating people up with uncommon Christianity." Spread the new thang! Open the re-education camps!

Borg: "It is a crucial need in our time, and there are resources: reading groups; video series groups, especially videos produced by 'Living the Questions.' Clergy can lead these, though they need not. Laity can also do so."

Oh yeah, "Living the Questions2" a $295 "resource" for the progressive church featuring guess who as a contributor? Marcus Borg of course. Way to work in a free plug Marcus. I am sure there are plenty of gullible lay people who will fall for Borg's uncommon Christianity and shell out the bucks for his books and DVDs, but common Christians should be able to find plenty of Bibles and resources provided for them free of charge by other common Christians.

Borg: "My impression: the timidity - apprehension, fearfulness - of some mainline Protestant and Catholic clergy to convey their richer understandings of the Bible and Christianity has contributed to the decline of Christianity in our time."

These so called "richer" understandings are the cause of the decline and fall of the Episcopal church. How much of those richer understandings came from Borg himself? Just look at the books he has published. Does anyone else see the intellectual snobbery showing? He goes on to isolate himself and his new Christianity further,

Borg: "There are millions of people who cannot accept the beliefs of 'common Christianity.' Let conservative Christianity have a monopoly on 'common Christianity.' But those of us who care about Christianity and its future should not imitate that." By Marcus Borg | March 16, 2010; 3:16 PM ET

I came away from reading Borg's words with the notion that, in his eyes, the church would be better off ridding itself of "common Christians" so that the enlightened Christians could get on with changing the world. I felt the presence of an intellectual snobbishness that was quite disturbing coming from someone whom the church has elevated to such an important position as Canon Theolgian. I for one am glad to be counted as someone who Borg would look down his nose upon. I am looking forward to being placed in the palliative care wing of his church. I sincerely want him to be happy at my passing. In fact, I would predict from his statements that when I go, he would have the biggest smile of anyone attending my funeral. I always wanted people to be happy at my send off, so I really need to invite Marcus Borg so he can help cheer people up.

I will pray for Marcus Borg, that he might come to love the common Christian and their understanding of the faith delivered to us by the witness of the Apostles. Since he is unlikely to listen to a lowly pewster, I will include the following quotation with his invitation to my funeral,

"There is nothing we cannot be made to believe or disbelieve. If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), p. 43.

Post Script:

I ran this post past a common Christian last week, and I asked him what he thought. He responded simply and frankly, "I think he (Borg) must have fallen on his head."

For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, Marcus J. Borg is Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, OR. Here is a commentary on Marcus Borg from EarlyChristianWritings.com

"Borg makes two negative claims about the historical Jesus: he was nonmessianic, which means that he didn't claim to be the Messiah or have a message focused on his own identity, and he was noneschatological, which means that he did not expect "the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own generation" (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 29). Borg summarizes his view of the historical Jesus in these words: "he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew, and into a community whose social vision was shaped by the core value of compassion" (op. cit., p. 119). By "spirit person," Borg means that Jesus was a "mediator of the sacred" for whom the Spirit or God was a reality that was experienced. Based on his experience of the sacred, for the historical Jesus compassion "was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God" (op. cit., p. 46). Jesus spoke against the purity system in sayings like "blessed are the pure in heart" and in parables like that of the Good Samaritan. The historical Jesus challenged the purity boundaries in touching lepers as well as hemorrhaging women, in driving the money changers out of the temple, and in table fellowship even with outcasts. Jesus replaced an emphasis on purity with an emphasis on compassion. The historical Jesus spoke an alternative wisdom in aphorisms and parables that controverted the conventional wisdom based upon rewards and punishments. The earliest Christology of the Christian movement viewed Jesus as the voice of the Sophia. The images of Jesus as the Son of God and the Wisdom of God are metaphorical, just as much as the images of Jesus as the Lamb of God and the Word of God.