I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God... I realized that whatever "divine revelation" and the "inspiration of the Bible" meant (if they meant anything), they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority.
--Marcus Borg.
Someone approvingly put this quote on Facebook. I understand why, but this quote demonstrates Borg's unhelpful approach. He actually reveals his fundamental unfamiliarity with non-dual thinking, and therefore his basic reflexive commitment to Modernity and therefore Empire. His first two sentences show that he does not believe something can be both human and divine. He sees these as mutually exclusive categories. In order to accept that the Bible "is a cultural human product," he says we have to "let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product." We apparently cannot have both. He denies that God works through people and communities. In this he basically denies God's ability to do anything, even exist or be in any meaningful way.
(I haven't read all of Borg, and this quote may not represent his views at all, for all I know. But it does represent a very common way of thinking. So I apologize if I am unfair to him.)
On the one hand, the quote affirms the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity of humankind since it implies that human beings have no capability to do anything good. Certainly, God cannot work through or in them. Or at least God did not work through the ancient communities that produced the Bible.
On the other hand, he makes God so wholly other, so utterly and essentially disconnected from human life and perhaps creation itself, that God does not and cannot bridge the infinite gap and participate in human life in any way. Or at least God did not do with in relation to the two ancient communities he talks about.
Maybe he only disrespects those "two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity." Maybe other communities exist that he can respect and even see God working within, I don't know. He doesn't say, at least, not here. (But I suspect not. I sense that Borg mistrusted all traditions and all communities, and only believed God could work with individuals, at best.)
Why, I wonder, can we not see the Bible as both a divine and human product? Why can we not understand that God works through and in communities, ancient and otherwise? Why does he apparently imagine it impossible to see the Bible or anything as both the product of historical, mortal humans, and at the same time God's word communicated to people?
Where does Jesus Christ land in Borg's binary scheme? Either he sees Christ as "fully human," and therefore as an utterly un-divine first century Jewish teacher, or as "fully God" as some Gnostic, docetic phantom who could never "become flesh," let alone die on a Roman cross. (His Westar Institute currently toys with both of these views.)
The Church addressed this question more or less definitively at Nicaea and Chalcedon, declaring Jesus Christ as both fully human and at the same time fully divine. This of course makes no sense to the dualistic mind that demands things be stuck in exclusive, logical categories.
We can only express spiritual truth according to a non-duality that recognizes the interpenetration, radical inclusiveness, and mutually participatory nature of Reality, with a panentheistic, incarnational view of the Creator.
I understand Borg's resistance to toxic and pathological Fundamentalism that habitually used the Bible as a weapon against their enemies, claiming their sour, exclusive, and self-serving interpretations as the Word of God. I understand that this kind of theology does a lot of damage to people and communities, including the Earth itself, and contradicts the love of God revealed in Jesus. But offering as an alternative to such evil the equally toxic and pathological, sour, exclusive, and self-serving approach of Modernist historicism, gets us nowhere. It accepts and affirms the binary, dualistic, either/or approach of fundamentalism, and just turns it around. It rejects Jesus and God in a different way, with the same result: people fall away from the love of the Creator.
This describes the story of Christianity in the Modern Age. Two slightly different flavors of toxicity battling against Creator and creation, one using God as a weapon of their own egocentricity and the other using godlessness in the same way. People imagine these as the only choices: fundamentalism or atheism. And either adopt a religious fascism for the sake of social order, or they wander off to figure things out "on their own." In either case, they remain in bondage to ego and Empire. Modernity uses this strategy continually: setting up illusory opponents in dualistic competition/conflict/war, offering these as the only choices, so that people can't even imagine the truth outside of this linear, binary grid.
The only way out of this dead end we have available to us in discipleship rooted in the grace of the Creator revealed in Jesus Christ. Freed of such binary dualism, Borg knows this now. He died in 2015.
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