Biblical Illiteralism Personified

I viewed the above video over on Apprising.org and thought TheChristianWorldview.com readers needed to become aware of a man named Marcus J. Borg as well for he represents and articulates religious humanism (man morphs God) – and secular humanism (man is god) - at its core tenet of belief (or lack thereof).

What would that be?  The issue at stake is the most important issue of all - the Bible.  Is it the words of God or the words of men?  Are there errrors in the Bible?  It is to be fully believed?  Should it have authority over our lives?  How should it be interpreted – literally, metaphorically, poetically?

Let me put it this way: if the Bible is not inspired by God and therefore not inerrant and authoritative, Christians are most foolish for believing and following it.  We might as well “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.”  If even one word is proven false, then no other words in it can be fully trusted.  If it’s just another book with human authorship, pick what feels good to you and throw out the rest.

But if it is what it claims to be – the truthful words of God – then we have the responsibility to understand it and live by it.

Yes, the gospel and doctrine and history and prophecy and Christ’s atonement, etc., etc., are important but let us never forget where we get the basis for all these – the Bible, the very word of God.

Here’s some interesting background on Marcus Borg from Wikipedia:

Marcus J. Borg (born 1942) is an American Biblical scholar and author. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, holds a DPhil degree from Oxford University and is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, an endowed chair, at Oregon State University. He is a columnist for Beliefnet, lectures widely and occasionally appears in the national news media. A best-selling writer whose works have been translated into nine languages, he has been national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, co-chair of its International New Testament Program Committee and president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. Borg is among the most widely-known and influential voices in progressive Christianity.

Borg was born into a Lutheran family of Swedish and Norwegian descent, the youngest of four children. He grew up in the 1940s in North Dakota and attended Concordia College, Moorhead, a small liberal arts school in Moorhead, Minnesota. While at Moorhead he was a columnist for the school paper and held forth as a conservative. After a close reading of the Book of Amos and its overt message of social equality he immediately began writing with an increasingly liberal stance and was eventually invited to discontinue writing his articles due to his new-found liberalism.

Following a period of religious questioning in his mid thirties, and numinous experiences similar to those described by Rudolf Otto, Borg became active in the Episcopal Church, in which his wife, the Reverend Canon Marianne Wells-Borg, serves as a priest and directs a spiritual development program at the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, Oregon.

Borg advocates entering into relationship with God as more important than belief about God. He has a panentheist understanding of God, which sees God as both indwelling in everything and transcendent.[citation needed] He teaches that a historical-metaphorical approach to the Bible is more meaningful for today’s world than is the historical-grammatical approach or that of biblical literalism. He also distinguishes between the pre-Easter Jesus, who was a Jewish mystic and the founder of Christianity, and the post-Easter Jesus who is a divine reality that Christians can still experience personally.

Borg does not believe that the Bible has to be taken literally if it is to be taken seriously, an idea he develops in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, subtitled Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. He claims that truths can be found in the many messages and metaphors of the Bible stories even though he states that such stories may not have actually happened at all. Rather than asking what the events in certain New Testament stories actually were, he challenges his audience with another question, ‘What effect must this man Jesus have had on the people he came into contact with for so many rich stories to have been written about him after his life?’