Putting Away Childish Things: A Tale of Modern Faith, by Marcus Borg: A Review

I love the writing of Marcus Borg. What he says about Christ and Christianity in books like The Heart of Christianity and Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time rings so true for me that I sometimes wonder why I read anything else about religion and faith.

Borg’s latest work is a novel, his first. Unfortunately, one can only hope that it is also his last. In the Preface to Putting Away Childish Things, he says:

I am aware that I may not have a novelist’s imagination or gifts [No kidding]. And I am aware that if I were not already a somewhat established author, this novel might not have been published [Ditto]. It’s not easy to find a publisher for a first novel.

Lots of awful novels do in fact get published. But this one frankly has a self-indulgent and slightly exploitative feel about it given the esteem in which Marcus Borg is generally held.

Good novels are about interesting and complex characters who find themselves in interesting and complex situations of conflict. The plot in this novel is thin at best. The protagonist, Kate Riley, who is a professor of religion at a small liberal college in Wisconsin, is eligible for tenure in one year. As she has published a well-received scholarly work on the gospel of James and her classes are very popular, the tenure seems assured. She is concerned, however, when one of her senior colleagues hints that her recent published work is less scholarly, more “popular,” and a little too Christian. She also learns that parents have been writing letters to the college complaining that she is using her classes to proselytize to her students.

The situation becomes more complicated when Kate is invited to apply for a one-year position at a well-known seminary and is led to believe that she would be the preferred candidate; in this position she would be encouraged to teach within the context of her Christian faith. She asks her present institution for a leave of absence but they are reluctant to give it to her as she is not yet tenured.

When Kate is formally offered the seminary job she must make a choice between a good chance at job security and an opportunity to do what she really loves to do but that does not offer security. Anyone who knows Marcus Borg will have no difficulty guessing Kate’s choice.

A couple of subplots that could have been interesting actually go nowhere. In one of these, a Wells student who belongs to a conservative Christian group on campus attends one of Kate’s classes because she has begun to question some of the elements of her faith. Again, however, the story only serves as a rather clumsy platform for Borg’s religious ideas. In the second, a romantic relationship from the past between Kate and a former professor, who will be her colleague at the seminary, appears as if it may be rekindled. The professor is perhaps the most interesting and well-developed character in the novel.

I found hardly any of the characters in Putting Away Childish Things, including Kate Riley, to be either interesting or complex. Because I was not especially interested in Kate’s character, I did not find myself caring very much about her conflict.

Information that is supposed to tell us something about the main character in fact tells us nothing because it is never connected to her developing story in any way; the information itself is clichéd and boring:

• She drives a new Volvo—standard transmission

• Her parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was in high school

• She frequents a seedy neighbourhood tavern because she likes to smoke and drink Guinness there and write in her journal (even though she lives alone and could just as easily—and more economically and comfortably—do these at home)

• She is attracted to one of her male colleagues but he turns out to be gay (The most boring conversations in the book are between her and this character; see below)

• She belongs to an Episcopalian congregation whose pastor is a woman (as it happens, Borg’s wife is an Episcopalian priest)

• She likes to wear red shoes

One can not help but suspect that Borg (of Scandinavian roots) likes Volvos with standard transmission, smokes the occasional cigarette (or was once a smoker and still misses it) and drinks Guinness.

The novel is full of boring conversations that are either irrelevant altogether or are used clumsily for exposition or to present the author’s views on various aspects of Christianity. In one of these pieces of dialogue the main character is having dinner at the home of one of her colleagues at the start of the Christmas break.

“So,” Geoff said, putting his napkin in his lap, “I’ve told you about my next few days. What do yours look like?”

“Well, I’m spending Christmas alone again this year. So I’m basically going to be at home—with myself. I mostly love the thought. Except next week won’t feel exactly alone—I’ve got all those radio interviews to do on my book. Fourteen—that’s a lot.”

“Good for you,” Geoff said. “Your publicist has done a good job.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Kate paused to take a bite. “But still I wish there weren’t quite so many. This duck is fantastic as usual, Geoff.”

“Thank you. Are you nervous about the interviews?”

We are not exactly experiencing poetry here.

In Chapter 3 Kate is being interviewed about her new book Two Stories, One Birth. The author uses the interviews to offer his view of the purpose of the biblical narrative of the birth of Jesus, as well as to expose the “other side”—the literal-factual interpretation. The first interview takes six pages, the second two pages.

Borg says that he had wanted to write a novel for a long time. I, for one, certainly hope that through this rather self-indulgent exercise he has got that desire out of his system. I also hope that he returns quickly to what he does best: lovingly and wisely nudging us out of the nest of inflexible Tradition and biblical literalism and into free flight buoyed by our absolute trust in God.

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"Neat Old Seminary" by m.gifford

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Reconciling Faith and Disbelief (I)

Shortly after I returned to Catholicism after many years of “lapse,” I had lunch with a young priest. In our conversation the subject of faith came up and the priest told me that when he was a teenager, he, like many other young people, was bored with church and did not share the strong faith of his parents. I asked him what had restored his faith so radically that he decided, before he reached the age of twenty, that he wanted to become a priest. He gave me a few reasons, but the first thing he said in answer to my question was, “Well, we all have to believe in something.”

As I had already begun the great struggle between faith and reason, I was stunned by this statement. Was that all that stood between agnosticism and faith—a conscious decision to “believe in something”? Do we just sit down one day and say, “Let’s see now. I have to believe in something, so I guess, since I was raised Catholic and I pretty much know all the doctrines and stuff, it might as well be Catholicism!” And once that belief decision is made we are somehow able to accept holus-bolus the body of Catholic teaching. No doubts, no going back, no questioning this belief or that doctrine. True peace of mind.

People like this young priest intrigue me. He appears to be completely comfortable with the something he has decided to believe in. He is always smiling or laughing, and he is warm, genuinely interested, full of energy, witty—the guy appears to be genuinely happy. I have spoken with him numerous times and listened to many of his homilies, so I know that he is also intelligent.

Despite his years of seminary indoctrination, his conservative cultural background, and the predominance of orthodox Catholicism among clergy and laypeople in the archdiocese, it is difficult to imagine that a state of cognitive dissonance does not at some point swamp this young man’s confident and comfortable belief. Can there be no conflict when you refuse Holy Communion to a couple you know is living together without the sacrament of matrimony yet offer it to a “legally” married couple you are 99 percent certain are using contraceptives? In your homily, when you tell us what God wants us to do, do you really believe you know what God wants? I am curious as to what happens to the orthodox believer when new information or problems of everyday life intrude upon the comfort zone of belief.

If we acknowledge God as our creator, we must also acknowledge that part of that creation is a brain and that the little creature is simply not content to accept whatever it is told. As modern, educated individuals, we also have to acknowledge the significant body of religious-historical research, biblical scholarship, and theological insight that has formed over the past one hundred years.

Let’s start with the concept of faith. If you asked any Christian the definition of faith, the reply would likely be that faith is belief; the more intellectually sophisticated Christian might say that faith was belief in something for which there is no evidence. When I was thinking of becoming a priest, I had a talk with a spiritual director (who was actually recommended to me by the young priest I just mentioned). This priest, who writes a weekly article on scripture in the archdiocesan newspaper, told me that he had no difficulty believing in God. After all, he said—with a straight face—he had never seen Australia but it is obvious to everyone that Australia exists. Well, Father, that’s because we all have to believe in something; it might as well be Oz.

How did it come to this?

It turns out that the concept of faith as belief is relatively new. Renowned New Testament scholar Marcus Borg tells us that “two developments account for its dominance in modern Western Christianity.” The first is the Protestant Reformation, which created a number of different Christian denominations, all of which distinguished themselves from other groups by emphasizing what they believed, “that is, by their distinctive doctrines or confessions.” In the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, Catholics reasserted their version of Christian truth.

The second development was the Enlightenment, which “identified truth with factuality” and which “called into question the factuality of parts of the Bible and of many traditional Christian teachings.” So Christians had to defend their territory by declaring the literal-factual “truth” of the virgin birth, the miracles performed by Jesus, the Resurrection, and all the other biblical events; and if you didn’t believe these truths, you had no business calling yourself a Christian.

The spiritual director who believes in Australia told me he thought the main reason people leave the Church is that they are lazy. I think not. I rather suspect that one of the most important reasons is that thanks to modern science, modern education, modern information technology, they simply can no longer believe what their church tells them they must believe. Marcus Borg says that “we cannot easily give our heart to something that the mind rejects.”

So here’s the point: the post-Enlightenment church has defined faith for us as belief in the literal-factual interpretation of the Bible and agreement with/adherence to a set of doctrines stipulated by the institution. In the process, the institutional church, with its magisterium, its hierarchy, its rituals in all their sumptuousness, and in its desire to protect its power and authority, has in some ways cut itself adrift from the God of love and mercy; it has, to a degree, separated itself from the Jesus of the gospels. In so doing it has created an unending cycle of conflict with those who don’t accept the whole package but wish to remain in the church, and it has cast many others out to wander alone in the desert.

So what are the “faithful non-believers” supposed to do?

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"Thinking then having a doubt" by fabbio

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Jesus and Sin

I am reading Spencer Burke's book A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, in which he promotes (his view of) spirituality over (his take on) religion in the postmodern age. Burke is one of the founding members of the emerging church movement. While I do not agree with everything he says (so far) in this book, I find some of his ideas beautifully resonant. For example, in a section of Chapter Three ("Grace and the God Factor") called Grace, sin, and spirituality, he says the following about Jesus and sin:

Sin would perhaps be better understood in our culture if it were presented as pursuing self-interest at the expense of the well-being of the larger (or smaller) horizons of our existence, whether through self-abuse or through lack of concern for the world in which we live.

Instead, sin has often been presented as a violation of the rules and regulations of religion. In Christianity, Jesus is held up as the model of sinless living, the ultimate example to which all humanity should aspire. "Jesus," it is said, "was tempted in all points as we are yet was without sin." This concept of Jesus as a sinless individual permeates Christian theology. But was Jesus really sinless? He certainly seems to have violated a number of the rules and interpretations of the Law that his contemporaries regarded as huge sins. He violated the Sabbath and excused his disciples for their violations. He interpreted the meaning of the Sabbath by telling the story of King David's questionable use of the Law in order to feed his men. He repeatedly talked to the unclean, the unlovely, and the unrepentant.

As I see it, Jesus may not have sinned against God, but he certainly committed sins against the religion of his day. Jesus lived his sinless life in grace - and that grace often transgressed the moral codes of religion. The challenge for followers of Jesus is to reframe the story and offer society a new understanding of exactly what grace is and what it means for us all.

What Burke is saying here reminds me of Hans Kung's remarks about how Jesus might relate to the Church authorities of today and of Marcus Borg's take on the subversive compassion of the pre-Easter Jesus. Again, it seems to me that we have a significant disconnect between what religious historians and theologians have determined Jesus really was about and what institutional Christianity requires us to believe. As for myself, the more I read about, the more I observe, the more I think about the Catholic Church, the more inclined I am to "find a congenial, compassionate way to live inside of it and yet outside of it," as Father Richard Rohr tells us.

Jesus, Compassion, and Homosexuality

I am currently reading Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. Chapter Three of this fascinating and enlightening book is entitled "Jesus, Compassion, and Politics." Here Borg claims that the compassion so evident in the teaching and in the public life of Jesus "was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community." Jesus' concept of compassion was in opposition to the predominant Jewish paradigm of the day, which was holiness ("Be holy as God is holy"). The issue that reflected this opposition was the law of purity and its social and political, as well as its religious, implications. In the Judaism of Jesus' time, "holiness was understood to mean 'separation from everything unclean'...[and] [t]he ethos of purity produced a politics of purity--that is, a society structured around a purity system."

The purity system marginalized those who were considered to be the most impure: occupational groups such as tax collectors and shepherds; people who were not considered to be physically whole, such as "the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers, eunuchs, and so forth"; and the "abjectly poor." Women were considered generally less pure than men, and gentiles were "impure and unclean."

But according to Borg, "[i]n the message and activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision: a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion." Jesus presented a different concept of purity, one in which inner purity was to be more valued than purity on the outside: "There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." Both the teachings of Jesus and his activities were a "challenge to the purity system." He healed lepers and hemorrhaging women and ate meals with tax collectors and sinners. For Jesus, compassion always trumped purity.

In a section of the chapter entitled Spirit, Compassion, and Us, Borg says the following:

The intra-Jewish battle between Jesus and the advocates of the purity system can be seen as a battle over two different ways to interpret Scripture. Both he and his critics stood in the tradition of Israel and sought to be faithful to it. The elites of his day read Scripture in accordance with the paradigm of holiness as purity. Jesus read it in accordance with the paradigm of compassion. Each provided a lens through which the tradition was seen. It was thus a hermeneutical battle, a conflict between two very different ways of interpreting the sacred traditions of Judaism. It was not, of course, the kind of academic hermeneutical argument that occurs today in scholarly circles. Rather it was a hermeneutical battle about the shape of a world, and the stakes were high.

The same hermeneutical struggle goes on in the church today. In parts of the church there are groups that emphasize holiness and purity as the Christian way of life, and they draw their own sharp boundaries between the righteous and sinners. It is a sad irony that these groups, many of which are seeking very earnestly to be faithful to Scripture, end up emphasizing those parts of Scripture that Jesus himself challenged and opposed. An interpretation of Scripture faithful to Jesus and the early Christian movement sees the Bible through the lens of compassion, not purity.

To use a specific example, I am convinced that much of the strongly negative attitude toward homosexuality on the part of some Christians has arisen because, in addition to whatever non-religious homophobic reasons may be involved, homosexuality is seen (often unconsciously) as a purity issue. For these Christians, there's something "dirty" about it, boundaries are being crossed, things are being put together that do not belong together, and so forth. Indeed, homosexuality was a purity issue in ancient Judaism. The prohibition against it is found in the purity laws of the book of Leviticus.

It seems to me that the shattering of purity boundaries by both Jesus and Paul should also apply to the purity code's perception of homosexuality. Homosexual behavior should therefore be evaluated by the same criteria as heterosexual behavior. It also seems to me that the passage in which Paul negates the other central polarities of his world ["In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female."] also means "In Christ there is neither straight nor gay." Granted, Paul didn't say that, but the logic of "life in the Spirit" and the ethos of compassion imply it.

One can only pray for the coming of the day on which the Catholic hierarchy chooses the ethos of compassion over what Marcus Borg calls "a purity system constituted by external boundaries." One does of course assume - compassionately - that Church attitudes toward and teachings on homosexuality do not involve "non-religious homophobic reasons" for such attitudes and teachings.

Marcus Borg, James Carroll, and Faith

At Christmas and Easter Mass, when parishioners bring friends and relatives to church to celebrate with them, our pastor always voices an admonition prior to Communion. He says that only practising Catholics and only those who believe all of the teachings of the Church may receive Communion. In the beginning, this gave me pause as I knew from the time I returned to the Church that there were many teachings that I could not agree with and some core beliefs that I could not accept. Should I then deny myself the Eucharist as a half-hearted Catholic? Would I be committing a sin if I received Communion in spite of this grave admonition?

In the end, the very state of my disbelief led me to go ahead and receive Communion. First, in my heart I did not believe in the Catholic notion of sin—a list of major and minor offences for which I had to ask forgiveness and “serve time”—and second I did not really believe in transubstantiation. I knew in my heart that the bread I received from the priest or from the extraordinary minister was a symbol of the transformation that imitation of Christ could bring, not the real body of Christ. As I took the host and returned to my pew I prayed that I would be transformed, that I would die and rise again as a more loving, more forgiving, more caring person.

I did ask myself why I was a Catholic if there was so much basic stuff that I just could not buy into. At the same time, I felt God was calling me to be a priest! (More about that little contradiction in a later blog.) A friend recommended I talk about this call to the priesthood with a gay United Church minister that he knew, so I contacted the man and had lunch with him. In our conversation he recommended that I read Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith. The book transformed my whole notion and understanding of faith.



The most revealing and resonant part of Borg’s book was, for me, the chapter entitled “Faith: The Way of the Heart.” Here he explains that the notion of faith as believing in a set of doctrines or teachings—the virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension of Mary—is a recent phenomenon. This notion resulted from the competing claims of orthodoxy that arose out of the Reformation and from the need of the various churches for protection from the effects of the Enlightenment, which “called into question the factuality of parts of the Bible and of many traditional Christian teachings.”

For Borg, faith as belief, to which he gives the Latin name assensus, or “assent,” is a matter of the head rather than the heart.

Prior to the modern period, the most common Christian meanings of the word “faith” were not matters of the head but matters of the heart. In the Bible and the Christian tradition, the “heart” is a metaphor for a deep level of the self, a level below our thinking, feeling, and willing, our intellect, emotions, and volition. The heart is thus deeper than our “head,” deeper than our conscious self and the ideas we have in [our] heads. Faith concerns this deeper level of the self. Faith is the way of the heart, not the way of the head.

Borg asserts that besides assensus, there are three other meanings of faith, all of which understand faith as a “matter of the heart.” The first of these he calls fiducia. This amounts to “radical trust in God. Significantly it does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God….Rather, it means trusting in God.” The opposite of fiducia is mistrust, which leads to anxiety or worry. Borg illustrates the concept with the words of Jesus:

Consider the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet God feeds them….Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

The second meaning is fidelitas, which is fidelity or faithfulness to our relationship with God.

Faith as fidelity means loyalty, allegiance, the commitment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the “heart”….[It] does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether biblical, credal, or doctrinal. Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the Bible and creeds and doctrines point. Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God.

The opposite of fidelity, of course, is infidelity, and one of infidelity’s biblical meanings, relevant yet today, is idolatry. If we worship the things of this world to the neglect of or in place of our relationship with God, which is central, we are unfaithful. We practice faithfulness through “worship, prayer, practise, and a life of compassion and justice.” Being faithful to God also means loving “the whole of creation,” which includes our neighbour.

The third meaning Borg gives to faith is visio, “faith as a way of seeing the whole, seeing ‘what is.’” We can see “what is” as hostile or threatening, as indifferent, or as “life-giving and nourishing.” The latter perception “leads to radical trust. It frees us from the anxiety, self-preoccupation, and concern to protect the self with systems of security that mark the first two viewpoints. It leads to the ‘self-forgetfulness of faith’ and thus to the ability to love and to be present to the moment.”

So Marcus Borg has turned the notion of faith as assensus, which we Catholics are required to subscribe to, entirely on its head. But Borg’s interpretation seems to speak to the thinking Christian, the one who may be sceptical of the literal reading of scripture and who is looking beyond orthodoxy for a faith that joyfully embraces God as divine mystery.

If we accept Borg’s understanding of faith as a matter of the heart rather than of the head, thereby putting aside what I consider our childish faith, are we then bad Catholics? In his most recent memoir, Practicing Catholic, novelist and memoirist James Carroll has a great deal to say on this topic. In the brilliant and moving last chapter of the book, entitled “A Writer’s Faith,” he says that once it was very clear who bad Catholics were.

Bad Catholics were in bad marriages, or they were openly gay, or they had had abortions, or they practiced artificial birth control.


But it is no longer as clear:

Members of Catholic reform groups, like Voice of the Faithful, Future Church, and Call to Action, are labelled as bad Catholics by some. Lay movements are generally looked on askance, even though they are thriving in the Church around the globe. In Latin America, priests who organize campesinos without permission of the bishop are bad. So are Latin-American laypeople for that matter, who organize themselves into “base communities” without a priest; Dutch theologians who evoke Erasmus; and women who preside at unofficial Eucharists without waiting to be ordained. On the other hand, Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma would seem to be a good Catholic since the American bishops appointed him head of their National Review Board on Clergy Sexual Abuse in 2002. Yet Keating had authorized dozens of death row executions, and Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, had said justification for the death penalty is “rare, if not virtually non-existent.” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is regarded as a good Catholic, yet he is openly contemptuous of the pope’s teaching here. And what about Catholics who supported George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, and his program of torture, despite the grave misgivings expressed by Church leaders? Was Pope Benedict’s honouring of Bush with an unprecedented papal visit to the White House consistent with those misgivings? Not long ago bad Catholics were also known as cafeteria Catholics, choosing beliefs as much by conscience as by the menu of authority, but it seems now that Catholics from left to right approach the cafeteria line, eying options.

In this same chapter Carroll, a former Roman Catholic priest, movingly describes an encounter with the poet Allen Tate, a Catholic, who had been a mentor to Carroll. Tate and his wife had just lost their infant child Michael, and the local priest had refused to give the child a Catholic burial because Tate was married to a young woman who had left the convent for him. The poet was devastated, and Carroll, soon to be ordained, was moved to console him.

I do not have a detailed memory of what I said to Tate on that day, but the burden of my words—their weight and significance—is very clear to me today and was then. All that poured from me showed that my faith had been transformed. The God of judgment and condemnation, so vividly incarnate in the excommunicating priest, had nothing to do with the God whom Jesus preached. Human love, Jesus said, which seeks not to command but to lure, is the great signal of who God is. And wasn’t it in Jesus’ own life, as those who loved him told the story, that we saw that?

He goes on to say this about Jesus and salvation:

What Jesus offers is not salvation, conceived only as a negative rescue from damnation. Instead, Jesus offers a positive completion of life—“life,” as he said, “to the full”— not some endless Sunday afternoon stretching on toward an omega point that never comes, but the fullness of life here and now. Past, present, and future, experienced in the light of God’s promise, change the meaning of time, and that same promise changes the meaning of space. But the point is, it happens here. Not in some afterlife. By being fully human, Jesus became God’s real presence.

And this on the Resurrection:

I do not recall discussing the Resurrection with Allen Tate, but I might have. Just as I would never have spoken of Michael at play in the streets of heaven, I would not have spoken of some miraculous resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus— as if the reorganization of molecules and atoms forms the content of Christian hope. I had learned from Tate himself the power of metaphor and symbolism, and was at home in understanding my religious impulse in those terms. Resurrection is the symbol pointing beyond itself to the intuition that, as his friends could not give up their affection for Jesus, neither could God. God’s permanent affection is for life, life over death, resurrection. It is not that God intervenes to counter the normal course of nature, but that the normal course of nature is itself the intervention.

These are not the words of a man who subscribes to the meaning of belief as assensus. There is clearly much that he does not believe and much that he believes more as matter of the heart than of the head. Yet James Carroll has not moved to a denomination that would be more welcoming of his rather unorthodox theology; he remains a practicing Catholic.

To repeat Rabbi Heschel’s words: God is greater than religion. Greater than every religion. Every denomination. Every time-bound ecclesiastical manifestation. And today many religious people see that. Certainly including many Catholics. God is greater than any language used of God.

The problem with assensus is that the critical mind questions; it wrestles with the concepts of God and of faith. It refuses to be bound to the limitations prescribed by the Catechism. Marcus Borg is just one Christian mind; James Carroll is just one Catholic mind. But what they represent to me is the freedom that can be experienced when I dare to go beyond official boundaries of Catholic teaching, when I question even core beliefs. Reading The Heart of Christianity and Practicing Catholic freed me not only to disagree—without guilt—with the official teachings of the Church but also to begin to experience God in my own unique way and to recognize that I may experience Him entirely differently tomorrow.

And still be Catholic.