T here has been an interesting debate on the internet this week between Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and Marcus Borg, the best-selling author who teaches religious studies at Oregon State University in Portland. Mohler took issue with Borg’s contention that the conservative church’s focus on Christian faith as assent to a proscribed list of essential doctrinal assertions– the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection the Jesus, the creation of the world in six days, a literal belief in miracles, etc.– is a product of the modern age. Borg writes,

       In the pre-modern world, before about 1600, the object of belief was never a statement, it was always a person. To believe meant to belove a person. To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity.

       Mohler responds:

       The New Testament includes several summary statements of belief, presented as the very foundation of the faith. Furthermore, the early church struggled with which beliefs to take as central and essential. The church quickly understood the scriptural claims concerning Christ to be of utmost significance. Thus, the Council of Nicaea, held in A.D. 325, was called to settle a question of essential belief that came down to a single syllable. A question of belief threatened to tear the Empire apart. The most venerable creed of the church, the Apostles Creed, begins with Credo– I believe. There can be no question that Christianity requires the believer to follow Christ. But the believer is a believer because the believer believes certain truths concerning Jesus Christ.        

       I hate to say it, but Mohler has a point. John’s story of Doubting Thomas certainly gives evidence that the early Christians struggled every bit as much as we do with whether the central claims of the Christian faith were credible. To say, “Jesus has been raised,” was just as incredible in the 1^st century as it is in the 21^st. The ancient people may not have shared our modern scientific understanding of the world, but they certainly understood that claiming someone had been raised from the dead required some explanation. Thomas had lots of company. In fact, even seeing was not believing. Matthew has a wonderful line in his gospel, when the resurrected Christ meets the disciples on the mountain in Galilee, that they worshiped him, “but some doubted.” Here they were, right in his presence, and some could not believe.

P erhaps that’s why the story of Doubting Thomas continues to have such appeal. When Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” we know he means people like us. We also know that more often than not we belong in Thomas’ company. Most of the time, the evidence for God seems scant, to say the least. So we also love that verse in Hebrews 11, which reads, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

       The question is, what do you have to believe to be a Christian? Here, I think, Borg has a point. The church has answered that question differently at different times and places. If the modern scientific age did not create the problem Borg names, it certainly exacerbated it. Words like Fundamentalism and Inerrancy did not really enter the lexicon until well into the modern era in response to Christians who began to take issue with certain biblical claims. For Mahler and the Southern Baptists, belief in the inerrancy of Scripture is a fundamental, something that leaves most Presbyterians out of the fold. For some Christians, you can’t believe in evolution and believe in God at the same time, which would make the Pope himself a heretic. But where do you draw the line? Do you have to believe in the Virgin Birth? What about the empty tomb? Can you believe in some of the miracles and not in all of them? Are there essential beliefs? And if so, who decides what belongs on the list?

       Here is where I think Mohler misses Borg’s point. It’s not that it doesn’t matter what we believe. It’s that believing has come to mean believing things that are unbelievable. So that being a good Christian requires the capacity to suspend disbelief, and hold at bay any evidence that might conflict with what someone has told us we have to believe. So we ignore scientific evidence for the origin of human kind, we dismiss biblical scholars who point out that the Hebrew people were not the only ones in the ancient world who told stories about the creation of the world, or that the early Christians were not the only ones who told stories of miraculous birth. We even ignore our own reading of the Bible when it seems clear on its face that different biblical authors conflict with each other. Being a Christian thus requires us, essentially, to go through life with fingers over our ears, going “nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh.”

       Nonsense, Borg replies. As if Jesus lived and died so that we could teach creationism. Or that our salvation requires us to go through life with our head in the sand. So, much to Mohler’s consternation, Borg proposes the word “beloving.” Frankly, he’s not really taking issue with Mohler’s beliefs. If that works for him, more power to him. What Borg objects to is Mohler’s insistence that unless you believe as he does you are not really a Christian at all. So Borg gets to what he believes is the heart of it:

       To belove Jesus means more than simply loving Jesus. It means to love what Jesus loved. That is at the heart of Christianity.

       So, for example, I don’t really believe in the Virgin Birth. I believe it was a way for the early Christians to say that this Jesus, whom we worship, was so close to God that God was actually involved in the very origins of his life. I believe that fully, even if I have my doubts about the angel visiting Mary in the middle of the night. And honestly, I don’t really know what happened on Easter morning. I believe something happened. I think it is too anemic to say “Jesus was raised in the hearts of his followers.” I don’t think you can account for the energy of the early Church if Jesus’ resurrection was simply a warm feeling in their hearts, the way we say at funerals, “John lives on in our memories.” But if you were there with a video camera, would you have been able to capture it on film? I’m not sure. The gospels themselves are somewhat ambiguous on this point. According to the various accounts, you could reach out and touch him, he shared bread and fish, but then he would suddenly disappear from behind closed doors. What exactly do you have to believe on this point to be a follower of Christ? For Mohler, it’s an all or nothing proposition. For Borg, it’s less important what you believe than whom you belove. At the end of the day, I’ll take my stand with Borg.

       So John, in his gospel, after telling a story about Jesus that differs in almost every way from the story we read in Matthew, Mark and Luke, concludes:

       Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

       At the end of the day, that’s what all this is about. Through believing in him can we find life in his name.

S o tomorrow, as you may know, I’m leaving town for a little while. (You were probably wondering how I was going to work this in to my sermon!) My first stop is Guatemala. If you know anything at all about their history, you know that the poor of that country have suffered terribly over the course of the past fifty years, and longer, the Ladino oligarches ruthlessly exploiting the Mayan peasants with the able assistance of the United States. For the poor of Guatemala to have life in Jesus’ name has nothing to do with their threshold for belief in the supernatural. I suspect that they struggle with issues of doubt and belief in ways that are different than in our own culture of privilege. I expect that I will have far more to learn from their faith journey than I have to teach from my own. I hope we can learn together what it means to love the things that Jesus loved.

       Leonardo Boff, perhaps one of the best known Latin American “Liberation Theologians,” speaks of the resurrection in this way:

He penetrates the entire cosmos,
pervades the whole world,
and makes his presence felt

in every human being.
The resurrection is a process

that began with Jesus
and that will go on

until it embraces all creation.
Wherever an authentically human life

is growing in the world,
wherever justice is triumphing

over the instincts of domination,
wherever grace is winning out

over the power of sin,
wherever human beings are creating

more fraternal mediations
in the social life together,
wherever love is getting the better

of selfish interest,
and wherever hope is resisting

the lure of cynicism or despair,
there the process of resurrection
is being turned into a reality.✞

© 2007 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel