The senior class’s mandatory first semester theology class titled “Christian Life Choices” had a reading that I felt was problematic. We had to read an excerpt from “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” by a New Testament scholar and Episcopalian named Marcus Borg. This excerpt is one of many homework readings that we are quizzed over. But even before I dive into the problems of the reading, it’s important to note the overall reason for this excerpt. This excerpt was supposed to help us explain the Catholic Church’s position of who Jesus is, and his relevance in our life for a project where we hope to explain exactly that. So we read this under the premise of taking the reading to be true. That’s especially dangerous when my classmates passively read, since it can lead to subconsciously absorbing falsehoods about the faith.

Starting off with the first 8 pages of the reading, Borg speaks about his image of Jesus evolving from childhood and the different states of his faith. This part of the excerpt was decent, but the rest of the excerpt (the 9 other pages) was confusing and misleading; for this reason I encourage my fellow classmates to be cautious with every theological reading even if there are no disclaimers. 

Borg speaks about his own relationship with Jesus, going through the seminary where he learned “the popular image of Jesus as the divine savior who knew himself to be the Son of God and who offered up his life for the sins of the world— was not historically true. That, I learned, was not what the historical Jesus was like”. About a page later he reaffirms his position saying, “That Jesus— the Christ of faith— is spoken of as divine, indeed coequal with God, of one substance with God” and that “Jesus as a human being— the historical Jesus— was quite different from all that. For one thing, he would not have known any of those things about himself”. Immediately after he says, “I learned that there was sharp discontinuity (rather than continuity) between the historical Jesus and the Christ of Christian tradition”. As I was reading this, Borg made it seem like the Gospels weren’t recording history or that the historical (real) Jesus was just a human being with no divinity, and that the Christian view of Jesus being divine was added into the Bible after the fact. I felt like I was missing the point of the reading, because the whole excerpt felt contrary to Catholic teaching to me. Presupposing that there are two different types of Jesus that aren’t the same— the historical Jesus and Christ of faith— discredits the Gospels. The historical Jesus should align with our divine Jesus because they are one in the same, and this is why I challenge my fellow classmates to not go through the motions and passively learn because doing so chips away at important truths when dealing with readings like this one. Near the end of the excerpt, Borg follows his logic and directly discredits the Gospels as he writes, “John’s gospel is true, even though its account of Jesus’ life story and sayings is not, by and large, historically factual”. If Borg’s whole position isn’t heretical, then at the very least it’s confusing, misleading, and borders on heresy. The Catechism states in paragraph 126, “The Church holds firmly that the four Gospels, "whose historicity she unhesitatingly affirms, faithfully hand on what Jesus, the Son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation, until the day when he was taken up.". John’s Gospel overemphasizes great, theological points, but nonetheless John’s Gospel is still historically reliable. Borg also writes, “After Easter, his followers experienced him as a spiritual reality, no longer a person of flesh and blood”, but the Catechism refutes this point as paragraph 645 states, “By means of touch and the sharing of a meal, the risen Jesus establishes direct contact with his disciples. He invites them in this way to recognize that he is not a ghost and above all to verify that the risen body in which he appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion”. These last quotes from Borg nullify the first 8 pages that were decent because if the whole point of this excerpt was reflecting on our own faith using Borg’s methodology then it leads us to the final step of his faith journey where Borg denies the historicity of John’s Gospel and denies the physical resurrection of Jesus. If— taking irrational steps like these to reject Jesus’ divinity— this isn’t problematic then I don’t know what is. 

This reading of Borg raises numerous questions: “Why are we reading interpretations that go against the Catholic Church, and taking these interpretations to be true?”, “Does the reading clarify and promote the Catholic faith, or does it confuse and mislead others?”, and “How do documents like this get added into the curriculum?”. I strongly recommend that all students raise questions about what they are learning, and to proceed into religious readings at our school with the utmost caution. I ask that this problematic Borg reading gets taken out of our curriculum for future classes. But these suggestions don’t repair the damage that’s been done—people have been misled. In my opinion, the SLUH theology department can do a lot better, and I hope they do, in teaching us our Catholic faith fully and accurately.

Peter James ’22