Eyre Lines

This is the title of a book by Marcus Borg, published 2003. I can strongly recommend it.

I’ve been doing some reading to provide background for some more extended writing I have in contemplation, around the topic of panentheism and Christianity, and caught a reference to this book, which had slid past my consciousness ten years ago. Now, I’ve thought for quite some time that Prof. Borg was what I’ve previously described as a “closet panentheist”, in that parts of some of his previous books strongly hinted to me that he had arrived at a broadly panentheist conception of God. I was interested to see if he went further in “The Heart of Christianity”.

If he was in the closet, in this book he has come out; he’s loud and proud, as you might put it. He goes a lot further. He puts forward a way of viewing scriptures and traditions within “the emerging paradigm” which really demands a panentheist stance, and then goes on to explore specific issues; being “born again” and the Spirit generally; the Kingdom; “Thin Places”; Sin and salvation; praxis; and finally Christianity in a pluralist world. He does it very well, as you’d expect from a biblical scholar of his experience and credentials and a best-selling communicator.

2003 was a bit late for this book to have saved me a lot of thinking, even had I read it fresh from the presses, but I’d have loved to read it in, say, 1993, and had it been in existence and I’d read it in 1973 (or, even better, 1968) my whole spiritual adulthood would probably have been very different. Since 1968 I’ve laboured under the difficulty that my panentheist stance, about which I really have no option, is not “standard Christianity”; here is a well-respected scholar arguing that not only is it a viable and valid way of moving forward with Christianity in a postmodern and pluralist world, but also to some extent respectable in terms of pre-modern thought (say, before around 1500). I grant you, I’ve yet to come across a church anything like local to me in which this kind of approach has reached more than (at most) the leadership, but armed with this book 45 years ago, who knows what might have happened?

I might have liked to see more about what I see as a panentheist thread running through Christianity, or at least it’s mystics, from the earliest days. Prof. Borg does touch on that, but only extremely lightly.

He arrives at his position from a direction entirely different from my own. Prof. Borg has, so far as I can see, been a Lutheran from childhood, and has been thoroughly within the church throughout, arriving eventually at a panentheist conception which re-invigorates and makes sense of his Christianity for the future. I started out as an atheist with an experience which I could only sensibly interpret as panentheist, and then spent many years trying to find out how to fit that into an available faith community (it was only in the late 1990s that two online friends persuaded me that I was, in fact, legitimately a Christian, albeit of a rather unusual flavour). It is interesting to see that Prof. Borg arrives at many of the same ways of looking at things as do I, for instance concepts of sin and salvation; exclusivity; the Kingdom. Neither are they just the same in outline; often he chooses the same passages and analogies as do I. Maybe this further validates the stance?