On On Faith II

Continuing an excercise I began earlier this month...

The question this week is "Do you believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God?" The one entry I want to comment on this time around is Marcus Borg's contribution, who says, "To be Christian is to affirm that Jesus is the Son of God and Lord." Sounds fairly conventional, but Borg is an extremely liberal theologian:

, I see the grand statements about Jesus – that he is the Son of God, the Light of the World, and so forth - as the testimony of the early Christian movement. These are neither objectively true statements about Jesus nor, for example in this season, about his conception and birth. To speak of him as the Son of God does not mean that he was conceived by God and had no biological human father. Rather, this is the post-Easter conviction of his followers.

I cannot help but think that this is the sort of disingenuity that causes people to flee liberal churches into the arms of fundamentalism.

I thought I might also post some of my own thoughts here, as I gave them in response to an e-mail about what I found wrong with Jesus' teaching:

Anyway, as to your question:
-Pacifism: I used to think very highly of Jesus' injunction against resisting evildoers. Now I realize that it would be nice in a perfect world, but a bad idea when dealing with people like Hitler.
-The whole "looking at a woman with lust = adultery" thing. Not practical, not healthy, better to focus on avoiding those things that really do do harm.
-Jesus' apparent belief that the world would end within his lifetime.
-In general, I think the gospels display an unrealistic, extremist, idealism common to small, upstart religious groups. I'm currently doing a history paper on 1950's UFO "contactee" groups, and you see much of the same stuff in them: nice sentiments, not the slightest clue on how to put them into practice.