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The Heart of Christianity
Rediscovering a Life of Faith
Chapter One
The Heart of Christianity
in a Time of Change
What is the "heart" of Christianity? What is most central to Christianity and to being Christian?
The question arises in each new period of Christian history. It is especially important in our time. A new way of seeing Christianity and what it means to be Christian is emerging in the church in North America. Because this vision of Christianity is quite different from the dominant way of seeing Christianity over the past few hundred years, our time is also a time of con flict. In our context of change and con flict, what is Christianity's "heart"?
Like all good metaphors, heart has more than one nuance of meaning. To begin with, it suggests what is most central. What is the core of Christianity, the "heart of the matter"? What is the essence of Christianity and the Christian life?
If "core" and "essence" suggest something too abstract,too lifeless, heart is also an organic metaphor, suggesting something alive, pulsating, the source of life. What is the heart, the animating source or driving force, of Christianity without which it would cease to live?
Furthermore, as in the phrase "head and heart," heart suggests something deeper than the intellect and the world of ideas. What is it about Christianity that is deeper than any particular set of Christian ideas and beliefs? And what is it about Christianity that reaches us at our "heart" level -- at a level of ourselves deeper than the intellect? The heart, this deeper level of the self, is the "place" of transformation. What is it about Christianity that gives it power to transform people at the "heart" level?
A Time of Change and Conflict
Christians in North America today are deeply divided about the heart of Christianity. We live in a time of major conflict in the church. Millions of Christians are embracing an emerging way of seeing Christianity's heart. Millions of other Christians continue to embrace an earlier vision of Christianity, often insistently defending it as "traditional" Christianity and as the only legitimate way of being Christian.
I have struggled with what to call these two ways of being Christian and have settled on the "earlier" and "emerging" ways of being Christian. What I mean by these terms will become clear in this chapter.
The familiar labels of "conservative" and "liberal" do not work very well, because both are imprecise. "Conservative" covers a spectrum ranging from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to C.S. Lewis to (perhaps) Karl Barth. The latter two would find the first two to be strange bedfellows. "Liberal" can be applied to a range of Christians from those with a strong sense of the reality of God and a deep commitment to the Christian tradition to advocates of a nontheistic Christianity for whom "tradition" is a negative term. Thus "conservative" and "liberal" don't tell us very much.
Moreover, there is much about the emerging way of being Christian that is conservative and traditional:it conserves the tradition by recovering it and envisioning it afresh. And there is much about the earlier way of being Christian that is innovative: its most distinctive features are largely the product of the last few hundred years. Indeed, both are modern products, as we shall see later in this chapter. Neither can claim to be the Christian tradition. Both are ways of seeing the tradition.
The differences between the earlier and emerging ways of seeing Christianity and being Christian involve specific conflicts as well as more foundational issues. These include how to see the Bible, God, Jesus, faith, and the Christian life.
To begin with, examples of specific issues that divide the contemporary church:
- Ordination of women: The earlier way of being Christian did not ordain women, and in many circles still does not. The emerging way does. Within mainline Protestant churches, the number of women clergy (including bishops) is rapidly increasing. Indeed, in many mainline seminaries, half or more of the students are women.
- Gays and lesbians:The earlier form of Christianity continues to regard homosexual behavior as sinful. Within it, the only options for homosexual Christians are celibacy or conversion to heterosexuality. For the emerging form of Christianity, the question of whether sexually active gays and lesbians can be Christians is mostly settled. The debate now is whether gays and lesbians in committed relationships can be married (or the equivalent) and whether they can be ordained as clergy, a debate virtually unimaginable a few decades ago.
- Christian exclusivism: Is there only one true religion, one path to salvation? Or are there several true religions, several paths to salvation? The earlier way of being Christian was (and is) confident that Christianity is the "only way." Now that is beginning to change. In a poll taken in 2002 in the United States, only 17 percent of the respondents af firmed the statement, "My religion is the only true religion." Most of these are in churches that af firm the earlier way of being Christian. But 78 percent did not, and this is typical of the emerging form of Christianity.
Beneath these specific differences is conflict about more foundational matters, including especially how to see the Bible and its authority. For the earlier way of being Christian, the Bible is seen as the revealed will of God, as "God's truth," and thus as absolute and unchangeable. The changes listed above challenge passages in the Bible that (1)teach the subordination of women and forbid them to have authority over men, (2)declare homosexual behavior to be sinful, and (3)proclaim Jesus as the only way to salvation. To regard these passages as not expressing God's will for all time implies a very different understanding of the Bible's authority and interpretation.
Here too there is statistical evidence of significant change ...
The Heart of Christianity
Rediscovering a Life of Faith. Copyright © by Marcus J. Borg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
