I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am [the eternal God], you will indeed die in your sins.” (John 8:24, Greek)

Always Learning But Never Able To Acknowledge The Truth

At his website A Portrait of Jesus, Jesus Seminar Fellow, Marcus Borg explains the “Jesus” he knows as a so-called Progressive Christian. Borg begins by denying that Jesus said the above:

The titles of Jesus (son of God, messiah, light of the world, etc.) are not found in the earliest layer of tradition and are not part of self proclamation of Jesus. (Online source)

This is because Borg sets up a false dichotomy between what he calls “pre-Easter” and “post-Easter” Jesus where pre is said to be a “Corporeal, human being of flesh and blood” and “Finite and mortal” while post is said to be “Spiritual, non-material reality,” as well as “Infinite, eternal”. It is beyond the scope of this short piece to present an apologetic against such lies, suffice to say that anyone reading the Gospels without the “lens” of the destructive higher criticism hatched by modern i.e. liberal scholarship will see that Jesus is presented as all of these things prior to His crucifixion.

Far from an invention of the Church, Christ Himself taught that He was God in human flesh—as the text above clearly states—which is what got Him crucified in the first place. However, to understand Borg you need to see that for him Jesus was a “Spirit person.” Borg, whose work is recommended by Emergent Church pastor Rob Bell, informs us, “A Spirit person or religious ecstatic is one who has frequent and vivid experiences of the sacred.”

And for Borg there have been, and are, “Spirit persons in many cultures.” He further tells us that:

Spirit persons:

* Experience the sacred frequently and vividly

* Become mediators of the sacred, a conduit for the power or wisdom of God to enter this world (Online source)

So now we have a tacit denial by Marcus Borg that Christ Jesus of Nazareth was the monogenes—totally unique—Son of God, as in God incarnate in human flesh. You see Borg’s “Jesus” is just another “Spirit person” in the contemplative/mystic traditions found in virtually every other religion, which gives you your key to understanding where leaders in the Emerging Church are going with their interfaith/interspiritual dialogues:

Jesus as Mystic / Spirit Person

There is something about people who are in touch with the sacred that can be felt by those around them; it evokes awe and amazement and impresses people with the feeling of another world.

Such was true of Jesus… The cumulative impression created by the stories in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that Jesus stands in the Jewish tradition of spirit persons.

Jesus is portrayed as a person through whom the power of the Spirit flowed. (Online source)

And then in his 1997 book called The God We Never Knew Borg reveals to us the corrupt source which has formed his life thus far of always learning but never [being] able to acknowledge the truth (2 Timothy 3:7):

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world… I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome. (25, emphasis mine)

And as I said in Rob Bell: Sounding More And More Like “Progressive” Christian Marcus Borg Who Denies The Deity Of Jesus Christ And His Bodily Resurrection, anyone—and I do mean anyone—who thinks that Dr. Marcus Borg is a Christian seriously needs to have his spiritual head examined. Yet this is the type of teaching laying the groundwork for the quasi-universalism that Rob Bell and his friend Emerging Church Pastor Doug Pagitt find so exciting.

In what Apprising Ministries has just shown you from his website, as well as in the short passage above, you should now be able to realize that Borg has denied virtually everything that Christians believe about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! And yet this is how pathetically weak the American Christian Church has become—so in love with compromising interfaith/interspiritual dialogues to please men—that we cannot even recognize such a ravenous wolf as Dr. Marcus Borg.

For the sake of our Lord, can’t you see that this wolf is barely even in sheep’s clothing? So in the end it truly is the word of Marcus Borg vs. the Word of Jesus. And beware when supposed Progressive Christians like Borg tell you they come from another Christian tradition; because Progressive Christianity—firmly rooted as it is in the Cult of Liberal Theology—is neither “progressive,” nor is it Christian.

See also:

MARCUS BORG: BUDDHA WAS BORN AGAIN

“PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY” IS NEITHER PROGRESSIVE OR CHRISTIAN

ROB BELL AND MARCUS BORG

MARCUS BORG: JESUS AND BUDDHA WERE EQUALS AND CHRISTIANITY IS A WAY