You're right that I didn't ask you what you believed. Neither was that my criticism of your approach. My criticism was that your approach of calling the gospels in their entirety "parables" (rather than simply pointing out where there are parables in the gospels) structurally degrades the importance that what happened actually happened.
Well, I believe that Mark, especially with the ending that isn't an ending, functions like a parable, or, I've compared the gospels also to sermons, where good preachers take traditional material (namely the texts of scriptures) and proclaim it in ways that make sense to and bring a message to a contemporary audience. Seldom is the main point in a sermon the giving of just a history lesson. Even when preaching historical stuff, at least my aim is to make it an exciting story that draws the hearers into the story, so that they are no longer like observers of what happened a long time ago to others, but they become participants in the story. (I think that's what parables seek to do.)
Jesus really did suffer and die and rise again, and all of this matters. If it didn't really and truly happen, then we are still in our sins. Your theology has to be able to account for the central structural importance of the facticity of these events of Jesus life for Christian proclamation. Christians have not treated them in a by-the-by manner where you can take their facticity or leave their facticity (as you previously had approvingly quoted Borg as saying) because this is to change the nature of the Gospel itself.
What Borg argues is that the way historical events were remembered was colored by the developing tradition. Most notably, the resurrection then colored everything they remembered about the pre-resurrected Jesus; and probably influenced the way they remembered him, and certainly how they came to understand things he said and did. I think that that's just part of human nature.
After 9/11, I think all of us found new and different ways of interpreting and applying biblical texts because of that tragic event. Although we aren't writing holy scriptures, we do write sermons, and we know that our experiences, our growth and maturity as Christians, insights given to us by others, influence the way we read and understand scriptures and what we write in sermons.
I think that the later experiences of the believers influenced what stories they remembered about Jesus -- and how they told them. For a simple example, in regards to the Lord's Prayer, the words Matthew attributes to Jesus, "When you are praying,...." He is writing from and/or to a group of people who pray. That is reflected in the way he remembers Jesus' words and events. In contrast, Luke has the disciples see Jesus at prayer, then say, "Teach us to pray,...." This suggests that Luke's audience may not have been people who were in the habit of praying and that colors the way he remembers Jesus' words and events.
As Borg states, and as I have experienced for myself, such conclusions about the gospels come from intense studies of scriptures. They arise out of noting all the subtle differences and similarities in the gospels. We come to conclusions about their compositions that we think best explain what is actually in scriptures -- what the texts actually say.
Paul points out clearly in 1 Cor 15 that if the resurrection didn't really and actually happen, we are still in our sins and our faith is in vain. To say that it doesn't matter all that much would be a foreign idea to Paul and would simply be the proclamation of a message different from his.
And yet, Paul's experience of the resurrection did not include a "body". When he argues about the resurrected body, he calls it a "spiritual" body (among other terms. While Paul insists on the necessity of the resurrection of Jesus, he doesn't help us understand exactly what that means, except, perhaps, as Borg summarizes the meaning of the resurrection: Jesus is Lord and Jesus is alive.
To first posit a tension that doesn't exist only to later resolve that tension by downplaying the importance of the facticity of events is an approach different than the Christian proclamation. Classic Christian proclamation has never had a problem with holding together the reality of what happened (and its inspired interpretation) with the ongoing transformative proclamation of those events; to adopt a proclamation that does have this problem is to adopt a different proclamation.
Perhaps your experience is different than mine, but I have run into people for whom their understanding of Christianity is tied
only to accept the historical details. If you believe that Jesus was born from a virgin, you must be a Christian. If you believe the tomb was empty and Jesus was physically raised from the dead, you must be a Christian. Besides overlooking the importance of life in Christ today; we also have, with those two statements, biblical evangelism that said nothing about the virgin birth, and statements about the resurrection that don't stress the physicality of it. The importance of those topics are part of the developing tradition. They are not present in Paul's letters -- the earliest written scriptures. Theya re not present in the gospel of Mark, the earliest written gospel. They apparently weren't all that important to those biblical writers. As I wrote above, such conclusions come from studying scriptures. Trying to find ways of explaning what is or isn't in the sacred writings. Did Paul proclaim the necessity of believing in the virgin birth or the
physical resurrection of Jesus, (her certainly did preach on the resurrection of Jesus and it's necessity,) on his great missionary journeys? While we can't know for certain, we do know that such preaching is not in the records in Acts, nor in his letters. So, I have encounted situations where there was not a both/and, but only the historical part.
Borg also points out another area of tension: that of believing and that of following; or as a way he phrases the two paradigms: "
belief-centered," which emphasizes the importance of holding Christian beliefs about Jesus, God, and the Bible; and "
way-centered," which emphasizes that Christianity is about following Jesus on a path. Jesus called the first disciples to follow him. In terms of their beliefs, in Matthew they are called people of little faith; and in Mark, people of no faith. Why is it that something like 80% of Americans believe that they can be good Christians and never attend church? I think that it's because they have been brought up on a "belief-centered" Christianity that makes the faith a set of doctrines or statements that one gives assent to. Prior to creeds and doctrines and other such academic stuff, I think Christianity was more about the way one lived, whether or not a person knew or understood or assented to, for instance, everything in the Athanasian Creed, which ends with: "One cannot be saved without
believing this firmly and faithfully." Shouldn't Christianity have something to do with gathering together in Jesus' name, "doing this" in remembrance of him, going out and making disciples? Why aren't those as important in defining Christians as agreeing with a virgin birth and a
physical resurrection of Jesus?
