Fresh off of suggesting that abortion may be a tragic yet best allowable option in cases of rape, incest, or for the mental health of the mother who can’t deal with a child with physical and mental deformities, famed New Testament scholar N.T. Wright has waded back into a previous controversy, claiming that belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ is not necessary to be a Christian and that his famously heretical friend who denied nearly every aspect of core Christian doctrine was a genuine Christian, albeit a “muddled” one.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Premiere Unbelievable? podcast, N.T. Wright addresses controversial comments he made to The Australian in 2006. At the time he said:
I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection. But the view I take of them – and they know this – is that they are very, very muddled. They would probably return the compliment.
Marcus Borg really does not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. But I know Marcus well: he loves Jesus and believes in him passionately. The philosophical and cultural world he has lived in has made it very, very difficult for him to believe in the bodily resurrection. I actually think that’s a major problem and it affects most of whatever else he does, and I think that it means he has all sorts of flaws as a teacher, but I don’t want to say he isn’t a Christian.
I do think, however, that churches that lose their grip on the bodily resurrection are in deep trouble and that for healthy Christian life individually and corporately, belief in the bodily resurrection is foundational.
His friend who “loved Jesus” was Marcus Borg, the leader of the controversial Jesus Seminar, who was on a quest for “the historical Jesus.”
Notoriously, believing the Bible was neither inspired nor inerrant, the Jesus Seminar concluded that only 18% of the sayings of Jesus and 16% of the deeds and actions attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were authentic.
Borg explicitly denied that Jesus was God (both here and here), saying things like “Was Jesus God? No. Not even the New Testament says that” and “Jesus of Nazareth was completely human. He did not have a divine component that made him different in kind from the rest of us.” Naturally, he also denied the virgin birth and Jesus’ supernatural miracles.
Commenting on the quote and context surrounding it, Wright explains:
“Mark had come from a very fundamentalist Lutheran background where you had to believe this and this and this this and this and he’d found it all completely deadening and didn’t do anything for him and so on. And then he gave it all up. But then in early middle life, through a series of extraordinary spiritual experiences, he came back into faith and Jesus became enormously important to him and his prayer life took off again.
But because he had been kind of bullied as a young person by a kind of dogmatic ‘you got to believe this, that and the other,’ he had got into the position where anything like bodily resurrection, that was simply unspiritual. He was basically some kind of a Christian Platonist. And there have been many, many Christian Platonists who just don’t think that the body matters that much.”
He continues:
Read it all in Protestia