For anyone interested, this site seems to be a somewhat simplistic but rather telling summation of Borg’s beliefs.

He seems to set great stress upon what he calls the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus’, as if they are two different people, or rather in his mind the pre-Easter is the real historic Jesus and the post-Easter is some kind of construct the church came up with over time and filled into the New Testament stories.

His take on the resurrection can be found on this page.

http://www.united.edu/portrait/post1.shtml

–Easter does not have to include something happening to Jesus’ body.

–The foundational meaning of Easter is that Jesus’ followers experienced his continuing presence as a living reality.

–An empty tomb is one way to talk about that experience.–

–As Paul well understood, Christianity stands or falls with the empty grave. If Christ is not raised, we are to be pitied, for our faith is in vain. Those who would preach a resurrectionless Christianity have substituted the truth of the gospel for a lie. But, asserted Paul, Christ is risen from the dead. Our faith is not in vain, but is in the risen Lord. He willingly faced death on a cross and defeated death from the grave. The Resurrection is the ultimate sign of God’s vindication of His Son.

The great good news of the resurrection is this — those who come to Christ by faith will share in His victory over sin and death. Belief in the resurrection of Christ is clearly essential in order for one to be a Christian. The Christian church has understood this from the beginning, and the Apostle Paul left no room for doubt when he declared that those who are saved are those who confess with their lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised Him from the dead [Romans 10:9].–

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida#Intentional_obfuscation

My point:

1. If he (or anyone else for that matter) does not believe
in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, whatever
else he believes about anything else is irrelevant.

2. If he does not believe that the literal bodily
resurrection of Jesus Christ ever happened, it puts him
automatically in the category of an unbeliever.

3. And, anyone who identifies themselves as a “brother”
(meaning, A fellow Christian) with the one who denies the
physical resurrection of Jesus Christ puts themselves in the
same category.

They are not believing the Biblical Jesus. It is another
Jesus of their own making.

But it does raise questions about what they mean by paradox. Butler Bass seems to say that Borg is an example of it, which I take to mean that while he doesn’t believe in the resurrection, he does claim to agree with the creeds, which I would think say that Christ resurrected from the dead. Is this what they mean by paradox, that a person can say something didn’t happen but still confess faith in it? What does that mean? Is this like saying that they don’t believe in it as fact, but have a belief in it as a story or as a mythology?

As the Scriptures says, “If Christ be not raised, then your faith is in vain and you are still in your sins.” Believing in some kind of “spiritual” resurrection is not an option. There is no indication in the text that Jesus resurrection was anything other than physical.

If Borg is going to bet his life that there was no tomb, then he doesn’t believe in the Biblical Jesus. It is another jesus of his own making. And if Tony Jones is going to consider those who deny the resurrection, like Borg, as genuine Christians then he too is embracing a false Jesus. He can’t have it both ways.

If he rejects those who deny the resurrection, and does not consider them as brothers in Christ, then he needs to say so plainly, and condemn those who deny the resurrection.

The leaders in the emergent church think it is cool and funny to obfuscate about their doctrine. They purposely try to avoid stating what they believe, as evidenced by the appendix in TNC where Tony uses another author to explain their lack of a doctrinal statement.

Well it’s not cute, and its not funny, and they will not think it is funny when they have to stand before God in the day of judgment and give an account for their obfuscation.

Denying the resurrection is no laughing matter. It is heresy, plain and simple. If Tony Jones considers people who deny the resurrection as brothers in faith with him, then he is severely mislead at best, and quite possibly an unbeliever playing at church.

And if these men are representative of the emerging church, as they claim to be, then they and their teachings are to be rejected outright. Conversation with them in any form other than evangelism is pointless.

There are excerpt from both Tony Jones and Diana Butler Bass.

aar part 1–57 minutes in

Jones “When I spoke at the National Cathedral in May, at a conference around Diana’s book, that they were nice enough to invite me to, the evening before I spoke, Marcus Borg spoke, and Marcus Borg for the umpteenth time was asked in the Q&A an old–I remember this so vividly–an old man came up to the microphone in the center aisle of the nave of the national cathedral, and said “Dr. Borg, what about the empty tomb?”. And he said, probably for the umpteenth time, verbatim, this is what he said, “If I had to bet a dollar or my life, I would say the tomb was not empty, or there was no tomb.” I was in the back, sitting around a circle with people my age who came from a mainline church in Wichita, and if you’re a mainliner in Wichita, you’re not really a mainliner in the way that people on the east coast think of mainliners, or people in Minnesota think of mainliners. In the fly-over territory, you don’t get to be a liberal mainliner at a big mainline church in Wichita. You are a bit evangelical, even though you’re a mainline church, because you’re in Wichita. And they were extremely distressed by this response, and it got me to thinking, that emergents don’t have a problem with paradox.”

A few minutes later, Diana Butler Bass responded to what was said here.

minute 1:06
Butler Bass “I really, I just have to jump in real quick, and then we can go to larger questions, but Tony, if Marcus Borg was sitting here and had misquoted you, I would jump in and defend you. Marcus did indeed say exactly what you said, but then three minutes later, he said that “but that in no way undermines the confession of the early church that Jesus lives and Jesus is Lord” and so then he went on to say that he does indeed–I mean I remember how startling it was there in the great high alter of the national cathedral, we got this incredible faith statement, personal faith statement, from Marcus Borg, saying that he does indeed believe in that confession and that he makes that confession proudly with the early church, and so what he actually did was although the way that he got about it was perhaps logical positivism, he came to a place himself of incredible paradox, that he made a faith statement that in a way contradicts old style liberalism and he did it in front of a crowd of some 350 people. And so you both were actually working out of your point of tension or wanting to work out of a paradox its just that your paradoxes where in different places and I wasn’t entirely sure that that you were–there were a couple of people who blogged about that as well, heard the second part of what Marcus said and I did hear it because I went downstairs and was attacked by somebody from the Institute of Religion and Democracy and they were going on about how you know this was just old style liberalism and it’s the same old same old and on and on and on and I said “Did you just hear what Marcus Borg said upstairs, if you weren’t listening, Marcus Borg just said that he believed in Jesus Christ.” And he said “Oh yeah I heard that but it just doesn’t matter”"

He tries to shoot down John Piper over what John said about the I-35 bridge collapse. It’s a thinly veiled attack on Creation. If God did create the universe by speaking it into existence, does it not exist an operate at His pleasure? Doesn’t God have sovereignty over molecules and atoms? What are beams a girders made of?

So Tony Jones, christian-sophist and christian-exestensialist, tries to put himself in the middle with Jesus. Tony says it all rests on faith. That’s very pious, but what is existential faith? It is faith undergirded with doubt.

Tony’s bridge to the resurrection is built with girders of doubt.

No wonder you are blue. I find this Emergent stupidity depressing too.