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Marcus Borg: A Transforming View of Christianity with Healing at Its Heart

by Dr. Shirley Paulson

I just missed meeting Marcus Borg in person, but I met him in my heart when I was in seminary. We were assigned to read Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary for our contemporary theology seminar, and I quickly realized I had found a force that could break out of the imprisoning literalism and iron heaven and-hell enclosure I had seen in my religious discourses.

Borg was talking about a Jesus who promised the fulfillment of yearning and hope, not the fulfillment of fortune-telling predictions. I was excited to come to class to discuss this Jesus, who was at once a “spirit person,”¹ teacher of alternative wisdom, social prophet, and movement founder. Instead, I caught a glimpse of the opposition Borg himself must have encountered. Before I could open my mouth, I sensed a darkened mood in the room. Bit by bit, everyone else spilled out their disgust at Borg’s “secularizing” of Jesus and his apparent dismissal of core Christian doctrines.

Who was this scholar who opened the curtains on the path to a re-centered Christian experience, who envisioned a Christianity based on the heart rather than rigid doctrinal belief, who laid the foundation for the meaning of healing in everyday lives, but whom my fellow seminarians shunned? I learned some details: that Marcus Borg was Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, a key participant in the Jesus Seminar of the Westar Institute, and a prolific author who brought scholarly rigor and heartfelt sincerity to his interpretation of Christianity.

He died in 2015, just before I became a member of Westar, where I would have loved to ask him so many more questions. Fortunately, he left books, articles, and spoken words of wisdom for anyone who wants to contemplate the transforming power he saw in Jesus. In the words of his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, “The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of peace and trust” (88). It is that path of transformation that I wish to explore further. Borg often spoke of Jesus as a healer, and I believe this path is the key to a deeper understanding of Jesus’s practice and teaching of healing.

Theology as Necessary and Healing

Remarkably, what Borg finds on this path of transformation serves as a safety net for those who can no longer believe in doctrines that defy logic or healing stories that sound like inexplicable miracles. For people who love Jesus but cannot find the spirit of joy in a creed, or who cherish hope for a broken world, Borg articulates a theology that is both necessary and personal. But his theology does not break from scripture. It maintains Christian order and authority based on God, Jesus, the kingdom (or realm), the crucifixion, and even the vindication of Jesus’s execution.

The evolution of church traditions has bifurcated these trends in such a way that many sincere seminarians feel caught in a Hobson’s choice: either remain faithful to a doctrine weakened by historical criticism, or choose a real but mystical experience that has lost its connection to the authority of doctrinal rightness.

Theology matters to Borg. We need an explanation of the divine order that is both intellectually credible and spiritually nourishing because this is the means by which we can understand and experience healing. A purely doctrinal or creedal Christianity closes off critical thinking and demands unquestioning faith. It asks its adherents to believe in miracles that defy scientific explanation.

Christianity has always been full of healing stories, more so than any other world religious tradition. Therefore, promoting doctrinal faith necessitates belief in miracles that disregards human logic. But “God,” for Borg, is a presence within whom we live and move and have our existence, to paraphrase Acts 17:28. When God became “transcendent” through the lens of the Enlightenment, God also became removed from the present universe and ceased to be a reality that could be experienced.

Yet the reality of God experienced is precisely what healing is. Borg explains that it was the real presence of God that made Jesus a healer in the here-and-now lives of the people around him. Jesus opposed the kind of temple worship that claimed an institutional monopoly on access to God.

From Doctrine to Experience

Shifting the center of Christianity from belief in doctrine to the reality of experiencing God creates, in the heart of a Christian, a desire to participate in the way. Jesus spoke of two ways: the common or easy way that leads to death and the more difficult and narrow way that leads to life. Choosing the way of life initiates a tumultuous shift to an entirely new worldview, arousing an awareness of “dying” to the ordinary way of thinking and experiencing a radical perceptual transformation. Instead of blindly clinging to beliefs that stretch the limits of logic, those who seek the way live with an enlightened sense of loving God and loving others.

Borg draws on Jesus’s primary metaphors to make plain the problems associated with the easy way. Blindness, for example, illustrates how we miss what is right in front of us. The blind cannot lead the blind. People with negative attitudes do not simply have specks in their eyes, they have logs that blind them to a true perception of others. It is common, Jesus taught, to discern the signs of weather, but discerning the reality of God’s presence requires a different way of seeing.

True to Borg’s approach, stories are more than stories. Even death itself served as a metaphor, showing the way out of a life of bondage. “Let the dead bury their own dead,” Jesus said (Matt 8:22), and those who want to live should leave the land of the dead and awaken, or resurrect, by following Jesus in the way to life in the Spirit. Metaphors have a “surplus of meaning.”² The death of Lazarus in the Gospel of John presents a story about a real death. Jesus affirmed to his disciples that Lazarus wasn’t merely sleeping, it was human death. But whether the account in John reports a historical event or not, Borg is not concerned with the factuality of the story. “The way it is told points to a more-than-historical meaning.”³ The real meaning, then, points to an awakening to life unlimited.

A Refuge for the Spiritually Homeless

So grateful to have found a safety net in Borg’s work for my theological wrestling, I was stunned listening to my fellow seminarians who found the opposite. “What about church?” they asked. “What’s so compelling about a metaphorical interpretation?” “Is he just throwing away the atonement of Christ?”

I realized that my comfort zone was their loss of security, and vice versa. The dialogue between Borg and N.T. Wright, in their book The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, became a guide for my own conversations. Their written discussion clarified the issues and established what was at stake. I leaned toward Borg’s vision of Jesus as a Spirit filled Jewish prophet, and toward the idea of salvation as transformation and liberation, in particular, I could understand the perspectives of my professors and fellow seminarians.

In Borg’s defense of the transformative and liberating teachings of Jesus, I discovered Borg’s alignment with Jesus’s healing system, perhaps without his ever saying so directly. I could see how Jesus, the human who lived and embodied the divine Spirit, was able to demonstrate to his students (then and now) how this Spirit worked.⁴ It was a divinely powerful presence, accessible to anyone striving to follow the way. If Jesus were actually the living God who merely looked like a human, then he would have been performing miracles beyond the reach of any human students. No one else would have access to such supernatural healing powers.

By rejecting substitutionary atonement and finding salvation through transformation and liberation, Borg rehabilitates the word salvation. He notes that in the Hebrew Bible, the Savior is associated with God’s presence, God’s love, God’s assurance, and God’s rescue from peril.⁵ In the New Testament, Jesus takes on the active role of Savior by enlightening the eyes of the blind, both metaphorically and physically. The stories of his restoring people to life offer yet another practical, present experience of being helped and healed.

I’ve met too many people troubled by their church experiences, and I think Borg has offered an alternative path for these people. He presents an image of Jesus that inspires life more than distant worship, joy more than fear of judgment, encouragement more than despair over sin. In a memoriam for Borg, in this issue of The Fourth R, Westar scholar Robin Meyers also envisions such a safety net: “Bless you, Marcus, for restoring credibility to Christianity. You caught lots of people walking out the church door and asked them to turn and look back one more time.”⁶

Anticipating a Pre-Constantinian Christianity

Borg had already been deeply involved in the Jesus Seminar by the time I encountered what seemed to me his beautiful and liberating theology. The subsequent Westar seminar, titled simply Christianity, was just getting underway in 2013 when Borg was diagnosed with his final illness. I found my way to this seminar in 2015, only months after Borg’s passing. From all I learned about his contributions, it seemed clear that Borg had anticipated the seminar’s eventual findings, which would be concluded in 2018. Without presuming to fabricate what he might have said, I believe it is fair to suggest that his desire to contribute to “emerging and emergent Christianity” found fulfillment in this seminar.⁷

His interpretation of the historical Jesus as a “spirit person” remained consistent with Westar’s Christianity Seminar’s reconstruction of the first two hundred years after Jesus. The traditional Christian “master narrative” that originated in the fourth century portrayed Jesus as the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent god, and as the divine agent who perfectly transmitted his message through specially chosen successors.⁸

But Borg balked at this portrayal, arguing that it diminished and limited God. The idea of omni presence in a human life was, for him, physically impossible and theologically incoherent. “A human being cannot be present everywhere.”⁹ Similarly, omniscience could not operate within a finite human life; how could a first century human know, for instance, the theory of relativity or the capital of Oregon? A more coherent theology, Borg suggested, would present Jesus as the decisive revelation of God, not the entirety of God, but the one through whom we see and experience divine reality.

Borg was also drawn to Jesus as a wisdom teacher. But this was wisdom about loving God, not merely believing in God, especially not belief as intellectual assent. For Borg, belief in God missed the mark entirely if it failed to lead to centering in God and wholehearted love. Perhaps most powerfully, Borg understood Jesus as a social prophet, in line with Israel’s historic role of advocating for economic justice and opposing domination by the wealthy and powerful. He warned of the institutional church becoming the very domination system it once resisted: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it” (Luke 13:34; Matt 23:37).

Borg’s conviction that Jesus was a spirit person, a teacher of wisdom, and a social prophet was remarkably aligned with the Christianity Seminar’s later findings. None of these fit within the confines of the fourth-century master narrative.

Healing as Subtext and Proof of the Sacred

The topic of healing recurs frequently in Borg’s writings. While he may have treated it somewhat peripherally in his broader theological framework, I believe his portrayal of Jesus as a healer reinforces and deepens his core insights. Healing, after all, offers the most tangible evidence of the efficacy of Jesus’s teaching.

I agree with Borg’s observation that “the term ‘miracle’ with its modern connotation of supernatural intervention into a world governed by natural laws does not occur” in the New Testament.¹⁰ The concept of violating natural law would not have occurred to ancient thinkers since the notion of nature following laws came with the Renaissance. But even the modern impulse to treat Jesus’s healing works as miracles—impossibilities—creates a theological disconnect with Jesus. If they were miracles, healing works would be as absurd as an omnipresent or omniscient Jesus. And if his healing power is inaccessible to humans, it renders Jesus as someone to worship but not someone whose example we can follow or whose teachings we can practice.

While Borg does not delve into medical explanations of the synoptic gospel healing stories, he does highlight the emotional and symbolic weight of these narratives. Compassion moves Jesus to act. He sometimes touches those he heals. He often references faith and heaven in brief, poignant comments. These stories are not technical reports, but rich encounters infused with meaning.

Even so, Borg does not regard faith as a complete explanation for Jesus’s healing work. In fact, Jesus occasionally healed people despite their lack of faith. Borg instead emphasizes that the healings point to a deeper source: Spirit power. The Greek word dunamis (“power”) is a key theological term in this context. Borg notes that “the mighty deeds of Jesus were understood by the gospel writers as power from the Power.”¹¹ This framing connects healing with the spirit of God’s presence, consistent with Borg’s overall concern for understanding redemption not as an abstract doctrine, but as a real, transformative experience.

Where Borg leans toward metaphor in his reading of healing accounts, I find no reason to discount their existential and even physical reality. The greatest limitation lies not in the stories themselves, but in modernity’s reliance on classical physics, which tends to dismiss any form of consciousness or divine action that defies materialist assumptions. According to more recent quantum sciences, consciousness does not depend on material conditions for its actions. Acts of healing without medical intervention, therefore, need not be explained by creedal Christianity nor by Newtonian physics, but by the action of thought—divine thought, in Jesus’s case.

This is a critical point in my appreciation of Borg’s vision of Jesus as a “spirit person.” Spirit does communicate or act within the human condition, and faith healing does take place, first in thought, and then in bodily expression. However, if we share the assumption of scientific materialism and therefore deny that spirit can act within the human condition, or if we rule out faith healing in principle, then we are treating material law as if it were superior to God. That reversal is theologically untenable to me. Jesus’s role as healer stands as the most potent evidence of the transformative power of God at work in the world.

Christianity’s Transformative Power: Healing as the Core, Not a Sidebar

Borg argues that “sin needs to be demoted from its status as the dominant Christian metaphor for what’s wrong with us.”¹² In a similar vein, he writes, “what the infirm need is not forgiveness, but healing and wholeness.”¹³ This shift in emphasis marks one of the most liberating and progressive moves in Borg’s theology.

Yet, Borg seems to pause at this line of inquiry, remarking that explaining how Jesus’s healings occurred is “beyond our purpose and probably impossible.”¹⁴ While this may be a responsible scholarly posture, I believe he was on the threshold of a theology that could have made healing a centerpiece of Christian understanding. It would not be merely metaphorical or spiritual, but existential and physical. All the healing stories in the Bible would not necessarily need to be literally true historically, but the possibility of physical healing should remain open.

Borg’s commitment to a panentheistic view of God, a God who is both immanent and transcendent, could support such a theology. In this framework, the line from Acts, “in God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), is not merely poetic but ontologically rich. It provides the grounds by which Jesus could embody divine power and extend that same healing presence to others, not as a supernatural anomaly but as a deep expression of spiritual reality.

Borg’s emphasis on metaphor remains crucial. Healing stories do indeed point to the inner transformation Jesus taught: liberation from fear, shame, despair, and societal exclusion. However, metaphor alone does not exhaust the meaning of these stories. The metaphor grounds the teaching, but Jesus’s physical acts of healing enacted it. This is what distinguishes him from other wisdom teachers: his teachings were performative, enacted demonstrations of the Spirit at work.

Christian theology has long struggled to make room for actual healing within a rational, Enlightenment inspired worldview. The resistance is often amplified by Borg’s own assertion that Jesus was not God, at least not in the fully post-Easter, divine sense. If Jesus was not ontologically God, then healing must either be explained through human capability or rejected altogether. And because physical law offers no satisfying framework for spontaneous healing, scholars often disregard it as legend or myth.

But this verdict misses the point. If Jesus was fully human, then his experiences of God’s power, as well as his ability to facilitate healing, become examples for others. Modern experiences with the placebo effect (the scientific name for “we do not know how it works”) can provide precedence and credibility for the skeptical. As Borg affirms, Jesus was a wisdom teacher, but he was also more than that. Likewise, Jesus was a healer, but more than that. Healing without medicine was often considered a magical or symbolic act in antiquity. But Jesus, by contrast, understood the why behind his healings. He knew that healing was not external to his message. It was the message enacted.

This knowledge is why he could teach others to do likewise. Healing was not a sidebar to salvation; it was the embodiment of salvation: restoration of life, renewal of dignity, liberation from affliction. This is the Christianity that Borg was, perhaps unknowingly, pointing toward: one in which healing is not a mystery to be explained away, but the core evidence of a God who transforms.

The Road Not Taken: Extracanonical Texts

Just as I see in Borg’s theology the beginning of an answer to his own question about how healing happens, I also believe he would have been pleasantly surprised by what scholars have continued to uncover in the extracanonical writings. When I first became involved with Westar shortly after his death, the scholarly conversation around extracanonical texts was just beginning to shift from long-standing debates over heretical status toward sincere inquiry into the meaning and insights of these long-neglected works.

Borg’s career spanned the work of the Jesus Seminar to the birth of the Christianity Seminar at Westar, which asked what truly happened between the time of Jesus and the fourth-century adoption of doctrinal Christianity. It was a time when a largely dormant chapter of Christian history was being brought back to life thanks to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discoveries of previously unknown Christian writings. Remarkably, it was often the same Westar scholars who had led the quest for the historical Jesus who now sought to dismantle the outdated category of “gnosticism” and reframe these texts as authentic and legitimate expressions of those long-lost voices.¹⁵

I think Borg would have welcomed this expansion. Take the Gospel of Truth,¹⁶ for instance: in it, Jesus’s death is not primarily understood as atonement for sin. Instead, it is portrayed as the tragic cost of participating in a human world and as motivated by love. This aligns with Borg’s “surplus of meaning” approach to biblical metaphor and his own mystical, panentheistic experiences. His “post-Easter Jesus” was more than a historical speculation; it was an affirmation of spiritual reality, and one he took seriously in light of Paul’s transformative vision.

Had he worked with the Gospel of Mary,¹⁷ I imagine Borg would have recognized in Mary Magdalene’s vision a compelling parallel to his own understanding of divine encounter. Her vision was dismissed by Peter and Andrew, not unlike the way many of Borg’s theological insights were rejected by his more traditional peers. Andrew said of Mary’s teachings,

I for one do not believe that the Savior said these things, for what she said appears to give views that are different from his thought. . . . . Has the Savior spoken secretly to a woman and not openly so that we would all hear? (Gospel of Mary 10:2–3)

I would love to have discussed with Borg the meaning of salvation in the Secret Revelation of John, as I described it in The Fourth R in 2022.¹⁸ In that work a post-Easter Jesus explains why the powers of this world do not have the last word. I think Borg would have been glad to know that salvation sounded more like his own definition of it: the transformation this side of death, less about sin, and nothing at all about a substitutionary payment for sin.

Was He Holding Back or Preparing for More?

Although I deeply regret never having met Marcus Borg, whom I consider one of the giants in the evolution of Christian thought, I was ready: ready for his passion for theological reeducation, ready for the break from literalism, ready for a vision of salvation as present transformation. I was ready for a God who is the very being in whom we live and move and have our being, and ready for a shift from belief-as-assent to faithfulness and trustworthiness.

As I’ve come to understand the path Borg himself walked to arrive at these insights, I am in awe of his patience and courage, particularly his painstaking labor, persistent communication, and the unrelenting opposition he faced. He took risks grounded not in reactionary defiance but in care, integrity, and devotion to what he believed was authentic Christianity. Even amid all his deconstructing of traditional doctrines, he never sought to discard the church itself.

Coming from a deeply rooted Midwestern Lutheranism, finding the God he was searching for in texts long branded heretical or even anti-Christian might not have fit with his trajectory. But I believe he had already traversed the most arduous part of that journey. In his final book, Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most, he reveals the dynamic, evolving quality of his deepest convictions. Like all who are truly wise, he was constantly in search of a fuller understanding. It is clear that his thinking was still maturing.

For those of us seeking a path that is both intellectually honest and spiritually nourishing, Borg’s work is not merely influential, it is foundational. His legacy opens a doorway through which many now walk to rediscover a Jesus who heals, not only metaphorically or ritually (as in magic), but through love, wisdom, and deep spiritual presence.

I am profoundly grateful for Borg’s life’s work. It continues to shape what I believe is the most hopeful future for Christianity: a faith centered in the heart and a community where physical, social, and spiritual healing is not only the sign, but the very substance, of the sacred.

End Notes

1 Borg frequently uses the specific phrase “spirit person” to identify Jesus. For example, “Jesus was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew” (Meeting Jesus, 119).
2 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 51.
3 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 198.
4 Followers of Jesus are generally identified as “disciples,” but the Greek word used in the gospels literally means “students.” Their role as learners comes across more clearly through the more accurate translation.
5 Borg, Speaking Christian, 43–44.
6 Myers, “Bless you, Marcus,” 6.
7 Borg identifies the “emergent paradigm” for Christianity in his book The Heart of Christianity, 6, 13.
8 The basic outline of the master narrative is described in Vearncombe et. al., After Jesus Before Christianity, 2.
9 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 7.
10 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 146.
11 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 148.
12 Borg, Speaking Christian, 144.
13 Borg, Speaking Christian, 145.
14 Borg, Jesus: Uncovering, 148.
15 Vearncombe et al., After Jesus, 218–31.
16 This extracanonical text can be found in Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures, 312.
17 This extracanonical text can be found in Miller, The Complete Gospels, 333.
18 Paulson, “A Path to Hope,” 7.

Works Cited

Borg, Marcus. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. HarperOne, 1994.

Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a

____________The Heart of Christianity. HarperOne, 2003.

____________Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. HarperOne, 2006.

____________Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—And How They Can Be Restored. HarperOne, 2011.

Layton, Bentley and David Brakke, transl. The Gnostic Scriptures. Second ed. Yale University Press, 2021.

Meyers, Robin, “Bless You, Marcus.” The Fourth R, No. 29-1 (Jan/Feb 2016): 5–7.

Miller, Robert J., ed. The Complete Gospels: The Scholars Version. 4th ed. Polebridge Press, 2010.

Paulson, Shirley, “A Path to Hope from a Mysterious Ancient Text: Gems within the Secret Revelation of John.” The Fourth R, No. 35-5 (Sept/Oct 2022), 7–12, 20.

Originally published in The 4th R magazine, 38:6, November/December 2025. Reprinted by permission.