He describes his own intellectual pilgrimage as a process of unlearning the disbeliefs that he imbibed in graduate school from prominent liberal theologians.
The idea of a liberal Christian third way between conservative orthodoxy and secular disbelief retains its original relevance.
The idea of a liberal third way between authority-based orthodoxies and secular disbelief has no less relevance or coherence in the 21st century than it held one hundred years ago.
Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes dispenses liberal theology with a homiletical flourish in his bestselling books on the Bible and the "good life." Episcopal bishop John Spong, passionately opposed to literalism in religion, has attained fame by urging the necessity of a living alternative to orthodoxy and secular disbelief. Biblical scholar Marcus Borg is equally famous as a herald of the second coming of the liberal Jesus.
His bestselling book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994) sold more than 270,000 copies in ten years, teaching church groups to think of Jesus as one who was "grounded in the world of the Spirit." Borg described his own spiritual pilgrimage as a journey from a Lutheran boyhood in North Dakota, to an anxiety-ridden loss of faith as an adolescent, to an intellectual interest in theology during college, to a career as a biblical scholar, to an understanding of Christian life beyond belief and disbelief as "a relationship to the Spirit of God ...
