the teachings of a really wise person named Jesus Christ, but you don't believe in his divinity or that his message came from God.

I think if you try to follow the example of Christ, if you strive to be more like Him, you are a Christian, even if you don't subscribe to every part of any of the man-made creeds.

I believe in it but that I know plenty of people in my parish that have questions.

It's a core teaching.

But I accept some have a hard time with it.

1 Corinthians 15:20, "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died."

that you can.

The central meaning of Easter is not about whether something happened to the corpse of Jesus. Its central meanings are that Jesus continues to be known and that he is Lord. The tomb couldn’t hold him. He’s loose in the world. He’s still here. He’s still recruiting for the kingdom of God.

http://www.marcusjborg.com/2011/05/16/the-resurrection-of-jesus/

As a member of the Jesus Seminar, he offers some wonderful insights on what can be known historically about the man Yeshua and the religion of the 'risen' Christ that followed.

And I found it rather confusing. Perhaps if he had better expressed just what he meant by "alive" I would not have a problem understanding it. Apparently, sightings of Jesus after the resurrection were hallucinations.

I must say that I am no fan of the Jesus Seminar. Their stated stances include denying the divinity of Christ, which is simply an unacceptable stance for a Christian.

read of his and other Jesus Seminar writers as well as their responses to critics.

My understanding was that the Jesus Seminar did not deny the divinity, they were instead simply trying to do as modern as possible critical scholarship on the historical man Jesus. Questions of theology and belief must then be decided by the churches and the individuals in question. German scholarship in the 19th century presented a similar challenge then to belief as the critical level of scholarship on the Bible was raised to a new level. One response is the more modern forms of liberal Christianity and the other was the birth of fundamentalism - a reactionary form of abject literalism. Honestly, I almost see those two sides as two distinct types of Christianity now almost 200 years later.

Borg is a Canon Theologian at an Episcopal Cathedral in Oregon and definitely considers himself fully and completely a Christian. I can only summarize his many writings here, however, I do encourage you to read them yourself. Challenging or not, it is excellent scholarship and Christian apologetics.

Borg, therefore, recognizes the historical Jesus prior to the Resurrection, and a Risen Christ thereafter. He is looking at experiences of Christ as real, not simply as visions or hallucinations either. It helps to be able to read the Koine Greek for the subtleties of language used to describe those experiences. This is a little more on what he means in a response to a critic:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marcusborg/2013/10/continuing-the-resurrection-conversation/

I recognize that Christianity as a religion with as many followers as it has and a history as long as it does surely continues to evolve and allows for many different takes on the central teachings therein. I think that each individual believer decides ultimately for themselves what is historical, what is allegorical, and what is mythological. Dogma and theology aside, I would no more say that Borg is more or less of a Christian than you are. Ultimately you both find meaning and purpose in the stories, teachings, and resurrection of Christ, even if you don't both agree on all of the specifics. That puts you both in a group of believers that share more in common than not.

supports a very similar reading in his Rabbi Jesus. He's another Episcopalian.

theologians who share this modern viewpoint - John Sanford (Minister & Jungian Analyst), Morton Kelsey (Catholic Priest who directly communicated with Jung), Matthew Fox, Paul Tillich, and Bishop John Shelby Sponge come immediately to mind.

I am not familiar with Father Bruce Chilton. I will need to read him now. Thank you for the reference.

that Jesus began as a disciple of John the Baptist. James Tabor, who's more of an archaeologist than a theologian in the strict sense, also holds this view. He believes that John and Jesus had a joint ministry until John's arrest.

Lots of good liberal theologians put there.

In a religious sense, I'm not sure. It would depend on what you believe in instead of the resurrection - if you really mean that his moral teachings are evergreen, but that there's no life after death, than I think you have to ignore a lot of what he said. If you believe in a spiritual resurrection but not a physical one, I guess that can work.

Bryant

"son of God?"

with both of those definitions.

The first would include Muslims, who believe that the Messenger Isa was conceived in exactly that way by Maryam, a virgin of the Jewish people.

The second has so much slack in it as to be virtually meaningless. Eg., it could be applied to me (though most definitely not by me) because I see Jesus and Mary as avatars of the divine masculine and the divine feminine, but my spiritual practice includes them only tangentially.

And probably neither one of them would have been accepted by Jesus himself and his Jewish followers, for whom "Son of.God" was a title of the King of Israel. (See Psalm 2, one of the "coronation psalms, : "You are my son; today I have begotten you.&quot In fact some variants of the gospels have those words in place of the better-
known "This is my beloved son. . . " in the
baptismal narratives.

And then, of course, thete are those who believe your first definition but don't follow through on putting Jesus's teachings into practice. Neither Jesus nor his brother James thought that was adequate.

It's a thornier question than it seems to be, isn't it?

Let me see if I can kinda sorta organize a reply here. In no particular order:

Isa and Maryam are identical to Jesus and Mary. The Quran includes a chapter entirely dedicated to Maryam, in which Isa is conceived miraculously by the spirit of Allah and Maryam's virginity is not compromised. Christians and Muslims would both be included in your first definition.

No, I don't identity as a Christian. I identify as a Native American Traditional. That said, I subscribe to a panentheist theology that fits very well with Process Theology, which works effectively within Christianity, Judaism, Islam and many other faiths. My theology overlaps theirs, but my practice largely does not.

The difficulty I see with accepting self-identification alone as sufficient grounds for
establishing Christianity is that Jesus himself did not appear to accept.it.. "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in Heaven." (Matt. 7:22ff) The epistle of James, Jesus's brother, also stresses action over belief or self-identification.

I'm not so sure Jesus would not accept an atheist as a follower. He accepted Samaritans, a gay Roman centurion and his partner, a (presumably reformed) terrorist who may have been his younger brother, a tax collector who collaborated with the Romans, a pagan Canaanite woman, and a good many other unconventional folk. Forgive me, but an atheist is pretty tame compared to some of those.

If you believe in a God and Jesus' teaching, I say you are a Christian, even if you have doubts about some of the Bible stores. The Resurrection is a big one for sure, but I wouldn't let that dissuade anyone. Enjoy it for what you make of it, and see where life takes you!