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A summary of the first chapter of Marcus Borg's book , by the same name as above. This summary first appeared on my blog, Tracers of the Word in 2008.
Marcus Borg is a professor of Religion and Culture at Oregan State University. He is a leading spokesman for what has come to be known as Progressive Christianity, or Emerging Christianity. This summary tells the story of Borg's relisious development from childhood to the present time. In later years he has develloped into a panentheist theologically, which retains the theistic concept of God. I struggle to find some expression of the mystery of God that is non-theistic, but am still in the midst of the struggle. I find this thought progression to be helpful in the sense that it supports the use of Christian symbols and hence enhances communication with more conservative Christians, while allowing me to maintain my own integrity. --ca
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Most of us met Jesus for the first time when we were children. For many, that childhood image of Jesus has remained intact into adulthood. But for others, that image has become a problem, leading some to be indifferent or even reject the religion of their childhood.
IMAGES OF JESUS AND IMAGES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
Images of Jesus matter. They correlate with images of the Christian life. What we think of Jesus gives shape to the Christian life. There are two prevailing images of Jesus:
(1) the popular image, or Jesus as divine saviour. Three major tenets support this image: (a) Jesus is the Son of God; (b) His mission was to die for the sins of the world; (c) His message was that he was the Son of God, the saving purpose of his death, and the importance of believing in him. The Christian life consists primarily of faith (believing). One understands certain things in Jesus' life and about Jesus to be true. Although belief may lead to much else, it is the primary characteristic of the Christian life.
(2) the moral image, or Jesus is a teacher of great moral principles. He propounded a fairly narrow moral code, e.g. the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandments to love God, neighbor and self, The Golden Rule, Sermon on the Mount, etc. The image of the Christian life that results is "being good", or seeking to live as Jesus lived.
Neither of these visions are adequate. This life is ultimately not about believing or being good, but it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.
MEETING JESUS AGAIN: MY (BORG'S) OWN STORY
A church group to which I was going to speak asked me to "Talk to us about Jesus and make it personal." Not sure what to make of that, I wrote "Me and Jesus" on a sheet of paper and began to reflect on those words. I began to trace my earliest memories through childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
Childhood
I grew up in a small North Dakota town in a family which attended the Lutheran Church. Out of my experiences there, I remember pictures of Jesus with sheep and with children. I knew that he was God's son and that he had been born to a virgin. I remember my father reading the birth story on Christmas eve. I also knew that Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead. I memorized John 3.16 for a Sunday-school program. And it was clear to me that believing in Jesus and telling others about him was the most important thing in the world. "What was at stake was nothing less than souls perishing, lost in the shades of night."
By the end of childhood, the ingredients of the popular image of Jesus were in place:
• Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God
• He died for the sins of the world
• His message was about himself, his saving purpose, and the importance of believing in him.
It was easy to believe these things. After all authority figures in my life told me they were true and I believed them. I call the state in which I received these teachings, the state of precritical naivete.
My naive beliefs soon came into shaky territory. In elementary school I began to wonder how God could be present "everywhere" and also be "up in heaven". My young mind decided that God was up in heaven, but he could be anywhere if he wanted to be. But, this was the first step in removing God from the world. He was a supernatural being who lived in heaven. I still believed God was real.
Adolescence
Pervasive doubts about the existence of God accompanied the onset of my teenage years. Anxiety, guilt and fear also plagued me, because I still had a fear of going to hell. I would pray fervently, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief". For all that I wanted, I could not "force" myself to believe.
What was happening was a collision between the modern world view and my childhood beliefs. The world view, with its cause and effect, and with reality composed of matter and energy, made belief in God (a nonmaterial reality) increasingly problematic. I had begun to think critically. And this led me to affect the way I thought of Jesus---the Son of God (for I was no longer sure who "God" was).
College
Four years of college and I became a closet agnostic. In a junior-year religion class I came into contact with some of the most exciting material ever. I read the intellectual giants of the faith (Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm) as well as emerging giants of the modern age (Bultmann, Tillich, Barth, etc.). The experience was liberating. My childhood images of Christianity had collapsed, but no new understandings had yet emerged.
Seminary and Beyond
In seminary I learned that the image of Jesus, who knew himself to be the divine savior, was not historically true. I learned that the gospels are neither divine documents, nor historical accounts. Rather the gospels were developing traditions written in the last third of the first century, and which included the developing accounts of second- and third- generation authors. For forty to seventy years, these accounts had circulated orally, not being written down. Much of the account of Jesus changed during those decades.
The gospels were written to particular communities that had begun to move beyond the Palestine milieu of Jesus. And the beliefs about Jesus grew during those decades. As time went by, Jesus was more and more considered to be divine. The gospels tell us the status of the community's belief about Jesus; they do not tell us, first and foremost, about the ministry of Jesus. [Borg defends this statement in later chapters in the book. --ca]
In my gospel studies, I learned that Jesus as a human being would not have known of his divine nature---Son of God, co-equal with God, begotten before all worlds. There was a sharp discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of the Christian tradition.
The radical difference between the gospel of John (the last gospel written) and the synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) illuminate this emergent tradition. In John, Jesus speaks as a divine person. He is the great I Am. the bread of life, the light of the world. And he says, I and the Father are one, and He who has seen me has seen the Father.
The difference between John and the synoptic gospels is so great that we must say one is non-historical and the other historical. Both cannot be historically accurate. The judgement is clear, John represents the Christ of faith, while the synoptics are more closely historical (though colored with the development of early tradition.)
There are two dominant consensus positions in Jesus scholarship:
(1) We can't know much about the Jesus of history. Even in the synoptic gospels it is hard to separate Jesus' words from the words of the Church.
(2) What little we could know about Jesus is that he was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God (soon). The content of his message was not about himself nor the importance of believing in him; but rather the urgent need to repent, the world was soon to pass away, and the need to ground oneself in God.
This image of Jesus is not particularly satisfying, but it is the image that a generation or two of seminary students graduated with. I found it very exciting, but not something I could talk about with my mother. The collision between the reality of God and the modern worldview remained. I was becoming a closet atheist who believed that all religions are constructed by humans to meet human needs.
God Becomes Real
In my mid-thirties I had a number of "numinous" experiences which changed my understanding of God, Jesus and Christianity. These experiences were nothing spectacular but they brought to me "radical amazement", a sense of the holy, and what Rudolf Otto calls the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a tremendous, overwhelming mystery that evokes trembling and a compulsive attraction.) These were aha moments for me.
"I realized that God does not refer to a supernatural being out there, but rather the word God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us. In God we live and move and have our being. I came to see that God dwells within (immanent) but he is not identified with any one particular thing (he is transcendent). Gradually it became obvious to me that God was not a concept of belief, but an element of experience.
How I See Jesus Now
I came to see that God was central (or the Spirit was central) in Jesus' own life. His spirituality was foundational for his life. He was deeply involved with the social world of his time, but he was also grounded in the world of the Spirit. "Jesus' relationship to the Spirit was the source of everything that he was."
THE PRE-EASTER AND THE POST-EASTER JESUS
There is a major difference between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. I have come to call them the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus. The pre-Easter is the Jesus of history before his death. Post-Easter is the Jesus of the Christian tradition and experience. The latter is not just a Jesus one believes in, but a Jesus one experiences as a reality.
After Jesus' death, his followers experienced him as a living reality. The statements in the gospel of John record the way they experienced this new reality: the great I Am, the light in the darkness, the bread of life. The gospel of John thus is true to the experience of the early Christians, while not being literally, historically true.
FROM BELIEF TO RELATIONSHIP
Up until my late thirties, I saw the Christian life as involving primarily believing. For over twenty years I struggled with doubt and unbelief. Now I see the Christian life as involving a relationship "with that to which the Christian tradition points." And "that" is what may be spoken of as God, the risen Christ or the Spirit. This relationship is lived out within the framework of the Christian tradition--and that is what defines a Christian. This relationship involves personal transformation, a life which is a journey [of spiritual understanding--ca].
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This concludes a summary of the first chapter of this book. Meeting Jesus for the First Time,
