[books i've been reading]

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

by Marcus Borg

Marcus Borg, professor emeritus in the philosophy department at Oregon State University, is a rare breed: a liberal biblical scholar and a practicing Christian. Borg's book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith, is about the Jesus of History and the Jesus of Faith; that is, it's about the prophet from Nazareth and about that prophet's enduring legacy and experience in the life of the church. Borg doesn't believe in the virgin birth, in the divinity of Jesus, and in some ways he doesn't even believe in "God" (or at least modern, Western conceptions of Him). "[The] central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible... Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen, living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition." (p. 17)

Chapter One serves as Borg's "Spiritual Autobiography," detailing his spiritual journey from childhood to adulthood. It's a story of uncritical naivete--believing what an authority figure tells you is true--turning to "closet agnosticism" and blossoming into a form of "closet atheism" before retrograding into a sort of pantheism. For Borg, God "does not refer to a supernatural being 'out there' [but to] the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. God is the nonmaterial ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, 'we live and move and have our being.'" (14) Borg writes about how his first seminary class served as a nail in his spiritual coffin; there he learned that the synoptic gospels were formed over the decades by the early church to address movements and issues within the church and that the Gospel of John came to express the second generation's understanding of Jesus entirely divorced from the preaching carpenter of Nazareth. Borg, in the shadow of Martin Kähler who determined that the true Christ is a Christ of faith detached from the Jesus of history, differentiates between the "Jesus of History" and the "Christ of Faith," but as a spiritual person himself, he doesn't like the designations; those phrases have become pregnant with meaning, and Borg prefers different classifications: the "pre-Easter Jesus" (the historical Jesus who walked around Galilee and ended up being crucified by the Romans) and the "post-Easter Jesus" (the Jesus experienced by the Christian community).

In Chapter Two, Borg sets out to sketch what we can know about the historical Jesus. As such, Borg finds himself in what's been called the "third quest" for the historical Jesus; the preceding two centuries were dominated by the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" (coined by the famous gospel scholar Albert Schweitzer) which decreed that nothing could really be known about the Jesus of history. The "third quest" says that something--maybe not a lot, and maybe only a little--can be known about Jesus. Borg begins this chapter with a cursory look at the Jesus Seminar (of which he was a participant); he doesn't go into much detail about the Jesus Seminar, wishing only to point out that scholars have been seeking to distinguish what in the gospels is original to Jesus and that which is original to the early church adding to Jesus. It's my understanding that the Jesus Seminar is one of the biggest hoaxes in gospel studies (but to Borg's credit, he often voted against the tide).* Borg asks what can be known about the boyhood Jesus, and he offers a charcoal sketch of ancient Nazareth, of cosmopolitan Galilee, and he surmises that Jesus became a disciple of John the Baptist where he underwent a conversion experience. Borg approaches conversion from the perspective of William James: "[Conversion] need not refer to changing from one religion to another, or from being nonreligious to being religious; it may also refer to a process, whether sudden or gradual, whereby religious impulses and energies become central to one's life." (27) Following the Baptist's execution at the hands of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch of Galilee, Borg speculates that Jesus took up the Baptist's mantle (and message). It is this picture of Jesus, Borg says, that we find in the gospels (although embellished by the early church). Borg advocates that Jesus was a spirit person, a teacher of wisdom, a social prophet, and a movement founder. Throughout the rest of Chapter Two, Borg looks at Jesus as a spirit person. 

The "Spirit Person" Borg refers to is the equivalent of a shaman or Holy Man. Borg's conception of the "Spirit Person" is derived straight from the Eastern religions and worldviews (he says as much himself, and it's not surprising, since his conception of God is derived from Eastern thought). These Spirit Persons "are people who have vivid and frequent subjective experiences of another level or dimension of reality." (32) This "other dimension" is the dimension of the sacred; "The sacred (or the numinous) refers to the other reality encountered in these experiences. Most often, of course, the religious traditions do not speak of the sacred abstractly; rather, they name it--as Yahweh, Brahman, Atman, Allah, the Tao, Great Spirit, God." (33) This naming happens because "the impulse to name something as sacred flows out of the experience of the sacred." These Spirit Persons have access to a part of reality that most of us do not; and as such, they are also mediators between us Normal Folk and the Sacred. "[They] become funnels or conduits for the power or wisdom of God to enter into this world... [They] are delegates of the tribe to another layer of reality, mediators who connect their communities to the Spirit." Borg acknowledges that what he writes sounds ridiculous to some, not least of all to Westerners steeped in modern thought paradigms: "The modern worldview, derived from the Enlightenment, sees reality in material terms, as constituted by the world of matter and energy within the space-time continuum. The experience of spirit persons suggest that there is more to reality than this--that there is, in addition to the tangible world of our ordinary experience, a nonmaterial level of reality, actual even though nonmaterial, and charged with energy and power. The modern worldview is one-dimensional; the worldview of spirit persons is multidimensional." (33-34) Borg's pantheistic leanings come into sharp focus in the next paragraph: "[This] other reality... is not 'somewhere else.' Rather, it is all around us, and we are in it... [We] are separated from it only by filmy screens of consciousness. When those screens of consciousness momentarily drop away, the experience of Spirit occurs. A spirit person is one in whom the screens of consciousness are unusually permeable--compared with most of us, who seem to have hardened rinds of consciousness instead." Borg turns his attention back to Jesus, and beyond him, to the heroes of the Old Testament, claiming that these patriarchs and prophets, who had mystical experiences and visions of the sacred, were spirit persons, as well; in this way, Jesus is just one of many Jewish spirit persons (and there are spirit persons just like him from every tribe, nation, and tongue). Thus "rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, [Jesus] is one of many mediators of the sacred." (37)

In Chapter Three, Borg wraps Jesus' mission and ministry around Luke 6.36, which reads in some versions, "Be compassionate as God is compassionate." Borg defines compassion as a feeling in the gut or the bowels that borders on an active empathy. This compassion is the compassion that God feels for His human creatures. "Like a womb, God is the one who gives birth to us--the mother who gives birth to us. As a mother loves the children of her womb and feels for the children of her womb, so God loves us and feels for us, for all of her children. In its sense of 'like a womb,' compassionate has nuances of giving life, nourishing, caring, perhaps embracing and encompassing. For Jesus, this is what God is like." (48) Building upon his belief that Jesus, as a sort of mystic, experienced God on a higher level, Borg insists that "[it] is implausible to see [Jesus'] perception of God as compassionate and the passionate courage with which he held to it as simply a result of the intellectual activity of studying the [Jewish] tradition, or to assume that based on some other grounds he decided it was a good idea. Rather, it is reasonable to surmise that he spoke of God as compassionate--as 'like a womb'--because of his own experience of the Spirit." (61) Jesus' understanding of God's compassion wasn't just a spiritual reality but a political one; as Borg puts it, "compassion for Jesus was political. He directly and repeatedly challenged the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of his social world and advocated instead what might be called a politics of compassion." (49) Jesus' compassion offered a new social vision that conflicted with the predominant social vision of 2nd-Temple Palestinian Judaism's social vision of purity.

Much of Chapter Three is devoted to surveying the "purity ethic" within the Judaism of Jesus' day, and it's one of the best sketches I've seen in print. This book is worth its weight for these few pages alone. Borg emphasizes that purity wasn't an individualistic scheme as it is in our thoroughly Western world but that it was nationalistic in scope. He looks at how the Pharisees and Essenes approached purity: the Pharisees were strict and sought to implement purity throughout all of Israel, and the Essenes cut themselves off from the wider culture to cultivate a purity of their own. The priesthood stood as the elite purists, proud in their Temple, and Jesus' movement conflicted with them all. Within Israel, "[Holiness] was understood to mean 'separation from everything unclean.' Holiness thus meant the same as purity, and [Leviticus 19.2] was thus understood as, 'You [Israel] shall be pure as God is pure.' The ethos of purity proceeded a politics of purity--that is, a society structured around a purity system." (50) Borg defines a purity system as "'a cultural map which indicates "a place for everything and everything in its place."' Things that are okay in one place are impure or dirty in another, where they are out of place. Slightly more narrowly, and put very simply, a purity system is a social system organized around the contrasts or polarities of pure and impure, clean and unclean. The polarities of pure and impure establish a spectrum or 'purity map' ranging from pure on one end through varying degrees of purity to impure (or 'off the purity map') at the other. These polarities apply to persons, places, things, times, and social groups." Thus the purity system "established a spectrum of people ranging from the pure through varying degrees of purity to people on the margin to the radically impure." Purity wasn't just about behavior: it also had to do with gender, physical prowess, and heritage. When it comes to behavior, however, "[the] righteous' were those who followed the purity system, and 'sinners' were those who did not. Though the word sinners had a range of meanings in first-century Palestine, it was not understood to include everybody (as it does in the mainstream Christian theological tradition), but rather referred to particular groups of people, the worst of whom were 'untouchables.'" (51) Thus "sin becomes a matter of being impure or 'dirty' and renders one 'untouchable.' This connection between sin and impurity is preserved in some Christian confessions of sin that speak of being 'sinful and unclean.' So it was in first-century Judaism: sinners often meant 'the impure.'" In sum, "the effect of the purity system was to create a world with sharp social boundaries: between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not whole, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile." (52) Jesus' ethic of compassion conflicted with predominant purity system, and he sought to create a community "shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion." (53) For Jesus, "[c]ompassion, not holiness, is the dominant quality of God, and if therefore to be the ethos of the community that mirrors God." (54) Borg examines a handful of Jesus' parables and teachings that underscore his compassion; most notable was his habit of embracing table fellowship with Judaism's untouchables. "[Table fellowship] was not a casual act, as it can be in the modern world. In a general way, sharing a meal represented mutual acceptance. More specifically, rules surrounding meals were deeply embedded in the purity system. Those rules governed not only what might be eaten and how it should be prepared, but also with whom one might eat. Refusing to share a meal was a form of social ostracism. Pharisees (and others) would not eat with somebody who was impure, and no decent person would share a meal with an outcast. The meal was a microcosm of the social system, table fellowship an embodiment of social vision." (55) "[Jesus] frequently ate with outcasts, as well as with others. Moreover, it appears that these were often festive meals, as is indicated by a small detail in the gospel accounts: the participants 'reclined' at table. Ordinary meals were eaten sitting; at festive meals, one reclined. Reclining turns a meal into a banquet, a celebration." (56) Thus "Jesus is accused of 'eating with tax collectors and sinners,' and is charged with being 'a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' As already noted, tax collectors were among the worst of the untouchables, and sinners should be given the meaning it had within a purity system: impure people, 'dirty' people." Jesus' movement was "an inclusive movement, negating the boundaries of the purity system. It included women, untouchables, the poor, the mained, and the marginalized, as well as some people of stature who found his vision attractive... [The] inclusiveness of Jesus' movement embodied a radically alternative social vision."

Borg writes, "The intra-Jewish battle between Jesus and the advocates of the purity system can be seen as a battle over two different ways to interpret Scripture. Both [Jesus] and his critics stood in the tradition of Israel and sought to be faithful to it. The elites of his day read Scripture in accordance with the paradigm of holiness as purity. Jesus read it in accordance with the paradigm of compassion. Each provided a lens through which the tradition was seen. It was thus a hermeneutical battle, a conflict between two very different ways of interpreting the sacred traditions of Judaism." (58) Borg argues that this conflict between two hermeneutics is alive and well within the church: traditional Christian orthodoxy, he argues, has followed in the vein of the Pharisees; those who are accepting of others no matter what, and those who don't try to force any "behaviors" on others, are those who are following in Jesus' footsteps of compassion. I would argue that Borg does an excellent job at showcasing how Jesus' compassion conflicted with the purity system within Judaism, but I would criticize him on this point: wrapping Jesus' entire ministry around one interpretation of one particular verse is problematic in and of itself. Yes, Jesus was compassionate; yes, the church has failed to model his compassion; no, compassion as such wasn't the main thrust of his ministry. I believe the main thrust of his ministry, and around which everything else circulates, is the proclamation which we see picked up in Galilee from Day One and carried into Jerusalem: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand."

In Chapter Four, Borg looks at Jesus' wisdom as alternative wisdom that conflicted with the conventional wisdom of his day. He presents Jesus primarily as a sage: "Whatever else can be said about the pre-Easter Jesus, he was a teacher of wisdom--a sage, as teachers of wisdom are called." (69) He defines wisdom well: "[Wisdom] concerns how to live. It speaks of the nature of reality and how to live one's life in accord with reality. Central to it is the notion of a way or a path, indeed of two ways or paths: the wise way and the foolish way. Teachers of wisdom speak of these two ways, commending the one and warning of the consequences of following the other." Borg identifies two types of wisdom: there's conventional wisdom (the stock wisdom of any particular culture) and alternative wisdom (wisdom that doesn't fit inside the box of culture's conventional wisdom). Borg defines conventional wisdom as "a culture's most taken-for-granted understandings about the way things are (its worldview, or image of reality) and about the way to live (its ethos, or way of life). It is 'what everybody knows'-the world that everybody is socialized into through the process of growing up. It is a culture's social construction of reality and the internalization of that construction within the psyche of the individual. It is thus encultured consciousness--that is, consciousness shaped and structured by culture or tradition." (75) He adds, "[Conventional] wisdom creates a world in which we live. It constructs a world; indeed, it is the construction. It is a domestication of reality, a net we cast over reality. It is basically life within the socially constructed world." (77)

Jesus stood against conventional wisdom and offered an alternative wisdom. "This [alternative] wisdom questions and undermines conventional wisdom and speaks of another way, another path. Its teachers are subversive sages, and they include some of the most famous figures of religious history." (70) Borg puts Jesus, the Sage of Nazareth, on par with Lao-Tzu and the Buddha. As a sage, Jesus spoke of both the Narrow Way and the Broad Way. He conveyed his alternative through his teachings. "[As] a wisdom teacher Jesus used aphorisms and parables to invite his hearers to see in a radically new way. The appeal is to the imagination, to that place within us in which reside our images of reality and our images of life itself; the invitation is to a different way of seeing, to different images for shaping our understanding of life. This emphasis upon seeing runs throughout his message... Jesus used these invitational and provocative forms of speech--aphorisms and parables--to subvert conventional ways of seeing and living, and to invite his hearers to an alternative way of life. As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus was not primarily a teacher of information (what we believe) or morals (how to behave), but a teacher of a way or path of transformation." (74-75)

Borg overviews three primary elements to Jesus' alternative wisdom: (1) Paradox & Reversal, (2) conventional wisdom as the Broad Way, and Jesus' own alternative wisdom as the Narrow Way. Borg argues that Jesus' primary conception of God within the framework of compassion heavily negates some of the apocalyptic speech put into his mouth; after all, a sage preaching hellfire and damnation certainly won't do. "To speak of God as gracious and compassionate... is very different from imaging God as the lawgiver and judge enforcing the life of requirements. Indeed, if we take the graciousness of God seriously, it completely undermines the world of conventional wisdom, whether in religious or secular form." (85) Borg follows in the footsteps of most liberal gospel scholars in denouncing the apocalyptic predictions of judgment from Jesus' lips; he stands in the vein of thought that Jesus' apocalyptic inferred the end of the Space-Time Universe. Such an understanding of apocalyptic, though outdated, remains cemented in peoples' minds, no doubt because so many fundamentalist Christians erroneously assume Jesus is talking about apocalyptic in such a manner. To his credit (and standing against the tide of most liberal gospel scholars), Borg does affirm the notion of an historical judgment spoken of by Jesus. He writes that "the notion of historical judgment does play a role in Jesus' message, in much the same way as it does in the classical prophets of the Old Testament: blindness has its consequences, both for a society and for the individual. On the level of society, because Jerusalem (the center of the ruling elites) did not know 'the things that make for peace,' historical conflict lay ahead. On the individual level (now as then), if one does not leave the world of conventional wisdom, one remains in it, living in 'the land of the dead.' That (and not the threat of hell) is the issue." Borg defines Jesus' Narrow Way as "the alternative wisdom of Jesus" and writes that his alternative wisdom as two dimensions. "First, it is an invitation to see God as gracious and womblike rather the source and enforcer of the requirements, boundaries, and divisions of conventional wisdom (whether Jewish, Christian, or secular). Second, it is an invitation to a path that leads away from the life of conventional wisdom to a life that is more and more centered in God. The alternative wisdom of Jesus sees the religious life as a deepening relationship with the Spirit of God, not as a life of requirements and reward." (85-86) Looking back from Jesus to the contemporary church, what does Borg think the Narrow Way entails? He writes on page 88, "[The traditional approach to Jesus] consists of thinking that the Christian life is about believing what the Bible says or what the doctrines of the church say. Firsthand religion, on the other hand, consists of a relationship to that to which the Bible and the teachings of the church point--namely, that reality that we call God or the Spirit of God." He identifies the gospel of Jesus as the Good News that "there is a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious wisdom. 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 relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God."

In Chapter Five, Borg deals with Christology. He subverts the traditional  Trinitarian approach to God within orthodox Christianity so that Jesus as "Son of God" has metaphorical undertones rather than echoes of political titles. "Son of God", he argues, is no less metaphorical than Jesus being called the "Word of God" or the "Lamb of God." He seeks to sketch out how Jesus became associated with God, proposing that Jesus, precisely because he was a sage, became associated with sophia, or wisdom. He became seen as the incarnation not of God but of wisdom. Because of the close relationship between God and wisdom seen in the Jewish scriptures, Jesus became closely associated with (and then a part of) the Godhead in a theological evololution.

Chapter Six is perhaps the best chapter of this book, and thus I'm devoting some considerable space to it. Here Borg introduces the well-known concept of narrative theology, identifies the major stories within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and then applies these stories to our perceptions of the atonement. He argues that while Christianity has tended to focus on one story over the others, a better approach would be to integrate the major stories into a coherent whole. This, Borg argues, leads to a radically different picture of what the Christian life is all about. We'll begin with narrative (or story) theology. He writes, "Theology, with its natural inclination toward conceptualization, has typically sought to extract a core of meaning from a story, which is then expressed in nonnarrative form. The story as story is lost. Modern historical study of the Bible has also tended to lose the story, either by seeking the history behind the story or by an analytical approach that often loses the story by focusing on bits and pieces." (120-121) He continues, "To a large extent, the Bible has its origins in story and storytelling. One should perhaps imagine the people of ancient Israel telling the stories of their ancestors around campfires, the accompaniment of drums. The image is undoubtedly romantic, but it also catches a truth: much of the biblical tradition originated in and was carried by storytelling. So also with the gospels; their traditions about Jesus were transmitted as stories long before they became texts." (121) He adds, "Ordinary people living in the preprint cultures... knew the Bible not as texts but as stories. The stories were transmitted and experienced in a variety of ways: visually, in the images of Christian art, especially in the stained-glass windows of the churches of the Middle Ages and afterward; musically, in hymns and popular ballads; verbally, in sermons; and ritually, in worship and in the great festivals and feast days of the church year."

Borg argues that there are two narrative layers that run throughout the Bible. "There is the narrative framework of the Bible as a whole, which on a grand scale can be considered as a single story beginning with paradise and paradise lost in the opening chapters of Genesis, moving through the story of God's redeeming activity in Israel and through Jesus, and concluding with the vision of paradise restored in the final vision of the book of Revelation." (120) Within this overarching narrative of Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained are hundreds upon hundreds of little stories. Wedged between these two layers of narrative are "macro-stories", "the primary stories that shaped the religious imagination and life of ancient Israel and the early Christian movement." These macro-stories include a Problem and a Solution, and they are as follows:

(1) The Exodus Story. "Our problem... is that we live in Egypt, the land of bondage. We are slaves of an alien lord, the lord of Egypt, Pharaoh. It provocatively images the human condition as bondage, an image with both cultural-political and psychological-spiritual dimensions of meaning. It invites us to ask, 'To what am I in bondage, and to what are we in bondage?'... We are in bondage to cultural messages about what we should be like and what we should pursue--messages about success, attractiveness, gender roles, the good life. We are in bondage to voices from our own past, and to addictions of various kinds." (124) This bondage cuts into the heart of our very being. "Who is the Pharaoh within me who has me enslaved and will not let me go? What instruments of fear and oppression does he use, this Pharaoh who tries everything to remain in control? What plagues must strike him?" The problem is bondage; the answer is liberation. "[Liberation] begins at night, in the darkness before dawn. It means leaving Egypt and the kingdom and dominion of Pharaoh. It involves passing through the sea to the other side, a passage from one kind of life to another. Liberation involves coming out from under the lordship of Pharaoh and the lordship of culture."

(2) Exile & Return. "[The] experience of exile as estrangement can be felt as a flatness, a loss of connection with a center of vitality and meaning, when one day becomes very much like another and nothing has much zest... [Exile] is living away from Zion, the place where God is present. Indeed, exile is central in the symbolism of the Garden of Eden story in the book of Genesis. The garden--paradise--is the place of God's presence, but we live outside of the garden, east of Eden." (126) The solution to exile is a return; but for Borg, the return isn't about the destination so much as it's about the journey. With the first two stories, Borg's hand is forced to turn it all into a metaphor, so that the Exodus is about our own bondage to anything that ails us (even religion!) and the Exile is about us living uneventful, unexciting, humdrum lives. He is forced to subvert the classical meanings of these echoes because of his preconceived notions; Christianity doesn't turn a blind eye to these stories but interprets them within the context of the third narrative, so that the Exodus becomes a story of bondage to sin and liberation from the power of sin; and the exile becomes a story about being estranged from God and then being reconciled with God through the priestly sacrifice of Jesus. This won't do for Borg, of course, who doesn't see any merit to classical approaches to the atonement and whose conception of God rules out anything as barbaric as a blood sacrifice.

(3) The Priestly Story. "[This story] is not primarily a story of bondage, exile, and journey, but a story of sin, guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness. Central to it are notions of impurity, defilement, and uncleanness, or that primal sense of 'being stained'... It is therefore also linked to images of cleansing, washing, and covering over... [Within] this story, we are primarily sinners who have broken God's laws, and who therefore stand guilty before God, the lawgiver and judge. Seen through the lens of this story, the religious life becomes a story of sin, guilt, and forgiveness." (127) Borg examines different ways the cross of Christ has been approached, noting that some are more indebted to the priestly story than others. He builds on the monumental work of the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen, who identified three main ways the death and resurrection of Jesus was seen in the history of Christian belief. The first is that of christus victor, "a Latin phrase that means 'Christ victorious.' It is an image that understands the central work of Christ to be a triumphing over 'the powers' that hold humans in bondage, including sin, death, and the devil. Like the exodus story, this image sees the human predicament as bondage and the work of Christ as liberation. 'The powers' holding us in bondage are Pharaoh and Egypt on a cosmic scale." (128) The second is the substitutionary approach. "This image pictures the death of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin that makes God's forgiveness possible." (128) The third understanding is the revelation approach. Jesus' death was about revelation. "Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus revealing what God is like (for example, love or compassion). Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus as 'the light' who beckons us home from the darkness of exile. Sometimes the emphasis is upon Jesus' death and resurrection as the embodiment of the way of return, a disclosure of the internal spiritual process that brings us into an experiential relationship with the Spirit of God." (129) Borg argues that the predominant approaches to the cross make the priestly story Front & Center. He resists making the priestly story central, and instead urges an integrated approach of the stories (of the Exodus, Exile & Return, and the Priestly Story) that does away with those pesky things such as sin, righteousness, guilt, forgiveness, and anything smacking of Christian orthodoxy. On pages 130-132, Borg gives at least five reasons why the priestly story ought to be abandoned in favor of a more integrated approach:

(1) The priestly story leads to a static understanding of the Christian life, making it into a repeated cycle of sin, guilt, and forgiveness. I would argue that this point is a non-point at all; I know of very few Christians who hold to such a static approach to the Christian life, and most Christians I know are far more conservative in their approach to Jesus than I am.

(2) It leads to a passivity about the religious life itself. Rather than seeing [the spiritual life] as a process of spiritual transformation, it stresses believing that God has already done what needs to be done. Borg argues against a caricature of Christian orthodoxy; one of the main thrusts of orthodox Christianity is the doctrine of sanctification, which affirms both that (a) all that needs to be done has been done and (b) we have work to do. The life of the orthodox Christian who takes seriously God's call to holiness and love is far from passive.

(3) The priestly story images God primarily as lawgiver and judge. God's requirements must be met, and because we cannot meet them, God graciously provides the sacrifice that meets those requirements. Yet the sacrifice generates a new requirement: God will forgive those who believe that Jesus was the sacrifice, and will not forgive those who do not believe. God's forgiveness becomes contingent or conditional... Thus, though the priestly story speaks of God as gracious, it places the grace of God within a system of requirements. The overarching image of God's relationship to us is a legal metaphor, which pictures God as the giver and enforcer of a set of requirements. Borg argues that the priestly story should be done away with because it doesn't line up with what he believes Jesus to be all about; in other words, centuries of Christian wrestling with theology should fall apart under the weight of his hypothetical approach to Jesus as a sage that is based almost wholly on conjecture. Never mind the fact that the early Christians had the priestly story Front & Center; Borg's Jesus wouldn't believe in such a god, and thus neither should we.

(4) This story is very hard to believe. As Borg puts it, "The notion that God's only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible.... [This story] is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straightforward about that." (131) A couple comments: (1) the orthodox Christian point-of-view didn't make anymore sense in 33 AD than it does now; (2) whether or not something "makes sense", in the sense that Borg means it, should never be a litmus test for something's justifiability (Borg argues that it goes against our social conditioning, and thus it should be eliminated).

(5) Some people don't feel guilty. Because some people don't feel guilty about sin, doesn't that call into question the whole concept of being guilty for sin? Not at all! The "feeling" of guilt of which Borg writes is a relatively new construction in our psyches; the writers of the New Testament wouldn't have approached "guilt" in the way we do. The feeling of guilt has to do with shame and honor; one who doesn't feel like they've been dishonorable, regardless of whether they have been, won't feel guilty. The guilt of which the New Testament speaks isn't a guilt of the emotions but a guilt of legal status, regardless of one's emotions. Some people don't feel guilty and they should; others feel guilty and they shouldn't. That's just the way it is, and it doesn't reflect negatively or positively on the Apostle Paul's declaration that we are all "in the dock."

Borg advocates getting rid of the Priestly Story as Front & Center and seeking an integration of the three macro-stories within Scripture. Borg is wrong, however, to insist that the priestly story dominates; Christian teaching has already integrated the macro-stories that Borg recognizes. The Exodus is a signpost to our bondage to sin and death and of our redemption through the blood of the lamb; the Exile & Return is a signpost to our exile from the Garden, from communion with God, and of our homecoming through God's Son; the Priestly Story is a story no less important and powerful to the Christian message, regardless of how it make's one feel or how well (or not well) it jives with our own likes and dislikes.

Borg rounds out the chapter looking at what it means to believe in Jesus. Although we disagree on the ultimate meaning, he's right in stating that belief in Jesus isn't about mentally assenting to certain doctrines about him. "Believe did not originally mean believing a set of doctrines or teachings; in both Greek and Latin its roots mean 'to give one's heart to.' The 'heart' is the self at its deepest level. Believing, therefore, does not consist of giving one's mental assent to something, but involves a much deeper level of one's self. Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one's heart, one's self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned toward us, the face of God, the Lord who is also the Spirit." (137)

Thus throughout the book, Borg has argued for a certain picture of Jesus as "a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder who invited his followers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew, and into a community whose social vision was shaped by the core value of compassion." (119) I found this to be a great book filled with powerful information and ideas, but ultimately it falls flat of bringing anything new to the table. Borg wants to take Jesus out of Christianity and rework him in light of Eastern mysticism, claiming all the while that he is keeping Jesus in his Jewish context. Much of Borg's book is built upon speculation and theory which he passes over as fact.