The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions
by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright
The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions is an interesting book in gospel studies. The subtitle captures the book's essence: the leading liberal and conservative Jesus scholars present the heart of the historical Jesus debate. Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright "face off" about Jesus. I use quotation marks because Borg and Wright are good friends, despite vast differences in their understanding of Jesus and the Christian life. Wright is perhaps my favorite Jesus scholar (he's "safe" for conservatives like me), and Borg is my second-favorite. No matter where you stand on the question of Jesus, Borg and Wright give a lot of food for thought and challenge previously-held assumptions (and all in a good-natured spirit of debate). The book is divided into questions and subjects, after which Borg and Wright respond. For ease of reading, I've eliminated chapter references; the question or subject will be followed by their responses.
How do we know about Jesus?
Marcus Borg begins by discussing the developing tradition of the gospels, which he believes were written somewhere between 70-100 A.D. The gospels as we have them came about because there was "a need to adapt the traditions about Jesus to new settings and issues as early Christian communities moved through time and into the broader Mediterranean world." (5) He continues, "[The] traditions about Jesus grew because the experience of the living Christ within the community shaped perceptions of Jesus' ultimate identity and significance." Borg differentiates between history remembered and history metaphorized. The former means that "some of the things reported in the gospels really happened. Jesus really did do and really did say some of the deeds and teachings reported about him." The latter means "the use of metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives to express the meaning of the story of Jesus." Many of the stories of healing, and not least the miraculous feeding of the 5000, didn't happen but were written as metaphorized history, presenting in story the meaning of Jesus. Borg distinguishes between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus; in this he breaks from the classic dichotomy between "the Jesus of history" and "the Christ of faith." In scholarly circles, the first has come to mean the Jesus who really was, and the second to mean the Jesus who was invented. For Borg, the post-Easter Jesus is just as real as the pre-Easter Jesus. Borg then gives a scathing rebuke on the modern worldview; relating his own experience within that worldview, he writes, "I became aware that the modern worldview is itself a relative cultural construction, the product of a particular era in human intellectual history. Though it is still dominant in western culture, I am confident that the time is soon coming when it will seem as archaic and quaint as the Ptolemaic worldview." (10-11) Borg holds the Two-Source Theory in regards to the gospels; in other words, he sees "Mark and Q as the two primary documents behind the synoptic gospels." He then writes about the importance of historical context in any study of Jesus.
N.T. Wright identifies himself within the "house" of gospel studies. The "Attic" is faith divorced from history, and the dungeon is history divorced from faith. He defines history as "a matter of looking, through one's own spectacles, at evidence about the past, trying to reconstruct the probable course of events, and defending such reconstructions against rival ones, not on the grounds of their coherence with one's own presuppositions, but on the scientific grounds of getting in the data, doing so with appropriate simplicity, and shedding light on other areas of research." (17) He criticizes the Hermeneutic of Suspicion dominating New Testament studies: "The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties. If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological scheme, that writer invented it. If there are two accounts of similar events, they are a 'doublet' (there was only one event); but if a single account has anything odd about it, there must have been two events which are now conflated. And so on. Anything to show how clever we are, how subtle, to have smoked out the reality behind the text. But, as any author who has watched her or his books being reviewed will know, such reconstructions again and again miss the point, even wildly. If we cannot get it right when we share a culture, a period, and a language, it is highly likely that many of our subtle reconstructions of ancient texts and histories are our own unhistorical fantasies, recognized only because the writers are long since dead and cannot answer back." (18) Wright discusses the Q Gospel, Markan priority, and the Synoptic Problem. When it comes to attempts at reconstructing the gospels by peeling back layers that have been added by the early church, such attempts are built upon two unfounded assumptions: "(a) the belief that isolated fragments of Jesus material circulated, and developed, in the early church divorced from narrative frameworks; [and] (b) a quite well worked out theory about Jesus and the early church which actually dictates the rules proposed for assessing material." (23) He goes on to say, "We cannot [assume], ahead of the [gospel reconstruction], that quite a lot of the gospel material was invented by the early church and then argue implicitly from that assumption that anyone who comes up with a historical proposal about Jesus which gets in most of the data cannot be considered a serious historian." (23-24)
Wright then looks at what it means to "know Jesus." He writes, "It has been inherent in Christianity from the beginning that the believer 'knows Christ'; Jesus, as the good shepherd, knows his own sheep, and his own know him. This is regularly described in terms borrowed from ordinary interpersonal relationships: believers are aware of Jesus' presence, his love, his guidance, his consolation, his rebuke, and even perhaps his laughter. They are aware with being in touch with a personality that is recognizable, distinct, frequently puzzling and unpredictable, always loving and lovable, powerful and empowering, loyal and calling forth loyalty. This awareness is regularly generated and sustained through certain activities, notably worship, prayer, the sacraments, suffering, the reading of scripture, Christian fellowship, reflection on the world as created and redeemed in and through Jesus Christ, and perhaps particularly the service of those in desperate need, those in whom Christians believe they meet Jesus in a special way." (24) He goes on to say, "It is natural to say 'I believe it's raining' when indoors with the curtains shut, but it would be odd to say it, except in irony, standing on a hillside in a downpour. For many Christians much of the time, knowing Jesus is more like the latter: being drenched in his love and the challenge of his call, not merely imagining we hear him like raindrops on a distant windowpane. (For many, of course, the latter is the norm; hinting, promising, inviting.)" (25)
What did Jesus do and teach?
N.T Wright locates Jesus on the spectrum of first-century Judaism, highlighting the major "themes" of that Judaism: monotheism, election, and eschatology. Israel in Jesus' day lived in their own land but still lived in a political or spiritual exile: they weren't masters of their own land. The Israelites longed for the Kingdom of God, and Jesus appeared on the scene preaching that the kingdom was at hand, and people needed to repent and trust in him and his teachings. N.T. Wright provides a sketch of his historical reconstruction of Jesus, similar to his sketches in The Challenge of Jesus and Victory of God. He identifies Jesus as "a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and indicating in symbolic actions, and in cryptic and coded sayings, that he believed he was Israel's messiah, the one through whom the true God would accomplish his decisive purpose." (50) He argues that his portrait of Jesus stands the scrutiny of history. "Jesus' critique of his contemporaries was critique from within: his summons was not to abandon Judaism and try something else, but to become the true, returned-from-exile people of the one true God. He aimed to be the means of God's reconstitution of Israel. He would call into being the true, returned-from-exile Israel. He would challenge, and deal with, the evil that had infected Israel itself. He was, in short, announcing the kingdom of God: not the simple revolutionary message of the hard-liners, but the doubly revolutionary message of a kingdom that would overturn all other agendas, including the revolutionary one. He was a prophet, announcing and inaugurating the kingdom, summoning followers, warning of disaster, promising vindication, clashing symbolically with other agendas, implicitly claiming messiahship, and anticipating a show-down. He was, in other words, a thoroughly credible first-century Jew." (51)
Marcus Borg has a different historical reconstruction of Jesus. He paints a portrait of Jesus much like an eastern shaman or wise man. Jesus' experience of God was transformative, and he stands in a long line of mystics, both Jewish and pagan, for whom God was such an experiential and transformative reality. Jesus' mission and message was shaped by his mystical experiences, the Torah and traditions of Judaism, and his passion for social justice. Jesus was a healer and an exorcist, and Borg takes the line that Jesus did genuinely heal people, though he calls them paranormal healings rather than miraculous healings; the first conjures up image of God intervening in the physical world, and Borg, as a panentheist, can't accept this. This isn't to say he buys into the idea, prevalent in some skeptical circles, that Jesus' healings were shams or psychosomatic. Jesus' healings and exorcisms "are associated with the kingdom of God and a time of deliverance." (67) As a mystical social prophet and wise man, Jesus taught an alternate wisdom; standing against the conventional wisdom of the day, Jesus taught a new way of seeing, of centering in God, and of living in this world. This new way of living was marked by compassion: "The core value of Jesus' ethic was compassion, an unusually rich word with resonances of feeling for people as a mother feels for the children of her womb." (70) Jesus' compassion for the poor and destitute, for the marginalized and exploited, ran against the elites of his day. Building upon the work of Walter Brueggemann, Borg identifies three characteristics within the social structures of the "ancient domination system," noting that "[there] is no reason to think that the Jewish homeland in the first century was an exception to the most common form of ancient social organization. Indeed, the economic situation of peasants may have been worsening in Roman Palestine. The commercialization of agriculture and the vast building projects of the Herods combined to produce a growing class of landless peasants." (72) These three characteristics, which Jesus stands against, are given on pages 69-70:
(1) A politics of oppression. These societies were hierarchical and patriarchal. They were ruled by a king and a traditional aristocracy, typically called by social historians "urban ruling elites." Ordinary people had no voice in the structuring of society."
(2) An economics of exploitation. In these preindustrial societies, the agricultural production of peasants was the primary source of wealth. And these societies were structured so that roughly two-thirds of the wealth generated by agriculture production ended up in the hands of the urban ruling elites, with roughly half going to the wealthiest one to two percent. This was accomplished through taxation upon agriculture and direct ownership of agricultural land.
(3) A religion of legitimization. These societies were commonly legitimated by the claim that the social order reflected the will of God. Kings ruled by divine right, and the powers that be were ordained by God.
Jesus stood against these characteristics of society, as any good social prophet would do. He focused his wrath on the urban ruling elites, who in his society were comprised of the religious teachers and the priesthood in Jerusalem. "Jesus indicted both Jerusalem and the temple. The point is not that Jerusalem and the temple were the center of Judaism, as if there was something wrong with Judaism. The point, rather, is that Jerusalem and the temple were the center of the ruling elites and thus the center of the domination system. Like Jeremiah before him, he warned of their coming destruction if they did not change." (73) He spoke against economic exploitation. "In our discomfort with [Jesus' teachings on wealth], we have often metaphorized them, as if they refer to spiritual poverty and spiritual wealth... But initially they referred to real wealth and real poverty. In that world, to be wealthy meant that one was among the ruling elites. The sayings against wealth are thus part of Jesus' criticism of the domination system." He bucked against the purity rules laid down by the religious elite: "I am persuaded that purity issues in his time were associated with sharp social boundaries and that the amplification of purity laws was the product of a scribal class attached to the temple. A strong concern for purity was part of the ideology of the elites. Purity was thus, for both Jesus and his opponents, not a matter of piety but of politics." As a social prophet, Jesus was also a movement-initiator. "In embryonic form, a movement came into existence around him during his lifetime. Remarkably inclusive and egalitarian, his movement undermined the sharp social boundaries of his day. One of its most striking features was Jesus' inclusive meal practice. The meals of Jesus, ancestors of the Christian eucharist, embodied his alternative social vision." (74) Like Wright, Borg sees the kingdom of God as integral to Jesus' message; but unlike Wright, Borg metaphorizes the kingdom of God, so that it could refer to the power of God, the presence of God, a certain social vision, the community of those living under the kingship of God, or even to the final or eternal kingdom.
Marcus Borg looks at the Final Week of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark: his entering Jerusalem, his debates with the religious leaders, his Temple action, the Last Supper, his betrayal, and arrest in the Garden. When it comes to the trials before the Jewish and Roman leaders, Borg is skeptical: he doesn't find them credible, since the trials were done in secret and none of Jesus' disciples were present to witness what happened. Borg looks at the crucifixion, highlighting the significance of that manner-of-death. "In the Jewish homeland of the first century, crucifixion was a Roman form of execution. Thus Jesus was executed under Roman authority... Crucifixion was commonly used for two categories of people: political rebels and chronically defiant slaves. The two groups shared something in common: both systematically defied established authority. Because Jesus was not a slave, it follows that he was crucified as a political threat to Roman order." (88-89) Borg deals at length with the anti-Semitism that evolved in the gospel tradition; he sees it as early Christians trying to distance themselves from the Jews (who had a bad rap after the Jewish Revolt) and of cleansing the reputations of the Roman authorities; though Rome executed Jesus, the Jews were really the ones to blame. "Though details remain vague, nearly all mainline scholars see Jesus' arrest and execution as resulting from collaboration between the ruling elites of the day: the Roman governor and a small circle of Jewish temple authorities." (90) But why did Jesus end up getting killed? As a social prophet, Jesus confronted the urban elites of his day, incurring their wrath. "[If] Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher, I doubt he would have been executed. But he was also a God-intoxicated voice of religious social protest who had attracted a following... Jesus died as a martyr, not as a victim. A martyr is killed because he or she stands for something. Jesus was killed because he stood against the kingdoms of this world and for an alternative social vision grounded in the kingdom of God. The domination system killed Jesus as the prophet of the kingdom of God. This is the political meaning of Good Friday." (91)
N.T. Wright argues that Jesus saw his impending death as being the great battle by which victory would be seized. "As historians, we must do our best to recreate the way in which first-century Jews, particularly those involved in movements of reform, revolution, or kingdom bringing, would have thought about suffering, death, and martyrdom. First-century Jews were not like comfortable Western scholars, living in a world where the avoidance or mitigation of suffering, especially one's own, is taken for granted. Traditions existed within first-century Judaism that explained how Israel's God would use even the sufferings and seeming tragedy of his people to bring about the longed-for redemption. The great Exodus story itself, retold in story and symbol each Passover (and invoked in other festivals, too), was all about the long night of slavery getting darker and darker and then God breaking through with freedom and hope. Out of the experience of the Babylonian exile came a whole conglomeration of meditations, finding expression in prophecy, psalm, apocalyptic, and folktale: through the suffering of Israel at the hands of the pagans, Israel's God would somehow bring Israel to redemption. These traditions were alive and developing throughout the second-temple period. We can see how they were evoked by those who wrote up, in roughly Jesus' own time, the tales of the Maccabean martyrs. Suffering and death were interpreted as effecting Israel's rescue from present and future suffering, from 'the wrath of God' in that sense." (93-94) Thus Wright argues that "[the] best first-century context in which to understand Jesus’ own intention as he went to Jerusalem, as he agonized in Gethsemane, and as he faced accusers and governors, torturers and executioners, is the belief, found in many Jewish sources stretching back into the prophets and on into the Christian era, that when Israel’s redemption came about it would be born through a period of intense suffering.” (98) By enduring the messianic woes, Jesus would "go through the darkest night and lead the way into the dawn of a new day. This was how he would fight the final battle against the real enemy. This is how he would build the true temple. This, in other words, was how he would win the victory that would establish him as Israel’s true messiah and transform the kingdom from its current present-and-future state into a fully present reality.” (98)
N.T. Wright turns his attention to the political conniving that led to Jesus' arrest and crucifixion. Whereas Borg argues that we can't know anything about the secret Roman and Jewish trials (if there were any) precisely because they were secret and none of Jesus' disciples were there, Wright's insistent that Borg's logic is faulty. "We have every reason to suppose that a crowded city at a time of a great religious, cultural, and political festival would have been an ideal time for news to travel fast... [When] scholars argue, as they do from time to time, that because Jesus' hearings before Caiaphas and Pilate were in secret nobody outside would have known what happened, they are living in a make-believe world. Even today, even in Western societies, even when people are sworn to secrecy in the interests of the church, the state, or the party, secrets have a remarkable habit of leaking out. How much more when the whole city, in eager mood for Passover, was ready to grasp and transmit any snippets of information about the leader whose appearance many thought heralded the arrival of the kingdom of God?" (94-95) With that in mind, Wright paints a portrait of Jesus' last hours before the authorities.
"The Jewish authorities in question were of course the chief priests, whose power base Jesus had threatened with his action in the temple. They were understandably eager to prevent his apparently antitemple movement gaining more ground." (100) They faced a problem, though: they couldn't legally execute him. The Romans had to do that. How to stick a charge on Jesus that the Romans would heed? "Their questioning about Jesus' temple action and its significance quickly unearthed what they had already suspected, that he saw himself in messianic terms and believed Israel's God would vindicate him as such." Pontias Pilate "appears in all accounts as at best vacillating and weak, at worst a malevolent petty tyrant. The only reason he tries to free Jesus is because he routinely wanted to snob the chief priests. His arm is twisted, though, because the prisoner before him is portrayed to him as a rebel king. Rome would not be pleased if news leaked out that a 'king of the Jews' had been on trial and had been released. The crowds, meanwhile, could be won over by the suggestion that Jesus was after all a blasphemer." (101) Jesus was thus caught in a power struggle behind the chief priests and the Roman authorities, and Pilate was pinned between wanting to piss off the chief priests and wanting to preserve his reputation before his Roman superiors. The chief priests won out, and the Romans crucified Jesus as a rebellious revolutionary.
But what meaning did Jesus' death carry for the early church? "Embedded within the earliest strands of Christian tradition we find an already formulaic statement: the messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures." (102) Wright clarifies what (he believes) the early church meant: "It was not, first and foremost, a way of saying that the moral failures of individuals had been atoned for in some abstract theological transaction. That would come, and quickly; we find it already in Paul's mature thought. But in the beginning it was a claim about what Israel's God had done, in fulfillment of the scriptural prophecies, to bring Israel's long night of exile to its conclusion, to deal with the 'sins' that had kept Israel enslaved to the pagan powers of the world, and to bring about the real 'return from exile,' the dawn of the new day, for which Israel had longed." (103) He continues, "This interpretation of Jesus' death was not, in the first instance, a feeling or a doctrine... It was not, that is, a matter of the early Christians 'feeling forgiven,' experiencing the divine forgiveness for moral misdemeanors as an inner existential reality. Nor was it a new theory about how 'atonement' functioned, supplanting previous Jewish beliefs on the subject. It was the early Christian deduction, from Jesus' resurrection, that his death had been after all effective, as the hinge upon which the door God's new world had swung open. To say that the messiah had died for sins in fulfillment of the scriptures was to make a claim, not so much about an abstract atonement theology into which individuals could tape to salve their guilty consciences, as about where Israel and the world now were within God's eschatological timetable. The sins that had caused Israel's exile had now been dealt with, and the time of forgiveness had arrived." Wright says on the next page, "Although the early church developed ways and means of making this point which went beyond anything that Jesus himself had said, that interpretation was indeed a development of, not an evolution away from, his own aim and intention. And... this central emphasis on the unique achievement of Jesus' death as the sin-forgiving, once-for-all liberating act of Israel's God remained at the center of early Christian thought, sustaining but not being replaced by the belief, which became so beloved of theologians and pastors in later years, that the sin of individual sinners had been dealt with on the cross." (104)
What does Jesus' death mean for us today? "Traditionally this question has been answered in terms of the remission of sin and guilt, whereby the individual sinner finds peace for a troubled conscience, in the present, and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness from God, in life after death. This answer is, I believe, perfectly true and valid, biblically rooted and pastorally as vital as ever it was. It does not, however, tell the whole story that the New Testament tells about the meaning of Jesus' death." (105) Wright looks at this larger story of Jesus' defeat of evil. While the conviction that Jesus' death on the cross defeated evil was mainstream in early Christianity, it's been filtered out in western evangelicalism. "The now-traditional scheme [projects] the victory on the one hand inward, into the heart and conscience of the believer, and on the other hand forward, into the state of affairs after death or at the end of the world."
N.T. Wright begins his chapter on the resurrection by defining the word, as it would have been used by Jesus' contemporaries. Resurrection was "a literal reference to the concrete event of dead bodies coming to life." (115) Thus by saying Jesus was raised from the dead, Jesus' followers were NOT saying that he was a ghost or a spirit, or that they were able to experience him in their hearts. If that was what they meant, they would've said as much; but by saying Jesus was resurrected, they were saying something very specific: that he had died and come back to bodily life. It doesn't make sense, Wright argues, for the early church to make something like this up; in Jewish thought, "the resurrection of the dead" was something that would happen to all people at the end of time, not to one person in the middle of time. It would be odd indeed for Jesus' fledgling movement to postulate him as resurrected when they could just have easily called him a ghost, or a spirit, or some inner presence. That something happened to Jesus--something differentiating him from all the failed and executed revolutionaries before him and since--is evident in that the early church "reconstructed their worldview, their aims and agendas, around [the belief in Jesus' resurrection] so that it became, not merely an extra oddity, bolted onto the outside of the worldview they already had, but the transforming principle, the string that had pulled back the curtain, revealing God's future as having already arrived in the present." (118) Much of Wright's chapter is a brief treatment of some of the evidences for the historicity of the resurrection (he simplifies many arguments he put forth in The Resurrection of the Son of God).
What are we to make of the historicity of the resurrection? "Grasping the nettle--proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality--will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start. But if Christianity is only going to be allowed to rent an apartment in the Enlightenment's housing scheme, and on its terms, we are, to borrow Paul's phrase, of all people the most to be pitied--especially as the Enlightenment itself is rumored to be bankrupt and to be facing serious charges of fraud." (124) He continues, "Once you allow that something remarkable happened to his body that morning, all the other data fall into place with astonishing ease. Once you insist that nothing so outlandish happened, you are driven to ever more complex and fantastic hypotheses to explain the data. For the historian, as for the scientist, the answer should be clear." There are, then, two options regarding the historicity of Jesus' resurrection: "either solve the historical puzzle by agreeing that Jesus' body was transformed into a new sort of life, or leave it in essence unsolved by coming up with flights of fancy, which themselves create far more problems."
What does the resurrection mean? "[The] meaning of the resurrection must begin with the validation of Jesus as messiah, as Paul says in Romans 1.4. It means that Israel's God, the creator, has affirmed that Jesus really was, all along, his 'son.' It means, therefore, the acceptance and validation of his messianic achievement, supremely in his crucifixion: the resurrection declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat." (125-126) Wright examines the relationship between Jesus' resurrection and new creation. "God's new world had been brought to birth. When Jesus emerged, transformed, from the tomb on Easter morning, the event was heavy with symbolic significance, to which the evangelists drew attention, without wishing to detract from the historical nature of what they were talking about. It was the first day of God's new week, the moment of sunrise after the long night, the time of new meetings, new meals, of reconciliation and new commissioning. It was the beginning of the new creation." God's new age has dawned, inaugurated by Jesus in his resurrection, and those who belong to him are called to a vocation of holiness; they are to embrace "the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus' victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.... [Get] rid of all the dehumanizing behavior that destroys God's good creation and the creatures made in his image, all anger and lust, greed, and pride. The resurrection thus opens the door to a new world; a new mode of life for the whole cosmos and for all who will dwell in it here and hereafter." (127)
Marcus Borg sees the resurrection narratives as "powerfully true metaphorical narratives." (130) He writes that resurrection "does not refer to the resumption of protoplasmic or corpuscular existence. To be sure, resurrection could involve something happening to a corpse, namely the transformation of a corpse; but it need not." (131) Never-mind that Jews of Jesus' day wouldn't envisage resurrection without the association of a physical body. Borg argues that the resurrection belief and stories came about as the early church sought to put a face to what they experienced after Jesus' crucifixion. "[The] followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death. In the early Christian community, these experiences included visions or apparitions of Jesus... [The] community experienced the power of the Spirit they had known in Jesus continuing to be and to operate. I think there were experiences of the same presence they had known in Jesus during his historical life-time." (135) The post-Easter Jesus, to Borg, is an experiential reality. "Christians throughout the centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure of the present, not simply a memory from the past. Those experiences (then and now) have taken a variety of forms. They include dramatic forms such as visions and mystical experiences, and less dramatic forms such as a sense of the presence of Jesus--whether in prayer, worship, or the eucharist, in other people, or in the dailiness of our lives." Borg's theory is that the "experiences of the risen Christ as a continuing presence generated the claim that 'Jesus lives and is Lord' and that the statement 'God raised Jesus from the dead' and the story of the empty tomb may well have been generated by those experiences." (137) Borg rounds out his chapter looking at five meanings in Jesus' death and resurrection: rejection/vindication, revelation of the Way, revelation of the love of God, sacrifice for sin, and defeat of the powers. In regards to the latter, Borg writes, "[Those] who crucified Jesus are not simply the political and religious authorities in Jerusalem, but the powers that rule this age. The New Testament names these powers in several ways: the principalities and powers, the elemental spirits of the universe, the prince of the power of the air, Satan, the dragon, the beast from the abyss... God in Christ 'disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross.' The internal logic is clear: Jesus got swallowed by the powers; the powers got him... [The] resurrection is God's yes to Jesus and no to the powers. Good Friday and Easter are about our liberation from the powers. The Lordship of Christ is the path of personal and existential liberation from the lords of this world." (138-139)
Marcus Borg writes that "Jesus as a Jewish mystic knew God. Moreover, as a Spirit person and healer, he would have experienced himself as one 'anointed by the Spirit,' whether he used this particular phrase or not." (147) Christians have long called Jesus the incarnation or embodiment of God; in the framework of what Borg calls "supernatural theism," God came from "out there" and embodied himself in Jesus. Borg is a panentheist (or an advocate of dialectical theism), and as such he frames Jesus' relationship with God through that lens. "God is not 'out there' but 'right here' as well as more than right here, both transcendent and immanent. God is the encompassing Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being... Jesus as a Spirit person was open to the presence of God." Borg writes that Jesus emptied himself to the point of being able to be wholly filled by the Spirit. He sees the post-Easter development of seeing Jesus as divine derived from (a) the Easter experience and (b) elements of the pre-Easter Jesus. Weaving together the disciples' continued experiencing of Jesus after his death, and their knowledge of his healings and wisdom, Borg argues that these strands created a divine Jesus decades down the road. I find this difficult to believe: such experiences, and such knowledge of Jesus as a wise and subversive healer, wouldn't cause people to jump to such radical notions as divinity. Both Jews and Greeks had different language for such things. Borg sees the Christological language in the New Testament as metaphors and confessional statements, rather than windows into what is factually true. He then looks at the Nicene Creed as a solution to a conundrum of the early church: "How could early Christians reconcile their experience of and devotion to the post-Easter Jesus as a divine reality with their commitment to monotheism?" (153) And thus trinitarian language was born.
N.T. Wright begins by examining creational and covenantal monotheism; if Jesus perceived himself as God incarnate, then it makes sense that he would understand that identity through the lens of the Jewish worldview. Thus Wright spends a considerable amount of time seeking to define the Jewish God over against its caricatures. “Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breath are not, as often has been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the deist god and the reductionists’ Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the new age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, and of the psalms, and ask what God might look like were to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross.” (167)
The Jewish people came to speak of God in a variety of terms. “Emboldened by deep-rooted traditions, they explored what appears to us a strange, swirling rhythm of mutual relations within the very being of the one God: a to-and-for, a give-and-take, a command-and-obey, a sense of love poured out and love received. God’s Spirit broods over the waters, God’s Word goes forth to produce new life, God’s Law guides his people, God’s presence or Glory dwells with them in fiery cloud, in tabernacle and temple… God’s Wisdom is his handmaid in creation, the firstborn of his works, his chief of staff, his delight. Through the Lady Wisdom of Proverbs 1-8, the creator has fashioned everything, especially the human race. To embrace Wisdom is therefore to discover the secret of being truly human, of reflecting God’s image.” (160) Wright then looks at the crux of the matter: “Was Jesus divine?” He writes, “Some have suggested that it was only when the early church started to lose its grip on its Jewish roots and began to compromise with pagan philosophy that it could think of Jesus in the same breath as the one God. Jewish polemic has often suggested that the Trinity and the incarnation, those greats pillars of patristic theology, are sheer paganization.” (160) But, Wright says, “Long before secular philosophy was invoked to describe the inner being of the one God (and the relation of this God to Jesus and to the Spirit), a vigorous and very Jewish tradition took over the language and imagery of Spirit, Word, Law, Presence (and/or Glory), and Wisdom and developed them in relation to Jesus of Nazareth and the Spirit.” (161) On pages 161-162, Wright looks at a couple key passages in the New Testament:
(1) 1 Corinthians 8.6: within a specifically Jewish-style monotheistic argument, [Paul] adapts the Shema itself, placing Jesus within it: “For us there is one God—the Father, from whom are all things and we to him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him.”
(2) Philippians 2.5-11: [Paul] draws on the fiercely monotheistic theology of Isaiah 40-55 to celebrate Christ’s universal lordship. “At the name of Jesus,” he declares, “every knee shall bow.” Isaiah has YHWH defeating the pagan idols and being enthroned over them; Paul has Jesus exalted to a position of equality with “the Father” because he has done what, in Jewish tradition, only the one God can do.
(3) Colossians 1.15-20: with its clear poetic structure, [it’s] a Wisdom poem, exploring the classic Jewish theme that the world’s creator is also its redeemer, and vice versa. But at every point of creation and redemption we discover, not Wisdom, but Jesus.
(4) Galatians 4.1-11: Paul tells the story of the world as the story of God’s freeing of slaves and his making them his children, his heirs. As in the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame. But the true God has now revealed himself in this way is the God who “sends the son” and then “sends the Spirit of the Son.”
Though more texts can be added to the list above, Wright’s point is that “in these passages we have, within thirty years of Jesus’ death, what would later be called a very high Christology. It is very early and very Jewish.” (162) Thus “[long] before anyone talked about ‘nature’ and ‘substance,’ ‘person’ and ‘Trinity,’ the early Christians had quietly but definitely discovered that they could say what they felt obliged to say about Jesus (and the Spirit) by telling the Jewish story of God, Israel, and the world in the Jewish language of Spirit, Word, Torah, Presence/Glory, Wisdom, and now Messiah/Son. It is as though they discovered Jesus within the Jewish monotheistic categories they already had. The categories seemed to have been made for him. They fitted him like a glove.” (163)
N.T. Wright identifies the Virgin Conception as the shibboleth of fundamentalist Christianity; lines are drawn to determine who’s in and who’s out based on whether or not they believe in the virgin birth. This, Wright thinks, is ridiculous. After all, “without Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 we would know nothing about [Jesus’ birth]. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross. Yet try to express any New Testament theology without Jesus’ death and resurrection, and you will find it cannot be done. ‘Man shall live for evermore,’ says the song, ‘because of Christmas Day.’ No, replies the New Testament. Because of Calvary, Easter, and Pentecost.” (171) Wright gives his own take on the virgin birth and why he sees it as historically credible; he adds, however, that “[no] one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn’t. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable.” (177)
Marcus Borg gives three reasons he (among many scholars) doesn’t find the birth narratives historically credible (pages 179-181): (1) The tradition that Jesus had a remarkable birth is relatively late. “The stories of his birth are found only in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, both written near the end of the first century. Earlier writers (as well as the rest of the New Testament) do not refer to a special birth. Paul, our earliest writer, does not. Neither does Mark, our earliest gospel. Moreover, though the gospel of John is probably later than Matthew and Luke, John does not include it, either.” (180) (2) The striking differences between Matthew’s birth story and Luke’s birth story. (3) The stories look like they have been composed to be overtures to each gospel. In other words, “[The] central themes of each birth story reflect the central themes of the gospel of which they are a part.” (181) He uses the journey to Bethlehem as an example. “One possibility… is that Jesus really was born in Bethlehem, even though the two stories disagree about why Mary and Joseph where there. A second possibility is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, but the story of his birth in Bethlehem arose because of Bethlehem’s significance in the Hebrew Bible. It was the ancestral home of King David, and there was a tradition [from Micah 5.2] that the great and future king of Israel would be descended from David.” (182) “On this view,” Borg continues, “the early Christian conviction that Jesus was the messiah and the Son of David created the story of Jesus being born in ‘the city of David.’”
Borg doesn’t see the birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 as historical; rather, they are metaphorized narratives. The birth narratives are true, but not in a historical sense. Borg turns his attention to the virginal conception, noting that “the theme of remarkable births is part of the tradition of Israel,” so that Jesus’ remarkable (read: virgin) birth is built onto this theme. “Just as God acted in the history of Israel to create and sustain the people of God through remarkable births, so also God had now acted in the birth of Jesus. Just as Israel came into existence through the grace of God when humanly speaking it was impossible, so the early Christian community as the continuation of Israel came into existence through the grace of God.” (185) Thus the virginal conception “is a metaphorical affirmation of Jesus’ identity and significance. Like the voice in the transfiguration story, it affirms, ‘This is my beloved son; listen to him.’” (185-186) Borg concludes that he doesn’t see “the story of the virginal conception as a marvel of biology that, if true, proves that Jesus really was the Son of God. Rather, it is an early Christian narratival confession of faith and affirmation of allegiance to Jesus.” (186)
Marcus Borg gives a short introduction to the matter-at-hand: the Return of Christ. “The coming again in glory of the one who is now Lord, seated at God’s right hand, will involve the judging of all who have lived and the establishing of the everlasting kingdom. In short, the second coming is associated with what we commonly think of as ‘the end of the world,’ the subject matter of eschatology.” (189) On page 192, he clarifies even further, saying that this kind of expectation could be termed apocalyptic eschatology, “the expectation of imminent dramatic divine intervention in a public and objectively unmistakable way, resulting in a radically new state of affairs, including the vindication of God’s people, whether on a renewed earth or in another world.” Borg notes that belief in an imminent return of Christ has waxed and waned throughout the history of Christendom. “Through the centuries, some Christians have expected the second coming (or parousia) of Jesus in their own time. Many in the first century did, [too]. Though the belief that the parousia was near waned among some Christians as time went by, some, like the theologian Tertullian in the early 200s, still argued vigorously for it. Waves of imminent expectation of the parousia surfaced several times in succeeding centuries: as the year 1000 approached, in the 1200s with the teaching of Joachim of Fiore, in the 1500s at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and in the 1800s among a number of Christian movements. Many expect it in our own day: according to one survey, approximately one-third of Americans think it will be soon.” (190) Borg asks, “Where did this belief in a 2nd Coming originate?” He presents two options: from Jesus himself or from the early church community. Borg doesn’t see Jesus as the sort to claim his own imminent return; he finds such egotism laughable and concerning. Within the first option, it’s possible that the tradition comes from Jesus but not in a way he intended. As Borg explains, “Jesus did not speak of his own second coming, but he did expect the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and the Son of Man. After his death, this expectation got transferred to the expectation of his imminent return as king of the kingdom that he had proclaimed. Put most simply: Jesus expected the kingdom of God; the early church expected Jesus.” The second option (and the one which Borg takes) is that the language of Jesus’ return comes from the early church community itself, wholly divorced from Jesus in every way. He admits that one of his biggest hindrances to belief in a literal return of Jesus (bigger, perhaps, than his own assumptions which doesn’t allow such a thing) is that it’s a laughable concept. “I can imagine the end of the world. I can imagine a final judgment. But I cannot imagine a return of Christ. If we try to imagine that, we have to imagine him returning to some place. To be very elementary, we who know the earth to be round cannot imagine Jesus returning to the whole earth at once. And the notion of a localized second coming boggles the imagination.” (195)
N.T. Wright frames the “return of Christ” within the framework of the over-arching biblical narrative. What is it that God intends to do? “[He] intends to create new heavens and a new earth, married together, in dynamic and perhaps even material continuity with the present creation. The new will be to the old as the flower is to the seed, as the butterfly is to the chrysalis. Analogies like this, inevitable if we are to speak of realities beyond present experience, point into the bright cloud of God’s future.” (197-198). He is sure to affirm what many Christians have forgotten, that “the created order is good and God given; evil is real and potent. Soft-pedal the first, and you end with dualism (creation itself is evil). Soft-pedal the other, and you end up with pantheism (creation is divine; nothing is really wrong).” If we are dualists or pantheists, that affects the way we look at the world and the Final Solution to evil. “The dualist supposes that, to escape evil, one must escape the created, physical universe. Lots of casual Christian talk (and song) about our future destiny slips unthinkingly into this mode. The pantheist looks forward to being absorbed into the great all-divine cosmos or supposes, with the ancient Stoics, that history will simply repeat itself endlessly.” (199) Over against this, “[the] New Testament envisages a world enhanced, made more joyful, by the removal of evil. Creation will be free to be itself at last, and we with it. In particular, death, the shadow that falls across all our dreams, will be abolished.” Where do humans fit into all this? Wright looks at the resurrection: “Resurrection doesn’t mean resuscitation: we share, swap, and pass on our molecules, so there aren’t nearly enough for everyone to have their own ones back. Resurrection demands, and the New Testament envisages, a great act of new creation, not the reassembling of identical sets of atoms. As Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5, the future embodiedness of God’s people will involve a new mode of physicality, over and above the present one.” (200) The future home of God’s people is in a marriage between Heaven and Earth; in reference to the first, “[in] biblical language, heaven is usually neither a location within our cosmos (say, a place several miles up in the sky) nor a destination within our time sequence (say, the state of affairs at the very end). [Heaven] is God’s dimension of day-to-day reality. It is normally veiled from our sight, but ‘seers’ are granted glimpses into it, such as when Elisha’s servant saw the horses and chariots surrounding his master or when a great door swung open and John the Seer found himself looking straight into God’s throne room.” (200-201)
N.T. Wright then looks at the subject at hand: Jesus’ return. He begins the discussion by examining the meaning of the Greek word parousia, which is often translated as “coming” in the New Testament. Wright says, “The New Testament often uses [this Greek word] to express the ‘presence’ of Jesus within God’s future recreation of the cosmos. Of course, someone who is present after a time of absence must have ‘come,’ ‘arrived,’ or ‘appeared.’ But the root meaning remains ‘presence’: the word was often used of the ‘royal presence’ of kings and rulers. If we spoke of Jesus’ royal presence within God’s new creation, rather than thinking of his ‘coming’ as an invasion from outside, our talk about the future might make more sense. It would also be a lot more biblical.” (201-202) Thus Wright proposes that “what we call the second coming, which is actually a metonym for the larger picture which includes cosmic renewal, human resurrection, the royal presence of Jesus, and the sovereign rule of God, was a very early Christian development of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, both necessitated and facilitated by the unexpected return of the messiah. What had been expected as a large-scale event at the end of time had happened as a small-scale, though explosive, event in the middle of time. The end had come, the end was still to come.” (202-203) Wright looks at the complicated and highly-charged 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, which is a proof-text for many of those wishing to lay out the literal how-to’s of Judgment Day. Wright advocates embracing the metaphors rather than trying to hammer them into a timeline: “Paul, straining at the borders of language, piles metaphor upon metaphor to express the complex truth: when the heavenly dimension is finally unveiled, so that the royal presence of Jesus is visibly and tangibly with us at last, the dead will be raised and the living transformed, to share his new humanity within a transformed world. This will be the fulfillment of the new world, which began in Jesus’ resurrection.” (203)
Because Borg went into great length showing up the appearance of Christ because of its delay, Wright throws in his two-cents. “Paul himself believed, when writing 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, that he might well be among those ‘left alive’; by the time of 2 Corinthians he had recognized that he might well die ahead of that time… Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, and others, to the end of the second century and beyond, still believed [in Jesus’ coming] and showed no sign of anxiety or embarrassment that the first generation had all died off without the world coming to an end. It is time that the old scholars’ myth of the ‘the delay of the parousia’ was given a decent burial. Metaphorically, of course.” (204)
N.T. Wright sees two poles of Christian living: worship & mission. “Glad, rich worship of the God revealed in Jesus invites outsiders to come in, welcomes them, nourishes them, and challenges them. Mission can be conceived, particularly with Matthew 25 in mind, in terms of worshiping and serving the hidden Jesus one meets in the poor and needy.” (208) Wright then looks at four different areas of Christian experience (spirituality, theology, politics, and healing) and then he argues for different levels of integration within the Christian faith. He urges integration between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, arguing against Borg’s position that much of the gospels are history metaphorized. “[The] gospels are what they are precisely because their authors thought the events they were recording—all of them, not just some—actually happened. Of course, we may as historians judge that in some cases they were mistaken; but, if this is so, they were to that extent failing to convey the most important meaning they had in mind, which was precisely that in these events as historical events Israel’s God, the world’s creator, had acted decisively and climactically within creation, within Israel’s history. These stories were never designed to express of embody a dehistoricized spirituality, or to convey truths about the post-Easter Jesus which were not anchored in the life of the pre-Easter Jesus. This is not because the gospels were written by ‘fact fundamentalists,’ but because they were written, and the pre-gospel stories were told, by Jews.” (215) Wright argues that his take on Jesus, rather than Borg’s, holds greater weight because of continuity. “I see continuity between the things the church claimed about Jesus after Easter and the aims and beliefs of Jesus before Easter. The obvious retort, that the church invented a Jesus to suit its subsequent beliefs, misses the point… [There] is precisely continuity, not identity, since the early church did not express its beliefs in, for instance, Jesus’ achievement on the cross in the same way he himself had done.” (225-226) Wright argues for integration between Jesus the Jewish messiah and Jesus the Lord claimed by Christians. “If [the roles given to Jesus by the New Testament, such as prophet, messiah, and martyr] make us nervous, with our late-twentieth-century perceptions and prejudices, so be it. Nervous? They scare me stiff. Is that not precisely what we should expect if we come face-to-face with ultimate and deeply personal reality—that is, God? Ought we to expect to be able to appraise God coolly, neutrally, rationally? Would God be God if we could?” He argues for integration between the different facets of the Christian life, for integration between history and eschatology, and integration between history and faith.
Marcus Borg turns his attention to what the Christian life is all about. "I do not think being a Christian is primarily about believing. It is not about believing in the [Bible], but about entering a deepening relationship to that which we see through the [Bible]. It is not about believing in the Bible or the gospels or Christian teachings about Jesus, but about a relationship to the One whom we see through the lens of the Christian tradition as a whole." (239-240) He suggests that Jesus as a Jewish mystic shows us what God is like: God is near, at hand, and can be experienced; this near God is accessible apart from convention, tradition, and institution; God is compassionate; and He is passionate about justice. In regards to the Christian life, Borg sees five characteristics: the Christian life is about "a life centered in the Spirit, lived by alternative wisdom, marked by compassion, concerned about justice, and lived within the alternative community of Jesus." The hallmark of the Christian life--life in the Spirit--spills out into everything. "[The] subversive and alternative wisdom of Jesus is an invitation to such a life. His wisdom teaching calls us to a life centered not in religious tradition or institution or convention, but in that which is beyond all of our domestications of reality: the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Life in the Spirit leads beyond contention to the still and wild place where God is known." (243) On the subject of spirituality, he writes, "Spirituality is entering into a conscious and intentional relationship to God. I emphasize conscious because we are already in a relationship with God and have been from our beginning, whether we realize that or not; spirituality is about becoming conscious of that relationship. Intentional means seeking to deepen the relationship with God, which happens in a variety of ways. It typically involves regular prayer, whether verbal or nonverbal, and perhaps other traditional spiritual practices. It also happens through worship that manifestly mediates the Spirit, whether the charismatic worship of Pentecostals, the silent gatherings of Quakers, or the sacramental worship of more liturgical traditions. What matters is opening to the Spirit." Borg adds, "A deepening relationship to the Spirit... transforms our sense of identity. We are not simply or primarily who our cultural conventions say we are. [Life in the Spirit] can liberate us from the anxieties and preoccupations that mark so much of our lives. [Life in the Spirit] is a source of courage as well as endurance. It enables us to face suffering in a new way." (243-244)
Marcus Borg has a different historical reconstruction of Jesus. He paints a portrait of Jesus much like an eastern shaman or wise man. Jesus' experience of God was transformative, and he stands in a long line of mystics, both Jewish and pagan, for whom God was such an experiential and transformative reality. Jesus' mission and message was shaped by his mystical experiences, the Torah and traditions of Judaism, and his passion for social justice. Jesus was a healer and an exorcist, and Borg takes the line that Jesus did genuinely heal people, though he calls them paranormal healings rather than miraculous healings; the first conjures up image of God intervening in the physical world, and Borg, as a panentheist, can't accept this. This isn't to say he buys into the idea, prevalent in some skeptical circles, that Jesus' healings were shams or psychosomatic. Jesus' healings and exorcisms "are associated with the kingdom of God and a time of deliverance." (67) As a mystical social prophet and wise man, Jesus taught an alternate wisdom; standing against the conventional wisdom of the day, Jesus taught a new way of seeing, of centering in God, and of living in this world. This new way of living was marked by compassion: "The core value of Jesus' ethic was compassion, an unusually rich word with resonances of feeling for people as a mother feels for the children of her womb." (70) Jesus' compassion for the poor and destitute, for the marginalized and exploited, ran against the elites of his day. Building upon the work of Walter Brueggemann, Borg identifies three characteristics within the social structures of the "ancient domination system," noting that "[there] is no reason to think that the Jewish homeland in the first century was an exception to the most common form of ancient social organization. Indeed, the economic situation of peasants may have been worsening in Roman Palestine. The commercialization of agriculture and the vast building projects of the Herods combined to produce a growing class of landless peasants." (72) These three characteristics, which Jesus stands against, are given on pages 69-70:
(1) A politics of oppression. These societies were hierarchical and patriarchal. They were ruled by a king and a traditional aristocracy, typically called by social historians "urban ruling elites." Ordinary people had no voice in the structuring of society."
(2) An economics of exploitation. In these preindustrial societies, the agricultural production of peasants was the primary source of wealth. And these societies were structured so that roughly two-thirds of the wealth generated by agriculture production ended up in the hands of the urban ruling elites, with roughly half going to the wealthiest one to two percent. This was accomplished through taxation upon agriculture and direct ownership of agricultural land.
(3) A religion of legitimization. These societies were commonly legitimated by the claim that the social order reflected the will of God. Kings ruled by divine right, and the powers that be were ordained by God.
Jesus stood against these characteristics of society, as any good social prophet would do. He focused his wrath on the urban ruling elites, who in his society were comprised of the religious teachers and the priesthood in Jerusalem. "Jesus indicted both Jerusalem and the temple. The point is not that Jerusalem and the temple were the center of Judaism, as if there was something wrong with Judaism. The point, rather, is that Jerusalem and the temple were the center of the ruling elites and thus the center of the domination system. Like Jeremiah before him, he warned of their coming destruction if they did not change." (73) He spoke against economic exploitation. "In our discomfort with [Jesus' teachings on wealth], we have often metaphorized them, as if they refer to spiritual poverty and spiritual wealth... But initially they referred to real wealth and real poverty. In that world, to be wealthy meant that one was among the ruling elites. The sayings against wealth are thus part of Jesus' criticism of the domination system." He bucked against the purity rules laid down by the religious elite: "I am persuaded that purity issues in his time were associated with sharp social boundaries and that the amplification of purity laws was the product of a scribal class attached to the temple. A strong concern for purity was part of the ideology of the elites. Purity was thus, for both Jesus and his opponents, not a matter of piety but of politics." As a social prophet, Jesus was also a movement-initiator. "In embryonic form, a movement came into existence around him during his lifetime. Remarkably inclusive and egalitarian, his movement undermined the sharp social boundaries of his day. One of its most striking features was Jesus' inclusive meal practice. The meals of Jesus, ancestors of the Christian eucharist, embodied his alternative social vision." (74) Like Wright, Borg sees the kingdom of God as integral to Jesus' message; but unlike Wright, Borg metaphorizes the kingdom of God, so that it could refer to the power of God, the presence of God, a certain social vision, the community of those living under the kingship of God, or even to the final or eternal kingdom.
The Death of Jesus
Marcus Borg looks at the Final Week of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark: his entering Jerusalem, his debates with the religious leaders, his Temple action, the Last Supper, his betrayal, and arrest in the Garden. When it comes to the trials before the Jewish and Roman leaders, Borg is skeptical: he doesn't find them credible, since the trials were done in secret and none of Jesus' disciples were present to witness what happened. Borg looks at the crucifixion, highlighting the significance of that manner-of-death. "In the Jewish homeland of the first century, crucifixion was a Roman form of execution. Thus Jesus was executed under Roman authority... Crucifixion was commonly used for two categories of people: political rebels and chronically defiant slaves. The two groups shared something in common: both systematically defied established authority. Because Jesus was not a slave, it follows that he was crucified as a political threat to Roman order." (88-89) Borg deals at length with the anti-Semitism that evolved in the gospel tradition; he sees it as early Christians trying to distance themselves from the Jews (who had a bad rap after the Jewish Revolt) and of cleansing the reputations of the Roman authorities; though Rome executed Jesus, the Jews were really the ones to blame. "Though details remain vague, nearly all mainline scholars see Jesus' arrest and execution as resulting from collaboration between the ruling elites of the day: the Roman governor and a small circle of Jewish temple authorities." (90) But why did Jesus end up getting killed? As a social prophet, Jesus confronted the urban elites of his day, incurring their wrath. "[If] Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher, I doubt he would have been executed. But he was also a God-intoxicated voice of religious social protest who had attracted a following... Jesus died as a martyr, not as a victim. A martyr is killed because he or she stands for something. Jesus was killed because he stood against the kingdoms of this world and for an alternative social vision grounded in the kingdom of God. The domination system killed Jesus as the prophet of the kingdom of God. This is the political meaning of Good Friday." (91)
N.T. Wright argues that Jesus saw his impending death as being the great battle by which victory would be seized. "As historians, we must do our best to recreate the way in which first-century Jews, particularly those involved in movements of reform, revolution, or kingdom bringing, would have thought about suffering, death, and martyrdom. First-century Jews were not like comfortable Western scholars, living in a world where the avoidance or mitigation of suffering, especially one's own, is taken for granted. Traditions existed within first-century Judaism that explained how Israel's God would use even the sufferings and seeming tragedy of his people to bring about the longed-for redemption. The great Exodus story itself, retold in story and symbol each Passover (and invoked in other festivals, too), was all about the long night of slavery getting darker and darker and then God breaking through with freedom and hope. Out of the experience of the Babylonian exile came a whole conglomeration of meditations, finding expression in prophecy, psalm, apocalyptic, and folktale: through the suffering of Israel at the hands of the pagans, Israel's God would somehow bring Israel to redemption. These traditions were alive and developing throughout the second-temple period. We can see how they were evoked by those who wrote up, in roughly Jesus' own time, the tales of the Maccabean martyrs. Suffering and death were interpreted as effecting Israel's rescue from present and future suffering, from 'the wrath of God' in that sense." (93-94) Thus Wright argues that "[the] best first-century context in which to understand Jesus’ own intention as he went to Jerusalem, as he agonized in Gethsemane, and as he faced accusers and governors, torturers and executioners, is the belief, found in many Jewish sources stretching back into the prophets and on into the Christian era, that when Israel’s redemption came about it would be born through a period of intense suffering.” (98) By enduring the messianic woes, Jesus would "go through the darkest night and lead the way into the dawn of a new day. This was how he would fight the final battle against the real enemy. This is how he would build the true temple. This, in other words, was how he would win the victory that would establish him as Israel’s true messiah and transform the kingdom from its current present-and-future state into a fully present reality.” (98)
N.T. Wright turns his attention to the political conniving that led to Jesus' arrest and crucifixion. Whereas Borg argues that we can't know anything about the secret Roman and Jewish trials (if there were any) precisely because they were secret and none of Jesus' disciples were there, Wright's insistent that Borg's logic is faulty. "We have every reason to suppose that a crowded city at a time of a great religious, cultural, and political festival would have been an ideal time for news to travel fast... [When] scholars argue, as they do from time to time, that because Jesus' hearings before Caiaphas and Pilate were in secret nobody outside would have known what happened, they are living in a make-believe world. Even today, even in Western societies, even when people are sworn to secrecy in the interests of the church, the state, or the party, secrets have a remarkable habit of leaking out. How much more when the whole city, in eager mood for Passover, was ready to grasp and transmit any snippets of information about the leader whose appearance many thought heralded the arrival of the kingdom of God?" (94-95) With that in mind, Wright paints a portrait of Jesus' last hours before the authorities.
"The Jewish authorities in question were of course the chief priests, whose power base Jesus had threatened with his action in the temple. They were understandably eager to prevent his apparently antitemple movement gaining more ground." (100) They faced a problem, though: they couldn't legally execute him. The Romans had to do that. How to stick a charge on Jesus that the Romans would heed? "Their questioning about Jesus' temple action and its significance quickly unearthed what they had already suspected, that he saw himself in messianic terms and believed Israel's God would vindicate him as such." Pontias Pilate "appears in all accounts as at best vacillating and weak, at worst a malevolent petty tyrant. The only reason he tries to free Jesus is because he routinely wanted to snob the chief priests. His arm is twisted, though, because the prisoner before him is portrayed to him as a rebel king. Rome would not be pleased if news leaked out that a 'king of the Jews' had been on trial and had been released. The crowds, meanwhile, could be won over by the suggestion that Jesus was after all a blasphemer." (101) Jesus was thus caught in a power struggle behind the chief priests and the Roman authorities, and Pilate was pinned between wanting to piss off the chief priests and wanting to preserve his reputation before his Roman superiors. The chief priests won out, and the Romans crucified Jesus as a rebellious revolutionary.
But what meaning did Jesus' death carry for the early church? "Embedded within the earliest strands of Christian tradition we find an already formulaic statement: the messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures." (102) Wright clarifies what (he believes) the early church meant: "It was not, first and foremost, a way of saying that the moral failures of individuals had been atoned for in some abstract theological transaction. That would come, and quickly; we find it already in Paul's mature thought. But in the beginning it was a claim about what Israel's God had done, in fulfillment of the scriptural prophecies, to bring Israel's long night of exile to its conclusion, to deal with the 'sins' that had kept Israel enslaved to the pagan powers of the world, and to bring about the real 'return from exile,' the dawn of the new day, for which Israel had longed." (103) He continues, "This interpretation of Jesus' death was not, in the first instance, a feeling or a doctrine... It was not, that is, a matter of the early Christians 'feeling forgiven,' experiencing the divine forgiveness for moral misdemeanors as an inner existential reality. Nor was it a new theory about how 'atonement' functioned, supplanting previous Jewish beliefs on the subject. It was the early Christian deduction, from Jesus' resurrection, that his death had been after all effective, as the hinge upon which the door God's new world had swung open. To say that the messiah had died for sins in fulfillment of the scriptures was to make a claim, not so much about an abstract atonement theology into which individuals could tape to salve their guilty consciences, as about where Israel and the world now were within God's eschatological timetable. The sins that had caused Israel's exile had now been dealt with, and the time of forgiveness had arrived." Wright says on the next page, "Although the early church developed ways and means of making this point which went beyond anything that Jesus himself had said, that interpretation was indeed a development of, not an evolution away from, his own aim and intention. And... this central emphasis on the unique achievement of Jesus' death as the sin-forgiving, once-for-all liberating act of Israel's God remained at the center of early Christian thought, sustaining but not being replaced by the belief, which became so beloved of theologians and pastors in later years, that the sin of individual sinners had been dealt with on the cross." (104)
What does Jesus' death mean for us today? "Traditionally this question has been answered in terms of the remission of sin and guilt, whereby the individual sinner finds peace for a troubled conscience, in the present, and the assurance of ultimate forgiveness from God, in life after death. This answer is, I believe, perfectly true and valid, biblically rooted and pastorally as vital as ever it was. It does not, however, tell the whole story that the New Testament tells about the meaning of Jesus' death." (105) Wright looks at this larger story of Jesus' defeat of evil. While the conviction that Jesus' death on the cross defeated evil was mainstream in early Christianity, it's been filtered out in western evangelicalism. "The now-traditional scheme [projects] the victory on the one hand inward, into the heart and conscience of the believer, and on the other hand forward, into the state of affairs after death or at the end of the world."
"God Raised Jesus from the Dead"
N.T. Wright begins his chapter on the resurrection by defining the word, as it would have been used by Jesus' contemporaries. Resurrection was "a literal reference to the concrete event of dead bodies coming to life." (115) Thus by saying Jesus was raised from the dead, Jesus' followers were NOT saying that he was a ghost or a spirit, or that they were able to experience him in their hearts. If that was what they meant, they would've said as much; but by saying Jesus was resurrected, they were saying something very specific: that he had died and come back to bodily life. It doesn't make sense, Wright argues, for the early church to make something like this up; in Jewish thought, "the resurrection of the dead" was something that would happen to all people at the end of time, not to one person in the middle of time. It would be odd indeed for Jesus' fledgling movement to postulate him as resurrected when they could just have easily called him a ghost, or a spirit, or some inner presence. That something happened to Jesus--something differentiating him from all the failed and executed revolutionaries before him and since--is evident in that the early church "reconstructed their worldview, their aims and agendas, around [the belief in Jesus' resurrection] so that it became, not merely an extra oddity, bolted onto the outside of the worldview they already had, but the transforming principle, the string that had pulled back the curtain, revealing God's future as having already arrived in the present." (118) Much of Wright's chapter is a brief treatment of some of the evidences for the historicity of the resurrection (he simplifies many arguments he put forth in The Resurrection of the Son of God).
What are we to make of the historicity of the resurrection? "Grasping the nettle--proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality--will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start. But if Christianity is only going to be allowed to rent an apartment in the Enlightenment's housing scheme, and on its terms, we are, to borrow Paul's phrase, of all people the most to be pitied--especially as the Enlightenment itself is rumored to be bankrupt and to be facing serious charges of fraud." (124) He continues, "Once you allow that something remarkable happened to his body that morning, all the other data fall into place with astonishing ease. Once you insist that nothing so outlandish happened, you are driven to ever more complex and fantastic hypotheses to explain the data. For the historian, as for the scientist, the answer should be clear." There are, then, two options regarding the historicity of Jesus' resurrection: "either solve the historical puzzle by agreeing that Jesus' body was transformed into a new sort of life, or leave it in essence unsolved by coming up with flights of fancy, which themselves create far more problems."
What does the resurrection mean? "[The] meaning of the resurrection must begin with the validation of Jesus as messiah, as Paul says in Romans 1.4. It means that Israel's God, the creator, has affirmed that Jesus really was, all along, his 'son.' It means, therefore, the acceptance and validation of his messianic achievement, supremely in his crucifixion: the resurrection declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat." (125-126) Wright examines the relationship between Jesus' resurrection and new creation. "God's new world had been brought to birth. When Jesus emerged, transformed, from the tomb on Easter morning, the event was heavy with symbolic significance, to which the evangelists drew attention, without wishing to detract from the historical nature of what they were talking about. It was the first day of God's new week, the moment of sunrise after the long night, the time of new meetings, new meals, of reconciliation and new commissioning. It was the beginning of the new creation." God's new age has dawned, inaugurated by Jesus in his resurrection, and those who belong to him are called to a vocation of holiness; they are to embrace "the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus' victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.... [Get] rid of all the dehumanizing behavior that destroys God's good creation and the creatures made in his image, all anger and lust, greed, and pride. The resurrection thus opens the door to a new world; a new mode of life for the whole cosmos and for all who will dwell in it here and hereafter." (127)
Marcus Borg sees the resurrection narratives as "powerfully true metaphorical narratives." (130) He writes that resurrection "does not refer to the resumption of protoplasmic or corpuscular existence. To be sure, resurrection could involve something happening to a corpse, namely the transformation of a corpse; but it need not." (131) Never-mind that Jews of Jesus' day wouldn't envisage resurrection without the association of a physical body. Borg argues that the resurrection belief and stories came about as the early church sought to put a face to what they experienced after Jesus' crucifixion. "[The] followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death. In the early Christian community, these experiences included visions or apparitions of Jesus... [The] community experienced the power of the Spirit they had known in Jesus continuing to be and to operate. I think there were experiences of the same presence they had known in Jesus during his historical life-time." (135) The post-Easter Jesus, to Borg, is an experiential reality. "Christians throughout the centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure of the present, not simply a memory from the past. Those experiences (then and now) have taken a variety of forms. They include dramatic forms such as visions and mystical experiences, and less dramatic forms such as a sense of the presence of Jesus--whether in prayer, worship, or the eucharist, in other people, or in the dailiness of our lives." Borg's theory is that the "experiences of the risen Christ as a continuing presence generated the claim that 'Jesus lives and is Lord' and that the statement 'God raised Jesus from the dead' and the story of the empty tomb may well have been generated by those experiences." (137) Borg rounds out his chapter looking at five meanings in Jesus' death and resurrection: rejection/vindication, revelation of the Way, revelation of the love of God, sacrifice for sin, and defeat of the powers. In regards to the latter, Borg writes, "[Those] who crucified Jesus are not simply the political and religious authorities in Jerusalem, but the powers that rule this age. The New Testament names these powers in several ways: the principalities and powers, the elemental spirits of the universe, the prince of the power of the air, Satan, the dragon, the beast from the abyss... God in Christ 'disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross.' The internal logic is clear: Jesus got swallowed by the powers; the powers got him... [The] resurrection is God's yes to Jesus and no to the powers. Good Friday and Easter are about our liberation from the powers. The Lordship of Christ is the path of personal and existential liberation from the lords of this world." (138-139)
Was Jesus God?
Marcus Borg writes that "Jesus as a Jewish mystic knew God. Moreover, as a Spirit person and healer, he would have experienced himself as one 'anointed by the Spirit,' whether he used this particular phrase or not." (147) Christians have long called Jesus the incarnation or embodiment of God; in the framework of what Borg calls "supernatural theism," God came from "out there" and embodied himself in Jesus. Borg is a panentheist (or an advocate of dialectical theism), and as such he frames Jesus' relationship with God through that lens. "God is not 'out there' but 'right here' as well as more than right here, both transcendent and immanent. God is the encompassing Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being... Jesus as a Spirit person was open to the presence of God." Borg writes that Jesus emptied himself to the point of being able to be wholly filled by the Spirit. He sees the post-Easter development of seeing Jesus as divine derived from (a) the Easter experience and (b) elements of the pre-Easter Jesus. Weaving together the disciples' continued experiencing of Jesus after his death, and their knowledge of his healings and wisdom, Borg argues that these strands created a divine Jesus decades down the road. I find this difficult to believe: such experiences, and such knowledge of Jesus as a wise and subversive healer, wouldn't cause people to jump to such radical notions as divinity. Both Jews and Greeks had different language for such things. Borg sees the Christological language in the New Testament as metaphors and confessional statements, rather than windows into what is factually true. He then looks at the Nicene Creed as a solution to a conundrum of the early church: "How could early Christians reconcile their experience of and devotion to the post-Easter Jesus as a divine reality with their commitment to monotheism?" (153) And thus trinitarian language was born.
N.T. Wright begins by examining creational and covenantal monotheism; if Jesus perceived himself as God incarnate, then it makes sense that he would understand that identity through the lens of the Jewish worldview. Thus Wright spends a considerable amount of time seeking to define the Jewish God over against its caricatures. “Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breath are not, as often has been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the deist god and the reductionists’ Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the new age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, and of the psalms, and ask what God might look like were to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross.” (167)
The Jewish people came to speak of God in a variety of terms. “Emboldened by deep-rooted traditions, they explored what appears to us a strange, swirling rhythm of mutual relations within the very being of the one God: a to-and-for, a give-and-take, a command-and-obey, a sense of love poured out and love received. God’s Spirit broods over the waters, God’s Word goes forth to produce new life, God’s Law guides his people, God’s presence or Glory dwells with them in fiery cloud, in tabernacle and temple… God’s Wisdom is his handmaid in creation, the firstborn of his works, his chief of staff, his delight. Through the Lady Wisdom of Proverbs 1-8, the creator has fashioned everything, especially the human race. To embrace Wisdom is therefore to discover the secret of being truly human, of reflecting God’s image.” (160) Wright then looks at the crux of the matter: “Was Jesus divine?” He writes, “Some have suggested that it was only when the early church started to lose its grip on its Jewish roots and began to compromise with pagan philosophy that it could think of Jesus in the same breath as the one God. Jewish polemic has often suggested that the Trinity and the incarnation, those greats pillars of patristic theology, are sheer paganization.” (160) But, Wright says, “Long before secular philosophy was invoked to describe the inner being of the one God (and the relation of this God to Jesus and to the Spirit), a vigorous and very Jewish tradition took over the language and imagery of Spirit, Word, Law, Presence (and/or Glory), and Wisdom and developed them in relation to Jesus of Nazareth and the Spirit.” (161) On pages 161-162, Wright looks at a couple key passages in the New Testament:
(1) 1 Corinthians 8.6: within a specifically Jewish-style monotheistic argument, [Paul] adapts the Shema itself, placing Jesus within it: “For us there is one God—the Father, from whom are all things and we to him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him.”
(2) Philippians 2.5-11: [Paul] draws on the fiercely monotheistic theology of Isaiah 40-55 to celebrate Christ’s universal lordship. “At the name of Jesus,” he declares, “every knee shall bow.” Isaiah has YHWH defeating the pagan idols and being enthroned over them; Paul has Jesus exalted to a position of equality with “the Father” because he has done what, in Jewish tradition, only the one God can do.
(3) Colossians 1.15-20: with its clear poetic structure, [it’s] a Wisdom poem, exploring the classic Jewish theme that the world’s creator is also its redeemer, and vice versa. But at every point of creation and redemption we discover, not Wisdom, but Jesus.
(4) Galatians 4.1-11: Paul tells the story of the world as the story of God’s freeing of slaves and his making them his children, his heirs. As in the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame. But the true God has now revealed himself in this way is the God who “sends the son” and then “sends the Spirit of the Son.”
Though more texts can be added to the list above, Wright’s point is that “in these passages we have, within thirty years of Jesus’ death, what would later be called a very high Christology. It is very early and very Jewish.” (162) Thus “[long] before anyone talked about ‘nature’ and ‘substance,’ ‘person’ and ‘Trinity,’ the early Christians had quietly but definitely discovered that they could say what they felt obliged to say about Jesus (and the Spirit) by telling the Jewish story of God, Israel, and the world in the Jewish language of Spirit, Word, Torah, Presence/Glory, Wisdom, and now Messiah/Son. It is as though they discovered Jesus within the Jewish monotheistic categories they already had. The categories seemed to have been made for him. They fitted him like a glove.” (163)
The Birth of Jesus
N.T. Wright identifies the Virgin Conception as the shibboleth of fundamentalist Christianity; lines are drawn to determine who’s in and who’s out based on whether or not they believe in the virgin birth. This, Wright thinks, is ridiculous. After all, “without Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 we would know nothing about [Jesus’ birth]. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross. Yet try to express any New Testament theology without Jesus’ death and resurrection, and you will find it cannot be done. ‘Man shall live for evermore,’ says the song, ‘because of Christmas Day.’ No, replies the New Testament. Because of Calvary, Easter, and Pentecost.” (171) Wright gives his own take on the virgin birth and why he sees it as historically credible; he adds, however, that “[no] one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn’t. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable.” (177)
Marcus Borg gives three reasons he (among many scholars) doesn’t find the birth narratives historically credible (pages 179-181): (1) The tradition that Jesus had a remarkable birth is relatively late. “The stories of his birth are found only in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, both written near the end of the first century. Earlier writers (as well as the rest of the New Testament) do not refer to a special birth. Paul, our earliest writer, does not. Neither does Mark, our earliest gospel. Moreover, though the gospel of John is probably later than Matthew and Luke, John does not include it, either.” (180) (2) The striking differences between Matthew’s birth story and Luke’s birth story. (3) The stories look like they have been composed to be overtures to each gospel. In other words, “[The] central themes of each birth story reflect the central themes of the gospel of which they are a part.” (181) He uses the journey to Bethlehem as an example. “One possibility… is that Jesus really was born in Bethlehem, even though the two stories disagree about why Mary and Joseph where there. A second possibility is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, but the story of his birth in Bethlehem arose because of Bethlehem’s significance in the Hebrew Bible. It was the ancestral home of King David, and there was a tradition [from Micah 5.2] that the great and future king of Israel would be descended from David.” (182) “On this view,” Borg continues, “the early Christian conviction that Jesus was the messiah and the Son of David created the story of Jesus being born in ‘the city of David.’”
Borg doesn’t see the birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 as historical; rather, they are metaphorized narratives. The birth narratives are true, but not in a historical sense. Borg turns his attention to the virginal conception, noting that “the theme of remarkable births is part of the tradition of Israel,” so that Jesus’ remarkable (read: virgin) birth is built onto this theme. “Just as God acted in the history of Israel to create and sustain the people of God through remarkable births, so also God had now acted in the birth of Jesus. Just as Israel came into existence through the grace of God when humanly speaking it was impossible, so the early Christian community as the continuation of Israel came into existence through the grace of God.” (185) Thus the virginal conception “is a metaphorical affirmation of Jesus’ identity and significance. Like the voice in the transfiguration story, it affirms, ‘This is my beloved son; listen to him.’” (185-186) Borg concludes that he doesn’t see “the story of the virginal conception as a marvel of biology that, if true, proves that Jesus really was the Son of God. Rather, it is an early Christian narratival confession of faith and affirmation of allegiance to Jesus.” (186)
"He Will Come Again In Glory"
Marcus Borg gives a short introduction to the matter-at-hand: the Return of Christ. “The coming again in glory of the one who is now Lord, seated at God’s right hand, will involve the judging of all who have lived and the establishing of the everlasting kingdom. In short, the second coming is associated with what we commonly think of as ‘the end of the world,’ the subject matter of eschatology.” (189) On page 192, he clarifies even further, saying that this kind of expectation could be termed apocalyptic eschatology, “the expectation of imminent dramatic divine intervention in a public and objectively unmistakable way, resulting in a radically new state of affairs, including the vindication of God’s people, whether on a renewed earth or in another world.” Borg notes that belief in an imminent return of Christ has waxed and waned throughout the history of Christendom. “Through the centuries, some Christians have expected the second coming (or parousia) of Jesus in their own time. Many in the first century did, [too]. Though the belief that the parousia was near waned among some Christians as time went by, some, like the theologian Tertullian in the early 200s, still argued vigorously for it. Waves of imminent expectation of the parousia surfaced several times in succeeding centuries: as the year 1000 approached, in the 1200s with the teaching of Joachim of Fiore, in the 1500s at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and in the 1800s among a number of Christian movements. Many expect it in our own day: according to one survey, approximately one-third of Americans think it will be soon.” (190) Borg asks, “Where did this belief in a 2nd Coming originate?” He presents two options: from Jesus himself or from the early church community. Borg doesn’t see Jesus as the sort to claim his own imminent return; he finds such egotism laughable and concerning. Within the first option, it’s possible that the tradition comes from Jesus but not in a way he intended. As Borg explains, “Jesus did not speak of his own second coming, but he did expect the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and the Son of Man. After his death, this expectation got transferred to the expectation of his imminent return as king of the kingdom that he had proclaimed. Put most simply: Jesus expected the kingdom of God; the early church expected Jesus.” The second option (and the one which Borg takes) is that the language of Jesus’ return comes from the early church community itself, wholly divorced from Jesus in every way. He admits that one of his biggest hindrances to belief in a literal return of Jesus (bigger, perhaps, than his own assumptions which doesn’t allow such a thing) is that it’s a laughable concept. “I can imagine the end of the world. I can imagine a final judgment. But I cannot imagine a return of Christ. If we try to imagine that, we have to imagine him returning to some place. To be very elementary, we who know the earth to be round cannot imagine Jesus returning to the whole earth at once. And the notion of a localized second coming boggles the imagination.” (195)
N.T. Wright frames the “return of Christ” within the framework of the over-arching biblical narrative. What is it that God intends to do? “[He] intends to create new heavens and a new earth, married together, in dynamic and perhaps even material continuity with the present creation. The new will be to the old as the flower is to the seed, as the butterfly is to the chrysalis. Analogies like this, inevitable if we are to speak of realities beyond present experience, point into the bright cloud of God’s future.” (197-198). He is sure to affirm what many Christians have forgotten, that “the created order is good and God given; evil is real and potent. Soft-pedal the first, and you end with dualism (creation itself is evil). Soft-pedal the other, and you end up with pantheism (creation is divine; nothing is really wrong).” If we are dualists or pantheists, that affects the way we look at the world and the Final Solution to evil. “The dualist supposes that, to escape evil, one must escape the created, physical universe. Lots of casual Christian talk (and song) about our future destiny slips unthinkingly into this mode. The pantheist looks forward to being absorbed into the great all-divine cosmos or supposes, with the ancient Stoics, that history will simply repeat itself endlessly.” (199) Over against this, “[the] New Testament envisages a world enhanced, made more joyful, by the removal of evil. Creation will be free to be itself at last, and we with it. In particular, death, the shadow that falls across all our dreams, will be abolished.” Where do humans fit into all this? Wright looks at the resurrection: “Resurrection doesn’t mean resuscitation: we share, swap, and pass on our molecules, so there aren’t nearly enough for everyone to have their own ones back. Resurrection demands, and the New Testament envisages, a great act of new creation, not the reassembling of identical sets of atoms. As Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthians 5, the future embodiedness of God’s people will involve a new mode of physicality, over and above the present one.” (200) The future home of God’s people is in a marriage between Heaven and Earth; in reference to the first, “[in] biblical language, heaven is usually neither a location within our cosmos (say, a place several miles up in the sky) nor a destination within our time sequence (say, the state of affairs at the very end). [Heaven] is God’s dimension of day-to-day reality. It is normally veiled from our sight, but ‘seers’ are granted glimpses into it, such as when Elisha’s servant saw the horses and chariots surrounding his master or when a great door swung open and John the Seer found himself looking straight into God’s throne room.” (200-201)
N.T. Wright then looks at the subject at hand: Jesus’ return. He begins the discussion by examining the meaning of the Greek word parousia, which is often translated as “coming” in the New Testament. Wright says, “The New Testament often uses [this Greek word] to express the ‘presence’ of Jesus within God’s future recreation of the cosmos. Of course, someone who is present after a time of absence must have ‘come,’ ‘arrived,’ or ‘appeared.’ But the root meaning remains ‘presence’: the word was often used of the ‘royal presence’ of kings and rulers. If we spoke of Jesus’ royal presence within God’s new creation, rather than thinking of his ‘coming’ as an invasion from outside, our talk about the future might make more sense. It would also be a lot more biblical.” (201-202) Thus Wright proposes that “what we call the second coming, which is actually a metonym for the larger picture which includes cosmic renewal, human resurrection, the royal presence of Jesus, and the sovereign rule of God, was a very early Christian development of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, both necessitated and facilitated by the unexpected return of the messiah. What had been expected as a large-scale event at the end of time had happened as a small-scale, though explosive, event in the middle of time. The end had come, the end was still to come.” (202-203) Wright looks at the complicated and highly-charged 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18, which is a proof-text for many of those wishing to lay out the literal how-to’s of Judgment Day. Wright advocates embracing the metaphors rather than trying to hammer them into a timeline: “Paul, straining at the borders of language, piles metaphor upon metaphor to express the complex truth: when the heavenly dimension is finally unveiled, so that the royal presence of Jesus is visibly and tangibly with us at last, the dead will be raised and the living transformed, to share his new humanity within a transformed world. This will be the fulfillment of the new world, which began in Jesus’ resurrection.” (203)
Because Borg went into great length showing up the appearance of Christ because of its delay, Wright throws in his two-cents. “Paul himself believed, when writing 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, that he might well be among those ‘left alive’; by the time of 2 Corinthians he had recognized that he might well die ahead of that time… Ignatius, Justin, Tertullian, and others, to the end of the second century and beyond, still believed [in Jesus’ coming] and showed no sign of anxiety or embarrassment that the first generation had all died off without the world coming to an end. It is time that the old scholars’ myth of the ‘the delay of the parousia’ was given a decent burial. Metaphorically, of course.” (204)
Jesus and the Christian Life
N.T. Wright sees two poles of Christian living: worship & mission. “Glad, rich worship of the God revealed in Jesus invites outsiders to come in, welcomes them, nourishes them, and challenges them. Mission can be conceived, particularly with Matthew 25 in mind, in terms of worshiping and serving the hidden Jesus one meets in the poor and needy.” (208) Wright then looks at four different areas of Christian experience (spirituality, theology, politics, and healing) and then he argues for different levels of integration within the Christian faith. He urges integration between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, arguing against Borg’s position that much of the gospels are history metaphorized. “[The] gospels are what they are precisely because their authors thought the events they were recording—all of them, not just some—actually happened. Of course, we may as historians judge that in some cases they were mistaken; but, if this is so, they were to that extent failing to convey the most important meaning they had in mind, which was precisely that in these events as historical events Israel’s God, the world’s creator, had acted decisively and climactically within creation, within Israel’s history. These stories were never designed to express of embody a dehistoricized spirituality, or to convey truths about the post-Easter Jesus which were not anchored in the life of the pre-Easter Jesus. This is not because the gospels were written by ‘fact fundamentalists,’ but because they were written, and the pre-gospel stories were told, by Jews.” (215) Wright argues that his take on Jesus, rather than Borg’s, holds greater weight because of continuity. “I see continuity between the things the church claimed about Jesus after Easter and the aims and beliefs of Jesus before Easter. The obvious retort, that the church invented a Jesus to suit its subsequent beliefs, misses the point… [There] is precisely continuity, not identity, since the early church did not express its beliefs in, for instance, Jesus’ achievement on the cross in the same way he himself had done.” (225-226) Wright argues for integration between Jesus the Jewish messiah and Jesus the Lord claimed by Christians. “If [the roles given to Jesus by the New Testament, such as prophet, messiah, and martyr] make us nervous, with our late-twentieth-century perceptions and prejudices, so be it. Nervous? They scare me stiff. Is that not precisely what we should expect if we come face-to-face with ultimate and deeply personal reality—that is, God? Ought we to expect to be able to appraise God coolly, neutrally, rationally? Would God be God if we could?” He argues for integration between the different facets of the Christian life, for integration between history and eschatology, and integration between history and faith.
Marcus Borg turns his attention to what the Christian life is all about. "I do not think being a Christian is primarily about believing. It is not about believing in the [Bible], but about entering a deepening relationship to that which we see through the [Bible]. It is not about believing in the Bible or the gospels or Christian teachings about Jesus, but about a relationship to the One whom we see through the lens of the Christian tradition as a whole." (239-240) He suggests that Jesus as a Jewish mystic shows us what God is like: God is near, at hand, and can be experienced; this near God is accessible apart from convention, tradition, and institution; God is compassionate; and He is passionate about justice. In regards to the Christian life, Borg sees five characteristics: the Christian life is about "a life centered in the Spirit, lived by alternative wisdom, marked by compassion, concerned about justice, and lived within the alternative community of Jesus." The hallmark of the Christian life--life in the Spirit--spills out into everything. "[The] subversive and alternative wisdom of Jesus is an invitation to such a life. His wisdom teaching calls us to a life centered not in religious tradition or institution or convention, but in that which is beyond all of our domestications of reality: the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Life in the Spirit leads beyond contention to the still and wild place where God is known." (243) On the subject of spirituality, he writes, "Spirituality is entering into a conscious and intentional relationship to God. I emphasize conscious because we are already in a relationship with God and have been from our beginning, whether we realize that or not; spirituality is about becoming conscious of that relationship. Intentional means seeking to deepen the relationship with God, which happens in a variety of ways. It typically involves regular prayer, whether verbal or nonverbal, and perhaps other traditional spiritual practices. It also happens through worship that manifestly mediates the Spirit, whether the charismatic worship of Pentecostals, the silent gatherings of Quakers, or the sacramental worship of more liturgical traditions. What matters is opening to the Spirit." Borg adds, "A deepening relationship to the Spirit... transforms our sense of identity. We are not simply or primarily who our cultural conventions say we are. [Life in the Spirit] can liberate us from the anxieties and preoccupations that mark so much of our lives. [Life in the Spirit] is a source of courage as well as endurance. It enables us to face suffering in a new way." (243-244)
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