Give Us This Day ...

Notes on

The Meaning Of Jesus:  Two Visions

by

Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright

Note 1:  These notes follow the outline given in the Table of Contents.

Note 2:  Most, if not all, of the sentences and phrases in the following pages were

pulled directly from the book and are placed within quotes.

Note 3:  The grey highlighted items can be considered primary key points.

Note 4:  The yellow highlighted items can be considered secondary key points.

PART VIII:  JESUS AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

15.  The Truth of the Gospel and Christian Living (by N. T. Wright): 

The Context:  Worship and Mission

“I have come…to envisage the two poles of Christian living in terms of worship and mission.  The two flow into each other: worship without mission becomes self-indulgence (and might even imply worship of a god other than the one revealed in Jesus); mission without worship degenerates into various kinds of do-goodery, following agendas that may be deeply felt but are by no means necessarily connected with Jesus.”

“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…..in terms of worshiping and serving the hidden Jesus one meets in the poor and needy.  Thus, though I continue to speak of worship and mission as separate activities, I also insist on integrating them.”

“…four different areas of Christian experience…spirituality, theology, politics, and healing.”

Spirituality

“The being we called ‘God’ was essentially other, living in a different sphere altogether.  Jesus had bridged the gulf between this God and us, his creatures; the Holy Spirit now enabled us to continue bridging the gulf; but a sense of a gulf remained nonetheless, and prayer remained a communication across it.  Prayer was thus an activity set apart from the rest of life.”

“….Christians…if they lose this home base – of personal relationship with the personal God – I believe they are in danger of ending up like the prodigal son spending half the Father’s property in a far country away from the Father’s face.”

“By spirituality…I wish to include the various practices of prayer, meditation, contemplation, spiritual reading, and the like that have characterized Christians from the very beginning.  Christian spirituality is rooted in Judaism, is focused on Jesus, is shaped by the God known in Jesus and the Spirit.  It embraces the whole person, and looks outward in love at the world.”

“Christian spirituality is rooted in Judaism….It is thus not so much ‘creation spirituality’…as ‘creator spirituality’: devotion to the creator.  And creator spirituality includes not only looking away from creation to the God who made it, but also, simultaneously celebrating the goodness and god givenness of creation and grieving over its twistedness and brokenness.  Creator spirituality is thus sacramental while firmly rejecting the magical: creation can be the bearer of God’s presence, holiness, love, and grace, but this remains God’s gift and can never be manipulated.”

“Christian spirituality is focused on Jesus, the messiah of Israel….God’s dealings with Israel had reached its climax…his kingdom announcement…bringing the temple theme in Judaism to a new and surprising conclusion.  The true temple, the true dwelling of Israel’s God, was to consist not of bricks and mortar but of a human being.  ‘In him,’ wrote Paul, ‘the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.’ ”

“I regard the standard objection (that Jesus’ sanity would be called in question if he supposed himself in any sense divine) as beside the point.”

“Christian spirituality is therefore shaped by this God, the God we know in Jesus and by the Spirit of Jesus.  It is never a matter of shouting across a void.  Insofar as God and humans inhabit different spheres, Jesus inhabits both, and by the Spirit enables and invites us to do the same.  Christian prayer is not a matter of petitioning a distant bureaucrat but of coming in trust before a deeply loving parent.”

“Christian spirituality embraces the whole person…presenting one’s body as a living sacrifice….(One of the great spiritual laws is that one comes to resemble what one worships.)

“Christian spirituality, finally, looks out in love at the world.  It is not self-centered, regarding its own spiritual progress or development as the be-all and end-all.  Precisely because it is rooted in Judaism….is focused on Jesus...is shaped by the true God…and because it embraces the whose person…Christian spirituality must…encourage those shoots that move outward and discourage those that become intertwined with one another.  Thus, though Christian spirituality generates and sustains a self-awareness in God’s presence, it can never be content with navel gazing.  The self of which one is aware, if it stands in the presence of the God we know in Jesus, must always be turned outward toward God’s world.”

“When this happens, the result is love, taking the forms of both joy and grief…the world as it now stands, though full of God’s glory, is also full of sorrow and shame, of wickedness and violence, of injustice and oppression.  One cannot fall uncritically in love with this world without colluding with evil.  Rather the Christian is called to love the world as God loves the world, joyfully celebrating its beauty, its majesty, its curious detail, its flashes of divine glory – and bitterly grieving over its wounds, its horror, its tragedy, its crucifixions.  Christian spirituality, focused on and shaped by Jesus, looks at the glory and the shame of it all and brings both, in prayer and liturgy, before the presence of God.  It thus holds together worship and mission…looking out at the world in joyful and grieving prayer.”

“…the dualist’s god, separate from the wicked world (and hence unable to celebrate its goodness or remake it in resurrection).”

Theology

“…spirituality and theology…sustaining and reinforcing each other.”

“Christian theology from the first was oriented toward both worship and mission: the true God was to be worshiped truly….and the news of what this God had just accomplished was to be communicated accurately and precisely to the whole world.”

“Christian theology is called to walk the tightrope:  to claim to be speaking the truth while making it clear in the manner of the claim that this is not after all a covert power play.”

“How can we be sure that we are not…merely projecting our own self-image or our authority-figure fantasies on to the cosmic stage and calling them ‘god’?”

“…this God….through self-revelation, has given us such knowledge as is possible and appropriate for us….this self-revelation has taken place supremely in Jesus.”

“…not that we know what the word God means and can discover the extent to which this ‘God’ was present in, or revealed through, Jesus; rather that, by close attention to Jesus himself, we are invited to discover, perhaps for the first time, just how the creator and covenant God was and is all along.  And when we discover that, we discover that the claim to truth is not a power play.  It is a love ploy…”

“…the gospels are what they are precisely because their authors thought the events they were recording – all of them, not just some – actually happened…Israel’s God the world’s creator, had acted decisively and climactically within creation, within Israel’s history.”

“The gospels…they belong firmly within the genre of Jewish stories of what Israel’s God was doing in actual history.  For us to declare that they contain major segments…which express in apparently historical language truths that are not dependent on history is not just to accuse them of incompetence...but also to say that they have systematically undermined their own deepest theological point…though God may sometimes have acted within history, ultimate truth lies in a different sphere altogether.”

“There never was a ‘prodigal son’ or a ‘good Samaritan,’ but the stories in which those two characters feature are among the truest ever told….the genre of the gospels, and of the individual stories in which Jesus figures, lies along the continuum of history and biography, not of parable.”

“…the place where the God of Israel, the God of history, the God of creation, had acted climactically within Israel…Whether the stories really did happen is another….matter; but everyone who told them thought that they did.”

“But would the Emmaus Road story be ‘true’ if it never happened?  My answer is ‘no,’…The foundation meaning of the story is that the risen Jesus truly met two disciples on the road, explained the scriptures to them, and was recognized when he broke the bread.  The other meanings are like the waves and ripples caused by a large stone being dropped in a pond.  It is because Jesus was truly raised from the dead that these things are now true.”

“…for the first-century Jewish worldview within which we can most credibly situate both Jesus and his first followers, rich symbolic meanings were to be found precisely within actual events…The richest of symbolic meanings were, of course, those that spoke of the presence of God.”

Politics

“…the turbulent world where people seek justice and peace:  the world of politics.”

“Keep your religion as a matter of private spirituality, they say, and we shall continue to steer the world by other lights.”

“The Jesus of whom I have written stands over against all such split-level universes….God’s sphere and the human sphere belong inseparably together….on earth as it is in heaven.  Not ‘in heaven when we eventually get there’ or ‘in heaven, where we enjoy our private spiritualities,’ but on earth, in the here and now.  And that kingdom, that will of God, concerned….God’s becoming king, and Caesar, Herod, and all other claimants being demoted.  That language…enters the arena known as politics.”

“Calling Jesus ‘Lord’ meant denying that title to Caesar….Persecution happens when people find their symbolic and political universe challenged by other people whose beliefs commit them to a different set of symbols, to a different political allegiance.”

“…after the first generation, which had been truly radical, the church went rapidly downhill, seeking political power, or at least an accommodation with the powers that be, until finally this goal was attained…in the conversion of Constantine.”

“…if the ruler is serious about allegiance to Jesus Christ, the church will retain the right to tell the ruler in no uncertain terms when he (or she) is failing in this basic duty.”

“…following the Jesus about whom I have written leads one into direct political action.”

“…Christians even today are being persecuted for their faith.”

“Just as spirituality and theology need politics, so politics needs spirituality and theology.”

Healing

“Physical healing…but also psychological healing, inner healing, healing of memories, and the like; and also the healing of societies and institutions.

“…the God I worship heals people physically:  I have friends, and at least one close relative, who owe their very lives to healings that came swiftly and directly in answer to widespread prayer after the medical profession had given up.”

“I know also that there are many people for who confident, believing prayers were said who did not get better….I refuse to allow my awareness of all these things to bully or browbeat me into denying other things I also know: that the God who healed through Jesus in his lifetime heals through the Spirit of Jesus today.”

“The church is not called to stand on the sidelines, watching the world from a distance as it groans in travail, longing for redemption….But within the church’s groaning Paul detects the groaning of the Spirit….God does not stand aloof from the pain of the church and hence from the pain of the world…Thus the church is called to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel….but the people who, in obedience to God’s strange vocation, learn to suffer and pray at the place where the world is in pain, so that the world may be healed….Such prayer is thus both worship and mission….the creator God designs to heal and renew the whole creation.”

Jesus and Integration

“…reconciliation between God and the world, between humans, and so on.  I have scarcely spoken of forgiveness, but it is one of the best words for what the worshiper of God in Jesus experiences….the main reason why…I still find it impossible to agree with Marcus in his analysis, has to do with integration.”

“Integration, first, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith….The pre-Easter Jesus does not appear through locked doors, breathe his spirit on his followers, or ascend to heaven.  But from where I sit it always appears, to put it bluntly, that in Marcus’s picture there is too much discontinuity and not enough continuity – just as I expect he will find the opposite in my account…..I see…far more direct continuity between Jesus before and after Easter than Marcus does.”

“…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…”

“I am committed to worshiping Jesus the first-century Palestinian Jew…identical with the messiah of Israel…”

“Integration…second…between Jesus the Jewish messiah and Jesus the Lord acclaimed by Christians.”

“Integration, third, between the different facets of Christian experience.  Many Christians integrate two of the four areas I have outlined; some attempt three; very few draw together all four….following the Jesus I have described enables us to bring together things that are often separated within the practice of the faith.  I regard this as a sign of health.”

“Integration, fourth, between history and eschatology.  One of my biggest problems with Marcus’s account…he has screened out of his account…the very first-century Jewish belief, characteristically expressed in the language of apocalyptic, that Israel’s whole history was reaching its decisive climax…I propose, rather, that history…reveals Jesus as having used eschatological language to indicate his belief that Israel’s history was indeed reaching its God ordained climax, even though that climax would not look like his contemporaries thought it would.”

“Integration, fifth, between history and faith….there is, as Marcus notes, a risk in allowing faith any say in the activity of history….Both history and faith cry out to be described in wider terms yet:  both are mental and emotional activities…

“…the tension supposed to exist between history and faith is much more oblique, much less of a problem and more of a stimulus, than usually conceived. And once we focus both history and faith on Jesus of Nazareth,…we may perhaps find that creation, sacraments, human life, politics, history, and faith come rushing together in new integrations for which as yet we have no language but worship.  That, too, seems to me to possess the ring of truth.”

16.  A Vision of the Christian Life (by Marcus Borg):

“What will emerge is a relational understanding of the Christian life.  Its central dynamic is not believing, but living within the Christian tradition as a sacrament whose purpose is to mediate the Spirit and transform our lives.”

Differences Between our Visions of Jesus

“I affirm his vision of the Christian life whole heartedly:  the two poles of Christian existence as worship and mission….”

“Our essential agreement about the image of the Christian life that emerges out of our study of Jesus and early Christianity is important.”

Our Foundational Categories

“My categories…Jesus as a Spirit person, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator….Tom uses categories native to the Jewish tradition:  Jesus as messiah and prophet of the kingdom of God, the need for the real return from exile, Israel’s vocation to be the light to the nations and so forth.”

“Tom uses emic categories (categories form within the culture), I using etic (categories from outside the culture) categories.  And I can translate my etic categories back into Jewish categories, just as Tom presumably could also translate his Jewish categories into more etic language.”

“I choose a cross-cultural approach in part because my audience over the last twenty-five years has been quite secularized and pluralistic college and university students.”

“…many people are experiencing a crisis of confidence about the meaning and truthfulness of the Christian tradition.  An older understanding of Christianity has ceased to be compelling to millions of people over the last thirty to forty years and is the major cause of the loss of membership in mainline denominations.  I have described that older understanding elsewhere with five adjectives….literalistic, doctrinal, moralistic, exclusivistic, and afterlife oriented.  It has ceased to work for a large number of people.  They find that if they must take the Bible literally, they cannot take it at all.  Moreover, the notion that Christian doctrines are true, and the teachings of other religions false, sounds increasingly dubious, as does the related notion that only Christians can be ‘saved.’ ”

“…an emphasis upon the experience of the sacred across cultures has a credibility that a focus on a single religious tradition does not.  A single religious tradition can easily be doubted as merely a human creation and projection, but when one sees that the great religious traditions share much in common, especially at the level of experience and practice, one begins to wonder if there might be something to religion.”

“…the approach I and many of my colleagues represent provides a way back into the life of the church and, for those who never left, a way of quickening and deepening their life with God.”

“Both approaches and angles of vision are useful and valid it seems to me.  They need not be seen as requiring an either-or choice but can be combined easily as a both-and.  In my study of Jesus I have sought to do so myself, not only seeing Jesus through cross-cultural lenses, but also seeing consistently to relate what I see to the language and history of ancient Judaism…I can imagine somebody combining not only our angles of vision but even our major conclusions.”

Epistemology and Faith

“By the phrase ‘epistemology and faith,’ I mean the role of faith in knowing about Jesus….the role of metahistorical factors in the study of Jesus.  Metahistorical factors are convictions that go beyond what a historian as historian can affirm…the conviction that God is real and can be experienced….that the risen living Christ is real and can be known.”

“…one could grant that people have experiences of God and the risen Christ but that there are psychological and cultural explanations of such experiences that do not require the affirmation, ‘The sacred is real.’ ”

“…whether or not I believe something to have happened has nothing to do with whether it did.”

How Much is Historical?

“…how much of what the gospels report about Jesus is historical, and how much needs to be historical?”

“Tom and I agree that the gospels combine historical material with metaphorical significance….What we disagree about is how much is history remembered, and whether gospel texts (beyond the parables) can be metaphorically true without also being historically factual.”

“….Tom’s  position, he sees the gospel narratives as…events that really happened…the truth of the Christian gospels depends upon the basic factuality of their reports about Jesus.”

“….I see the gospel traditions about Jesus as….history remembered, some combine history remembered with history metaphorized, and some are only history metaphorized…”  Examples of material I place in the last category include the birth stories, the multiplication of loaves, walking on water and stilling a storm, the transfiguration story, and sayings reporting that Jesus had a messianic self-awareness and saw his death as having a salvific purpose.”

“Moreover, I do not think the metaphorical truth of a gospel narrative depends upon it also reporting a specific historical event.  We thus disagree not only about how much is historically factual, but about how much needs to be.”

“For Jesus and Israel, history is the place where the will and passion of God are known.  The issue, rather, is whether the truth of a gospel story is dependent upon its being grounded in a particular historical event.  Tom says ‘yes,’ and I say ‘no.’ ”

“What I am confident about is that we know enough about the historical Jesus to give substantial content to the claim that in Jesus we see what God is like and what a life full of God is like.”

Sources and Method

“About one step of the methodological process, we agree:  historical context is utterly crucial.”

“But we disagree significantly about the other step of the methodological process, namely, our understanding of the sources of the gospels and how to use them….my method for using the gospels has three stages.  First, a decision about sources…second, constructing a hypothesis from early layers...third, using single-source material that is congruent with the hypothesis constructed at stage two.  Tom essentially bypasses this and uses a one-stage method for using the gospels.”

“…Mark is the earliest of our existing gospels and that Matthew and Luke used Mark.  Of next importance...is the existence of Q, a hypothetical early document consisting mostly of the wisdom teaching of Jesus, also used by Matthew and Luke.”

“Tom is right that there is not unanimity among scholars about the priority of Mark and the existence of Q…he goes about his historical work without a decision about earlier and later sources.”

“He proposes instead a method based on hypothesis and verification: the most satisfactory hypothesis is the one that enables us to incorporate the greatest amount of data.  The effect of this methodological move on his work is important:  everything in the synoptic gospels becomes a candidate for inclusion in his reconstruction of Jesus, the criterion being primarily whether it can be accommodated in an overall hypothesis.”

“We make different probability judgments about the sources.  In the case of the priority of Mark, it seems to me that the probability is very high indeed…Slightly less higher in probability is the existence of Q…”

“The consequence for our historical work is considerable.  When Mark and Matthew and/or Luke all report the same story or saying, I understand the differences among them to be the product of Matthew and Luke’s modification of Mark.  They are the product of editorial revision and thus are not candidates for historical data about Jesus.  Tom…can sometimes treat differences among Matthew, Mark, and Luke as the product of independent witnesses to the same event or saying…”

“By seeking to accommodate as much of the data as possible, Tom may be seeking to accommodate material that in fact is not evidence.  And it seems to me that his claim that Jesus saw his own death as central to his messianic vocation may be using data that are likely to be the product of the community after Easter.”

A Vision of the Christian Life

A Relational Understanding

“….I teach an introductory-level course on the Bible….I emphasize in particular that it does not see the Bible as divine in origin but as human, namely, as the product of two ancient communities….As such, the Bible tells us not how God sees things, but how those two ancient communities saw things.”

“ ‘….the Bible is like a lens through which we see God, and …..it’s important to believe in the lens.’…the Bible is a lens, and as a lens, it is not the object of belief but a means whereby we see.”

“…a relational understanding of the Christian life.  I do not think being a Christian is primarily about believing.  It is not about believing in the lens, but about entering a deepening relationship to that which we see through the lens.  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.”

“Thinking of the Christian life as being primarily about believing in God, the Bible, and Jesus is thus a modern mistake…Beliefs have little ability to change our lives.  One can believe all the right things and remain a jerk, or worse….the Christian life is about a relationship to the God to whom the tradition points.  What matters is the relationship, for it can and does and will transform our lives.”

“…what matters is hearing the voice that speaks to us through the tradition, not believing in the tradition.”

“….we are to listen for and respond to the divine voice.  What matters,…is that we hear the voice.”

Jesus as Lens

“I define the Christian life most compactly as a relationship with God as revealed in Jesus Christ….Language of revelation connects to seeing…”

What God is Like

“God is near, at hand, and can be experienced…the one in whom we live and move and have our being.”

“The near God is immediately accessible….God was accessible to those who were ‘not much’ or worse, including the radically marginalized and outcasts.”

“God is compassionate…The compassion of God is commonly and more abstractly spoken of as the love of God.  God is love – and it can be a fierce love.”

“God is passionate about justice….Indeed, Jesus’ passion for justice in the name of God was the cause of this death:  he challenged and suffered the wrath of the powers.”

A Life Full of God

“….discipleship means ‘following after Jesus’: taking seriously what Jesus took seriously.”

“What is it about Jesus that we are to imitate?....five characteristics as most central:  a life centered in the Spirit, lived by an alternative wisdom, marked by compassion, concerned about justice, and lived within the alternative community of Jesus.”

“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…What matters is opening to the Spirit.”

“A deepening relationship to the Spirit is transforming.  It transforms our sense of identity. We are not simply or primarily who our cultural conventions say we are.  It can liberate us…It enables us to face suffering in a new way.”

“A deepening relationship to the Spirit leads us to see everybody and everything…as a manifestation of the Spirit…as created by God.”

“…we see people and nature itself as creations of God, and we are led to be compassionate as God is compassionate.  It is how Jesus saw, and how mystics and saints in all traditions saw…The Spirit leads us to see other people not in cultural categories of attractive and unattractive, successful and unsuccessful, interesting and uninteresting, deserving and undeserving.  It leads us to see that common categories of ‘good behavior’ and ‘bad behavior,’ and thus of ‘good people’ and ‘bad people,’ are very often simply based on deeply ingrained cultural convention.”

“Destitution and degradation….the product of domination systems created and maintained by the rich and powerful to serve their own interests.”

“Compassion thus includes social justice.”

“Life in the Spirit is also life in community.  The vision of Jesus is not individualistic…he saw the covenant with God as not simply about our relationship to God, but also about our relationship with one another….it embodied his inclusive social vision.”

“A vision of the Christian life that takes Jesus seriously would not be very much concerned with the afterlife.”

“… ‘eternal life’… ‘life of the age to come,’ not ‘life in heaven.’….John sometimes speaks of ‘the life of the age to come’ as a present reality, not simply as a state we can enter into after death.”

“My point is also not to deny an afterlife.  But it wasn’t central to Jesus’ teaching.  The vision of the Christian life that flows out of taking him seriously is about a relationship with the Spirit of God that transforms our lives in the present, not about a reward that only comes later.”

The Gospels as Lens

“…we need to develop the ability to hear the gospels (and the Bible as a whole) in a state of postcritical naivete.  It is a state beyond the childhood stage of precritical naivete and the adolescent and adult stage of critical thinking.”

“Those of us who grew up in the church first heard these stories as young children in a state of precritical naivete….we took it for granted that they really happened the way they were told.”

“…the stage of critical thinking, which involves evaluating things we believed and were taught in childhood….We begin to wonder if the biblical stories really happened the way they’re told.  It begins to take faith to believe them…we are no longer able to hear them as true stories…..Although the progression from precritical naivete to critical thinking is virtually automatic, moving beyond the skepticism of a critical mode of thinking wedded to the modern worldview is not.  Many people get stuck in this stage, sometimes for their whole lives.””

“Beyond critical thinking is postcritical naivete….the ability to hear the central stories of the Christian tradition once again as true stories….postcritical naivete is not a return to precritical naivete, for one knows that the stories may not be historically factual. But one also knows that their truth does not depend upon their historical factuality….‘I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.’ ”

“As T. S. Eliot wrote:  

‘And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.’ ”

“…post-critical naivete…affirms insights from the historical-critical stage and integrates them into a larger paradigm….A post-critical reading does not disavow the critical, but brings the critical with it.”

“Because I combine historical Jesus research with a metaphorical and narrative reading of the gospels, I can affirm that both the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus matter.  One does not need to choose between the two.”

Living Within the Tradition

“Postcritical naivete provides a way of hearing the gospel stories of Jesus as deeply true.”

“..life coming out of death, light shining in the darkness, a banquet at which the wine never runs out and the best is saved for last.  Being a Christian involves living within this tradition and letting it shape our lives.  It means letting these stories have their way with us.”

“…I think of the Christian tradition not simply as a lens, but as a sacrament.  A sacrament is a means of grace, a mediator of the sacred.  More than a lens through which we see, the tradition is also a sacrament that mediates to us that which we behold.”

“Celtic Christianity speaks of ‘thin places.’….that reality has at least two layers or levels or dimensions:  the visible world of our ordinary experience and the sacred, understood not only as the source of everything but also as a presence interpenetrating everything.  In ‘thin places’ the boundary between the two levels becomes soft and permeable, the veil becomes diaphanous and sometimes lifts.  Jesus was a ‘thin place,’…Through these ways and more, the living Christ comes to us and transforms our lives, even today.”