Give Us This Day ...

Chapters 9 & 10
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 V:  WAS JESUS GOD?

9.  Jesus and God (by Marcus Borg): 

“…most Christians think of Jesus as divine, and most non-Christians think this is what Christians believe.  Some Christians see agreement with this claim as a primary test of orthodoxy…. ‘Do you believe Jesus was God?’…. no, and yes.”

“Do I think Jesus thought of himself as divine?  No.”

“But if we make the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, then my answer would be, ‘Yes, the post-Easter Jesus is a divine reality – is indeed one with God.’  And about the pre-Easter Jesus, I would say, ‘He is the embodiment or incarnation of God.’ ”

The Pre-Easter Jesus and God

“I grant that it is possible that Jesus thought of himself as the messiah, as Tom argues, but I am not at all confident about such a claim.”

“…if you think you are the light of the world, you’re not.  That is, perceiving oneself in such grand terms is a fairly good indicator that you’re off base.  The parallel statement, of course, is:  if you think you are the messiah, you’re not.”

“And though saints and Spirit persons are a bit crazy, when judged by conventional standards, they typically do not think of themselves in grandiose terms.  I don’t think people like Jesus have an exalted perception of themselves.”

As Incarnation of God

“Incarnation means ‘embodiment’:  in Jesus, God became embodied, the Word became flesh.”

“Supernatural theism sees God as a being ‘out there’ and not ‘here.’  Within this framework, God’s relationship to the world is seen in interventionist terms….For thirty years or so, more or less, God was here, incarnate in Jesus.  But normally God isn’t here.  This view sees Jesus as the unique incarnation of an absent interventionist God…”

“…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.”

“Writers on spirituality sometimes speak of ‘emptiness’ as a condition of the psyche that makes possible being filled by God….Jesus was so ‘empty’ in this sense that he could be filled with the Spirit.  Thus I see Jesus as the embodiment and incarnation of the God who is everywhere present…as completely human as we are.”

The Post-Easter Christological Images

The Origin of the Images

“…experiences (which continue to this day) of Jesus as a living reality with the qualities of God, a figure of the present and not of the past.”

The Christological Images as the Voice of the Community

“…christological language is the voice of the community after Easter and not the voice of Jesus….the remarkable collection of ‘I am’ sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospel of John…I and most mainline scholars do not think Jesus said these things.”

“…if we think of these not as self-statements of Jesus but as the voice of the community, they become very powerful… ‘We have found in this person the light of the world who has shown us the way out of darkness.’ ”

“…I find the christological language of the New Testament much more compelling when I hear it as the testimony of the community rather than as the self-proclamation of a Galilean Jewish peasant….The community says, in effect, ‘This one who was among us as Jesus of Nazareth is also the Word of God, the Son of God, and the Wisdom of God.’  In him, we see what God is like.”

The Christological Images as Metaphors

“Metaphors can…be true, but their truth is not literal.”

“But to see him as the true vine implies taking him very seriously as the one upon whom we as the branches depend for life, and as one whose life flows through us.”

“Wisdom/Sophia in the Jewish tradition is often personified as a woman…she invites people to follow her way, which is the way of wisdom rather than folly.”

The Christological Images as Confessional Language

“The christological metaphors are confessional.  That is, they are confessions of faith, not statements of verifiable fact…..these affirmations about Jesus are true.  But they are true as metaphors.  The recognition that this is metaphorical language is crucial.”

The Creed and the Trinity

“How could early Christians reconcile their experience of and devotion to the post-Easter Jesus as a divine reality with their commitment to monotheism?....the Trinity…”

“I have no difficulty saying and affirming the Nicene Creed….It crystallizes the developing tradition at a particular point in time”

“…if the creed had been formulated in a different culture, its language would have been very different.”

“...the creed and the Trinity affirm….three functions….First…that the living risen Christ is a divine reality….Second…the one God is known in three primary ways: as the God of Israel, as the Word and Wisdom of God in Jesus, and as the abiding Spirit….The risen living Christ is thus not a second God but is one with God….Third….by framing the life of Jesus within conception by the Spirit and resurrection to God’s right hand, it affirms that what happened in Jesus was ‘of God.’ ”

“I do not see it as a set of literally true doctrinal statements to which I am supposed to give my intellectual assent, but as a culturally relative product of the ancient church.”

“When I say the creed I understand myself to be identifying with the community that says these words together...also with generations of long-dead Christians who said these same ancient words….I experience a momentary participation in the communion of saints.  Given all of the above, I think we would understand the purpose of the creed better if we sang it or chanted it.”

The Cumulative Christological Claim

“Each metaphor has its own nuances, and it is important and illuminating to explore them individually.”

“The christological metaphors and the more conceptual language of the Nicene Creed..….claim that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God….Jesus discloses what God is like.  Jesus is the epiphany of God…”

“To affirm that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God does not require affirming that he is the only, or only adequate, revelation of God.”

“…these passages…need not be understood to mean that Jesus…is the only way of salvation.  Instead, we might understand them…as reflecting the joy of having found one’s salvation through Jesus…”

“But to be Christian is to affirm, ‘Here, in Jesus, I see more clearly than anywhere else what God is like.’  This affirmation can be made with one’s whole heart while still affirming that God is also known in other traditions.”

10.  The Divinity of Jesus (by N. T. Wright): 

“I developed a stock response:…..Which god is it you don’t believe in?....So they would stumble out a few phrases about the god they didn’t believe in:  a being who lived up in the sky, looking down disapprovingly at the world…. ‘Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god.  I don’t believe in that god either.’ “

“….I believe in the god I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.’ ”

God in First-Century Judaism

“What did first-century Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, mean by god?....Their belief can be summed up in a single phrase:  creational and covenantal monotheism.”

“Classic Jewish monotheism…believed, first, that there was one God who created heaven and earth and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and, second, that this God had called Israel to be his special people…..Jewish-style monotheism meant living in this story, trusting in this one true God, the God of creation and covenant, of exodus and return.”

“…he could be trusted to act more specifically on behalf of Israel.”

“….liberating them finally from all their oppressors, would also be the vindication of his own name, his reputation.”

“To embrace Wisdom is therefore to discover the secret of being truly human, of reflecting God’s image.”

Monotheism and Early Christology

“God’s Love…a person, the crucified and risen Jesus.”

“…at every point of creation and redemption we discover, not Wisdom, but Jesus.”

“…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.”

The Origin of Christology

“….in Jesus God had done what, in the Bible, God had said he would do himself.  He had heard the people’s cry and had come to help them.”

“…Jesus’ resurrection led the early church to speak of him within the language of Jewish monotheism…Resurrection pointed to messiahship; messiahship to the task performed on the cross; that task, to the God who had promised to accomplish it himself.”

“…a central feature of Jewish expectation, and kingdom expectation at that, in Jesus’ time was the hope that yhwh would return in person to Zion.”

“And Jesus seems to have believed it about himself.  The language was deeply coded, but the symbolic action was not.  He was coming to Zion, doing what yhwh had promised to do.  He explained his action with riddles all pointing in the same direction.  Recognize this, and you start to see it all over the place, in parables and actions whose other layers have preoccupied us….He believed himself called to do and be what, in the scriptures, only Israel’s God did and was.”

“…a one-man countertemple movement.”

“Judaism believed that its God would triumph over the powers of evil, within Israel as well as outside.”

“His awareness, in faith, of the one he called Abba, Father, sustained him in his messianic vocation to Israel, acting as his Father’s personal agent to Israel.”

“I do not think Jesus ‘knew he was God’ ”

“…he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only yhwh himself could do and be.’ ”

Jesus and Christology Today

“Using incarnational language about Jesus, and Trinitarian language about God, is of course self-involving: it entails a commitment of faith, love, trust, and obedience.