Rediscovering Marcus Borg--as He Rediscovers Jesus

Marcus Borg, now retired from his position as Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, down the road at Oregon State Univ. (Corvallis), was just the voice that mainline (i.e., liberal) Christians needed in the 1990s. Buffeted by the rise of Evangelicalism, having seen their children leave the "fold" of the mainline Church, uncertain about the role of historical criticism of the Bible and its connection to faith, swiftly losing their memories of the "Sixties" or other times when things seemed to go much better for them, mainline Christians needed someone to whom to turn to tell them that their inclinations towards faith not only were good ones but were ones which shaped Jesus, too. Borg was perfectly positioned to be the spokesman for that generation of people, mostly now in their 60s and 70s, who wanted that type of assurance. Of calm demeanor and scholarly mien, with literate, lucid and lapidary prose, Borg poured out book after book in the 1980s and 1990s, which garnered him attention and high respect in many circles. When he began to speak further about his own faith, and not simply the way that scholarship on Jesus might be "relevant" to faith today, people loved him more. Here was a child of the 1960s, gently standing up for biblical scholarship and liberal Christian faith, with humor, passion, eloquence and skill.

Rediscovering Borg in 2008

With all these things in mind, I decided to pick up his 1994 book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time again. I wanted to know how it "read" after fourteen years, and whether the insights he so lucidly laid out in the mid-1990s still had any resonance with me in 2008. The glowing tributes in the front of the book meet you first, but I quickly bypassed them to get to Borg's content. What he wants/wanted to do in the book was to present Jesus as he lived historically (i.e., the "pre-Easter Jesus") and then bring out lessons for us today regarding how the Jesus he discovers can aid faith and the church. Borg's central point is that Jesus was in a relationship with God, and this relational character of faith is more central to faith than what he calls the fideist (a list of beliefs) or moralist (a list of commands) vision of faith.

When he looks specifically at Jesus' life, Borg identifies four themes of importance: (1) Jesus was a spirit person; (2) Jesus was a teacher of wisdom; (3) Jesus was a social prophet; and (4) Jesus was a movement founder. When you actually come down to it, however, he is not much interested in (4). Borg tries to put Jesus in the context not simply of 1st century BCE/CE Judaism, but within the context of "spirit people" generally in the history of religion or "wisdom teachers" throughout the world. Well, in a word, he doesn't really have time to show how Jesus is part of this larger movement; he pretty much just states his sympathy for studying Jesus in this broader history-of-religions way. But his most painstaking attention is to Jesus not simply a wisdom teacher but as the personification or instantiation of Sophia herself. Popular as a theme in 1990s feminist scholarship, this insight suggests that Jesus was a person who can give us insight into the "feminine" side of God. Then when he turns to Jesus as the social prophet, who delivers "subversive wisdom," who stood up to the powers that be to free them from their dependence on ritual and purity concerns, which deaden the religious spirit, we have his case fully made. Jesus was a remarkable person who brought us striaght into the heart of God, through his work of wisdom and social prophecy.

In the last chapter of his book, Borg introduces us to three "master stories" of Christian life, and he opts for the stories of Exodus and return from Exile over one that stresses Sacrifice and Purity; thus, the need of the (liberal) church for the day is to understand the dynamic movement of God who brings people out of darkness and into the freedom of homeland or return from Exile.

Gentle Critique

Because Borg presents himself with a kind of scholarly dispassion and reasonability, I will only gently give my assessment of his effort. I will do so on terms that he lays out--rather than trying to suggest an alternative vision of how to understand Jesus, though I did that in my 1997 book Yearning Minds and Burning Hearts: Rediscovering the Spirituality of Jesus. First, I was bothered by his "halfway" historical approach. He works on the assumption that the "real Jesus" or the "historical Jesus" or the "pre-Easter" Jesus is able to be isolated from later "layers" of material about Jesus that make up the Gospels. He then proceeds to tell us a little about the Jesus Seminar, which reflects this approach to the text. But after describing the voting method of the Seminar, he just blithely identifies the bedrock of the tradition (Jesus as sage, Jesus as social prophet) without giving us any reason for thinking that these aspects of the tradition are any more "historical" than those that suggest Jesus cast out demons (I don't think he uses the word "demon" once in the book) or that he expected the imminent end of the age. That is, he gives the impression of disciplined, rational and somewhat objective historical method but then abandons that, or doesn't bring us into it at all, as the book develops.

Second, he seemingly has a confused role for Sophia in his book. He contrasts two kinds of wisdom--conventional and subversive (which do you think Jesus demonstrates?), and identifies the former with the Book of Proverbs in the Bible or with general pieces of advice that come out of our or any culture. But Sophia, who seeminly instantiates Jesus' unconventional/subversive Wisdom, is most fully presented in Proverbs, of all places. That is, how does a figure from "conventional" Wisdom become the model for Jesus' self-understanding of "subversive" Wisdom? I think he is trying to fit the feminist scholarship into the probably unsupportable distinction between conventional and subversive wisdom in such a way as to lead to confusion and inconsistency.

Conclusion

As I re-read his book, I was impressed by how "Nineties" it sounds. The words "radical" or "subversive" or "transformative" or "journey" suffuse the pages to such an extent that I don't know really what he means by them. But, I think these are good "buzz" words for aging 60s' radicals or people who would have liked to be radical at some time in the past, and so the words pass without much critical attention. What strikes me, however, about this book after my own critical reading, however, is how non-radical it is. It is a pretty mainstream "scholarly book made easy" to the general public. How radical is the mainstream of Biblical scholarship? Well, I lived with them for more than a decade, and they are a conventional lot. So, when "radical" language is developed in a protective, academic, armchair world, what are we to think of it? Sometimes, indeed, such language can be provocative and thoughtful, and even can reorient our thinking. But here we have consensus scholarship dished up to a popular audience. It is the "consensus" that Jesus was "radical." Phew, now we can all agree on that one. And now we can be transformed...

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