The  Meaning Of Jesus: 

Two Visions

by Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright

HarperSanFrancisco:  March, 2000.  304 pages.

Reviewed by John Testerman

"The Meaning of Jesus—Two Visions" contains alternating chapters by N. T. Wright, a conservative New Testament scholar, and Marcus J. Borg, a liberal New Testament scholar and well-known member of the "Jesus Seminar." This is an excellent introduction for the educated layperson interested in the current historical Jesus debates. 

N. T. Wright is no flaming fundamentalist and Borg is by no means the most skeptical member of the Jesus seminar; nevertheless both are highly articulate and readable spokespersons of their respective camps and both are committed Christians.

What follows is a focused discussion of what I believe to be the key issue in the book—the differing worldviews of the authors, which explains their contrasting approaches to the New Testament documents and Marcus Borg’s claim that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish mystic.

Worldviews

Christian Supernatural Theism:  According to this worldview, in addition to all the beings in the universe, there is another being, namely God, who created the world and intervenes in it from time to time. God, though separate from the world, can be known from his interventions in the world, most decisively in those events described in the Bible. Because most of the important interventions took place long ago, leaving no definitive evidence, "believing what you cannot know" is a major feature of supernatural theistic religion. That is why we call the adherents "believers."  Because God’s interventions as recorded in the Bible are important, even crucial, for theistic belief, modernist criticism of Biblical source documents, such as provided by the "Jesus Seminar," is highly threatening to believers.

Modernism:  According to this worldview,  the 5 senses plus reason are adequate tools for understanding the world. Reality consists of that and only that which can be detected by the 5 senses or their instrumental extensions—the physical universe. Nothing that can’t be studied by science is allowed into the modernist universe, so "beliefs" in miracles, supernatural entities, and other stuff not directly verifiable by experience are highly problematic. Therefore, reports of miraculous occurrences in the Bible could not be historical in any literal sense. Modernists don’t believe in believing more than they can know.

N. T. Wright is a supernatural theist, while Marcus Borg is a modernist scholar. Thus Wright, the believer, starts from the traditional understanding of the gospels as his default position and retreats from it only so far as his scholarship forces him. But Borg, the modernist, is not interested in believing more than he can know. He asks, "based purely on the historical evidence, what can I really know about Jesus?" Starting from zero, he builds things up bit by bit as he feels compelled by the evidence. 

But Borg is also a mystic, which differentiates him from the other Jesus Seminar scholars. Having become a skeptic and agnostic in young adulthood, he had a mystical experience in his 30’s which caused him to "meet Jesus again for the first time." For those readers who are interested in his spiritual odyssey, I highly recommend his book by that title.

Borg as Mystic

In the mystical experience, a 6^th sense emerges, which discloses an unexpected sacred depth underlying surface physical reality. According to Richard Young, "Mysticism is the end of belief and the beginning of knowledge of God. It is the experimental science of the divine." 

Borg the modernist and Borg the mystic can happily coexist because neither is interested in believing more than one can know. Both are empirical. The modernist and the mystic base their views of the world on their directly known experience of the world. The type of world disclosed depends on whether you use 5 senses or 6. With his 5 senses Borg is a modernist; add the 6^th, a mystic.

The faith of Borg the mystic depends not at all on believing in the literal historicity of events described in the Bible. Thus we have the (to believers) amazing spectacle of Borg the committed Christian, nonchalantly discussing such  crucial issues (to believers) as the historicity of the virgin birth and the resurrection as if the outcomes were of mere academic interest. He can do this because the outcomes of historical research do not threaten his faith, which is based on his firsthand experience of the world, not secondhand "beliefs," which can be threatened every time a new book is published. Thus the seeming contradiction between Borg the modernist scholar and Borg the committed Christian is resolved. I don’t know of a better way of explaining how the two Borgs can live in the same body.

Borg describes his own world view as one of "dialectical theism" or "panentheism" literally, "everything-in-God" (which should be clearly distinguished from pantheism, the view that everything is God). The world is marinated in God, has its being in God. "In Him we live and move and have our being." God is not only transcendent (more than), but also immanent (within the world). Thus God can be part of the lived experience of the world. 

Borg sees the Hebrew prophets experiencing God as intimately knowable and involved with the world. In medieval Christianity, God was not only seen as transcendent, meaning "more than" the world, but also immanent within the world, and thus experientially knowable. But the experiential knowledge of God has fallen on hard times in Western Christianity since the Enlightenment, as transcendence came to be more and more understood as placing God literally separate from the universe and God’s immanence was de-emphasized. Thus today the supernatural theist sees God as "out there," known mainly by miracle and special revelation, but the mystic’s experience of God is very much "in here." Readers interested in further discussion of these worldview issues would enjoy Borg’s The God We Never Knew, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Jesus as a Jewish Mystic

In Chapter 4 Borg the mystic tries to convince us that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish mystic. "My claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic means Jesus was one for whom God was an experiential reality," he writes.  "He was one of those people for whom the sacred was, to use William James’ terms, a firsthand experience rather than a secondhand belief. Mystics, as I use the term, are people who have decisive and typically frequent firsthand experiences of the sacred."

The basic mystical insight is that underlying the everyday world of hierarchies and distinctions and the apparent separateness of individual lives is a fundamental spiritual unity. Jesus saw this sacred world as breaking into history and accessible to all. This is very subversive. It leads to compassionate action and radically trivializes all social distinctions and barriers of class, education, moral behavior and gender. This explains why Jesus was so at odds with the guardians of a rule and purity-focused religious system based on rigid hierarchies. This is why moral outcasts, the poor and the women followed him gladly.

According to Borg, Jesus' mysticism got him in to trouble with the temple elite in Jerusalem. If the kingdom of God is spread out in the world for all to experience and God is accessible within, we don’t need priests and temple hierarchies to approach God. Jesus taught a spiritual path of love, forgiveness, selfless service, and devotion to God. Having a vision of reality radically different from the ancient domination system, Jesus was a counter cultural wisdom teacher like the Buddha and Lao Tsu. Borg points out that especially in Q, a hypothetical document posited to be older than the current Gospels of the New Testament, we see the teaching of an enlightened one whose consciousness has been shaped by the experience of the sacred, who tries to lead his hearers out of habituated ways of seeing.

Finally (and I regard this as the strongest argument), Jesus is universally recognized by the world community of mystics as a leading representative of their species. Mystics recognize one another. That is the main reason, in addition to cross-cultural religious scholarship, why the mystic Marcus Borg picked up on Jesus’ mysticism. Mystics have a way of speaking that gives them away. Even Jesus’ enemies recognized that he didn’t speak as the scribes, who taught second-hand beliefs, but spoke as one with first-hand knowledge. He spoke differently because he saw differently.

In Borg’s Christology, Jesus of Nazareth the historical man discovered within himself a fundamental unity with God that radically transformed his experience of the world. He lived out of this connection to God to such a degree that he became a transparent window into the divine. The Post-Easter Jesus opened this window wider still. To be a Christian doesn’t mean to believe certain things about the window, it means to be among those who look at God through this window, Borg contends.

Although Borg’s Christology is not orthodox, it provides an alternative perspective that may be more compelling to those who find the traditional view problematic and exclusivist. Jesus as "window into God" doesn’t imply this is the only possible window. Also, this emphasis focuses our attention on God and how God may be experienced in our own lives, as opposed to doctrinal or historical arguments over Jesus. In Borg’s view, the important issue is not what you believe about the window itself, but that you look through the window and are transformed by what you see.