© 1992 Ken Glasziou
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Queensland
A recently published book entitled “Jesus, A New Vision” by Marcus J. Borg (Harper Collins) may be an indication that the message of The URANTIA Book is having a considerable direct or indirect influence in academic circles. It may also portend that great things are about to happen in the Christian churches.
Borg is a professor of religious studies at Oregon State University and the author of several academic studies relating to Jesus. This book is written for a wider readership and has some quite startling revelations. In it Borg announces that the risen Christ who came to die for the sins of the world was an invention of the early church and was never preached by Jesus himself. He calls this the popular image of Jesus, as still preached in the mainstream churches, and states that it is seriously misleading.
That this image is inaccurate, Borg says, is a bedrock conclusion arrived at by mainstream New Testament scholarship that commenced as far back as the seventeenth century, accelerating in the nineteenth and twentieth. “Mainstream biblical scholarship,” he states, “is the approach to Scripture taught in the seminaries of the mainstream churches. It is the product of using an historical method on the books of the New Testament, treating them as human documents rather than as divine documents guaranteed to be infallible by God.”
Borg tells us that the image of Jesus as taught in the seminaries for most of this century is that Jesus saw himself as a prophet who came to proclaim the end of the world in his own time and therefore preached the urgency for repentance before it was too late.
Primarily this concept of Jesus (the eschatological image) had its origin with the work of Albert Schweitzer which, though at first branded as sensational, gradually became the consensus understanding among scholars. That the clergy of the mainstream churches (which include Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Episcopalians, the majority of Lutherans, and some Baptists) have been taught that Jesus saw himself in this way is indeed a revelation to lay people. The fact that the clergy has not passed the message on to the laity appears to be because they could find no satisfactory substitute for the popular image of the sacrificial Christ who died to pay for our sins.
In the light of this information it seems that many, perhaps most, clergy, have for long been preaching a message that they themselves did not believe. Is it any wonder that the numbers in church congregations has plummeted? The clergy are faced with presenting a lameduck Christianity. When mainstream clergy do preach about Jesus, Borg says, they tend to emphasize the “kerygma” — the message of the early church about Jesus and not the historical Jesus himself, concerning whom they are strangely silent.
An interesting comparison is made between what Borg calls the “reality” for the times of Jesus and the modern era. This is the total sociological environment in which we grow up and more or less unconsciously absorb into our thought patterns. Virtually all of our life experiences are then interpreted in terms of that “reality”. In Jesus’ time, and up to quite recently, it was normal to accept that our “reality” included the existence of that “other world”, the world of spirit co-existing with our material world and contactable by holy men, prophets, shamans, mystics, charismatics and so on. In the modern world the norm is to reject the existence of this “other world” and to interpret everything in terms of what can be experienced objectively and directly. This attitude is often unconscious — we reject things out of hand that do not fit our “reality”.
…Borg Announces That The Risen Christ Who Came To Die For The Sins Of The world was an invention of the early church and was never preached by Jesus himself.
Borg makes no attempt to prove the divinity of Jesus but concentrates on Jesus, the man, and what Jesus believed about God. In so doing, he presents a vision of a Jesus that could be acceptable to both mainstream and “fringe” Christians and perhaps to many who have previously been non-committal. This Jesus is portrayed as one who was remarkably in touch with that “other world”, a charismatic, a healer, a teacher and sage, a prophet, the founder of a revitalization movement, a challenge. Jesus is also presented as an epiphany of God, who discloses that at the centre of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well being, both as individuals and as individuals within society. To Jesus, says Borg, “reality” was ultimately Spirit, a gracious, nurturing, and compassionate God, Creator of all things, by whom and in whom everything exists.
This book contains a multitude of references that indicate a new movement is emerging in the world of religious scholasticism that has the potential to turn the Christian world upside down. Its approach to religion and to Jesus is reasonable and rational. The very nature of the God it presents is one that carries within itself an automatic correcting mechanism for most of the inconsistencies of conventional Christianity. There is also an awareness that the popular modern world view of “reality” is flawed, that purely materialist science has been judged as false by the findings of theoretical physics.
Of course this does not prove the truth of the religious world view, but it does undermine the central reason for rejecting it.
There are many parallels between Borg’s work and The URANTIA Book in respect to the teachings of and about Jesus. Borg describes Jesus as a remarkably free person, freẹ from fear and anxious preoccupation, thus able to see clearly and to love. This freedom was grounded in the Spirit, from which flowed the other central qualities of his life: courage, insight, joy, and above all compassion, all these being the “fruits of the Spirit.” Borg says that what we can know about Jesus invites us to see “life in the Spirit” as a striking alternative to the way we typically live our lives. He states that as an epiphany of God, Jesus was a “disclosure” or “revelation” of God. Jesus did not reveal God only in his teaching but in his very way of being.
Borg describes Jesus as a remarkably free person, free from fear and anxious preoccupation, thus able to see clearly and to love. This freedom was grounded in the Spirit, from which flowed the other central qualities of his life: courage, insight, joy, and above all compassion, all these being the “fruits of the Spirit”.
Just how much The URANTIA Book and its teachings have contributed either directly or indirectly to this “new vision of Jesus” is something we will never know. It is doubtful that this will bother the midwayers who wrote:
“The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must no longer be sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions!” (UB 196:1.2)
It is unlikely that Borg’s work will be read by significant numbers outside of the academic community, hence it will take a long, long time for this new vision to permeate down through the seminaries to the general congregations of the churches. However, as The URANTIA Book tells us, patience is a virtue and slow evolution is more productive than disruptive revolution. But URANTIA Book readers might well consider giving Borg’s book as a present to some of their non-reader, church-going friends.