© 1994 Meredith J. Sprunger
© 1994 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Marcus J. Borg
Harper San Francisco, 1994, pp.
Biblical scholars like Rudolf Bultman have pointed out that using the resources of secular history, we can know almost nothing about the life and personality of Jesus. Contemporary Biblical scholarship confirms this paucity of information about Jesus in secular literary sources. Marcus J. Borg, Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, in his most recent book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, shows that even though we cannot verify much about Jesus, we can appreciate and participate in the religion of Jesus. He describes his own pilgrimage from naive, unquestioning belief in Christ, through collegiate skepticism, to a mature Christian faith. This was a journey from secondhand belief to firsthand experience.
Borg’s book stands in sharp contrast to John Crossman’s Jesus, a Revolutionary Biography (Harper San Francisco, 1994). Crossman uses his extensive knowledge of crosscultural anthropology and Greco-Roman and Jewish history to reject most of the Biblical biographical data about Jesus. Among the many recent books on the historical Jesus, only Borg explores what the latest Biblical scholarship means for personal faith.
Many Christians, especially in mainline churches, find that their childhood image of Jesus no longer makes much sense. “It is for these people,” Borg says, “this book was written.” (p.1) The author distinguishes between the pre-Easter Jesus (historical) and post-Easter Jesus (early Christian faith). Jesus’ relation to the Spirit of God was the source of everything that he was and did. “For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God.” (p. 46) The dominant social vision of Judaism was centered in holiness: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” (Lev. 19:2) This Jewish purity system created a world of sharp social boundaries: between pure and the impure, righteous and sinner, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile. There was something boundary shattering about Jesus’ message and activity: “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” (p. 58)
Borg observes that the Hebrew word for compassion, whose singular form means “womb,” is often used of God in the Old Testament. And wisdom is a feminine noun in both Hebrew (hokmah) and Greek (sophia). “To say that God is like a womb is to say that God is like a woman, just as the personification of God as Sophia suggests that God is like a woman; and Jesus is a spokesperson for the compassion of Sophia/God.” (p. 103) Jesus criticizes the central values of his social world’s conventional wisdom: family, wealth, honor, purity, and religiosity. In the place of conventional wisdom, he presented an alternate, even subversive, wisdom such as, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matt. 6:24)
Like other Biblical scholars, Borg acknowledges there is insufficient extra-Biblical evidence to postulate the divinity of Jesus. “The multiplicity of images for speaking of Jesus’ relationship to God (as logos, Sophia, Son — to name but a few) should make it clear that none of them is to be taken literally. They are metaphorical… Thus it is not the case that Jesus is literally ‘the Son of God’.” (p. 109) “As one who knew the Spirit, Jesus may have imagined and/or experienced the Spirit as Abba and Sophia. But did he, in addition, think of himself as ‘son’ (in some special sense) of the one he called Abba?.. Given the nature of our sources, I find it difficult to imagine how a judgment of historical probability could be reached on this particular matter.” (p. 110)
During the last two decades, a movement known as story theology has called attention to the narrative character of the Bible. Borg speaks of the macro-stories of scripture as the exodus story, the story of exile and return, and the priestly story. These stories, Borg says, have shaped our Christology. The priestly story has dominated and distorted the popular understanding of Jesus. “The notion that God’s only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible. Taken metaphorically, this story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straight forward about that.” (p. 131)
“Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one’s heart, one’s self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned toward us, the face of God, the Lord who is also Spirit.” (p. 137) This means moving from secondhand religion to firsthand religion.
The strength of the intellectual honesty of contemporary Biblical scholarship along with its lack of evidence in the understanding of the divinity of Jesus, underscores the great need in mainline Christianity for the inspiring insights of The Urantia Book. Urantia Book Christology reinforces both the historic Christian faith in the divinity of Jesus, and many of the insights of modern scholarship. It liberates us from the divisive religion about Jesus and reemphasizes and magnifies the religion of Jesus.