Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

Marcus J. Borg

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061747625
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Of the many recent books on the historical Jesus, none has explored what the latest biblical scholarship means for personal faith. Now, in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg addresses the yearnings of those who want a fully contemporary faith that welcomes rather than oppresses our critical intelligence and openness to the best of historical scholarship. Borg shows how a rigorous examination of historical findings can lead to a new faith in Christ, one that is critical and, at the same time, sustaining.

"Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him, " Borg writes. "Rather, it means to give one's heart, one's self at its deepest level, to... the living Lord."

Drawing on his own journey from a naive, unquestioning belief in Christ through collegiate skepticism to a mature and contemporary Christian faith, Borg illustrates how an understanding of the historical Jesus can actually lead to a more authentic Christian life—one not rooted in creeds or dogma, but in a life of spiritual challenge, compassion, and community.

In straightforward, accessible prose, Borg looks at the major findings of modern Jesus scholarship from the perspective of faith, bringing alive the many levels of Jesus' character: spirit person, teacher of alternative wisdom, social prophet, and movement founder. He also reexamines the major stories of the Old Testament vital to an authentic understanding of Jesus, showing how an enriched understanding of these stories can uncover new truths and new pathways to faith.

For questioning believers, doubters, and reluctant unbelievers alike, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time frees our understanding of Jesus' life and message from popular misconceptions and outlines the way to a sound and contemporary faith: "For ultimately, Jesus is not simply a figure of the past, but a figure of the present. Meeting that Jesus—the living one who comes to us even now—will be like meeting Jesus again for the first time."

1

Meeting Jesus Again

We have all met Jesus before. Most of us first met him when we were children. This is most obviously true for those of us raised in the church, but also for anybody who grew up in Western culture. We all received some impression of Jesus, some image of him, however vague or specific.

For many, the childhood image of Jesus remains intact into adulthood. For some, that image is held with deep conviction, sometimes linked with warm personal devotion and sometimes tied to rigid doctrinal positions. For others, both within and outside of the church, the childhood image of Jesus can become a problem, producing perplexity and doubt, often leading to indifference toward or rejection of the religion of their childhood.

Indeed, for many Christians, especially in mainline churches, there came a time when their childhood image of Jesus no longer made a great deal of sense. And for many of them, no persuasive alternative has replaced it. It is for these people especially that this book is written. For them, meeting Jesus again will be–as it has been for me–like meeting him for the first time. It will involve a new image of Jesus.

IMAGES OF JESUS
AND IMAGES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Images of Jesus matter. The foundational claim of this book is that there is a strong connection between images of Jesus and images of the Christian life, between how we think of Jesus and how we think of the Christian life. Our image of Jesus affects our perception of the Christian life in two ways: it gives shape to the Christian life; and (as we shall see later in this chapter) it can make Christianity credible or incredible.

The way images of Jesus give shape to the Christian life is illustrated by two widespread images and their effects on images of the Christian life. The most common image of Jesus–what I call the “popular image”–sees him as the divine savior. Put most compactly, this image is a constellation of answers to the three classic questions about Jesus. Who was he? The divinely begotten Son of God. What was his mission or purpose? To die for the sins of the world. What was his message? Most centrally, it was about himself: his own identity as the Son of God, the saving purpose of his death, and the importance of believing in him.

The image of the Christian life to which this image of Jesus leads is clear: it consists primarily of believing–that Jesus was who he said he was and that he died for our sins. We may call this a fideistic image of the Christian life, one whose primary dynamic is faith, understood as believing certain things about Jesus to be true. Though belief may (and ideally does) lead to much else, it is the primary quality of this image of the Christian life.

Only slightly less common is an image of Jesus as teacher. A de-dogmatized image of Jesus, it is held by those who are not sure what to make of the doctrinal claims made about Jesus by the Christian tradition. When these are set aside, what remains is Jesus as a great teacher. His moral teaching may be understood in quite general terms (the Great Commandment of love of God and love of neighbor, or the Golden Rule of doing to others as you would have them do to you), or in quite specific terms as a fairly narrow code of righteousness. But in either case, the image of the Christian life that flows out of this image of Jesus consists of “being good,” of seeking to live as Jesus said we should.

Just as the first image of Jesus leads to a fideistic image of the Christian life, so this image leads to a moralistic image of the Christian life. Both images, it seems to me, are inadequate. Not only are they inaccurate as images of the historical Jesus, as we shall see, but they lead to incomplete images of the Christian life. That life is ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, as I shall claim, it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.

The understanding of the Christian life as a journey of transformation is grounded in the alternative image of Jesus that I develop in this book. This image flows out of contemporary biblical and historical scholarship. Though it may seem fresh and initially unfamiliar, it is very old, going back to the first century of the early Christian movement. Meeting this Jesus will, for many of us, be like meeting Jesus again for the first time.

MEETING JESUS AGAIN:
MY OWN STORY

To recall the ways in which we have met Jesus before is illuminating. The occasion for my first doing so came unexpectedly. About two years ago I was invited to speak to an Episcopal men’s group that had been meeting weekly for over ten years. Because of the nature of the group, whose times together were marked by personal sharing, their instructions to me were twofold: “Talk to us about Jesus, and make it personal.”

Nobody had ever asked me to do that before. I had given hundreds of lectures about Jesus, but nobody had ever said, “Make it personal.” It was a challenge. Not being sure how to proceed, I wrote the words Me and Jesus on a piece of paper, began to think about them, and was led into memories and reflections about Jesus in my own life. It was a rich and illuminating experience, and I encourage you to try this yourself sometime. Simply begin, as I did, with your earliest childhood memories of Jesus, track them through adolescence and into adulthood, and then see what has happened to your image of Jesus over the years.

Childhood

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota near the Canadian border in the 1940s, in a world that now seems very far away. We were a Scandinavian Lutheran family, and church was important to us. Not only did I have several uncles who were Lutheran pastors, but the local Lutheran church was the center of our social life: Sunday-morning services and Sunday school, Ladies’ Aid meetings that I attended with my mom, frequent church suppers, midweek services during Lent, missionary conferences, and youth groups with names like “Lutheran Children of the Reformation.”

My early memories of Jesus are quite scattered. I remember pictures of Jesus with sheep, and with children. I knew he liked children; that was a big message when we were kids. Clearly, he was important. I knew that he was God’s son, and that he had been born in a miraculous way. Indeed, I knew that he was “born of the virgin Mary” before I knew what a virgin was. My father’s voice reading the birth story from Luke’s gospel to my family as we sat around the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve comes back to me still: “And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.”¹

I also knew that Jesus died on a cross and then rose from the dead, and that all of this was very important. Easter mornings ranked second only to Christmas as festive times of the year. I knew you could pray to Jesus and even ask him to be present: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest” was our daily table grace. As a preschooler I memorized John 3.16 for a Sunday-school Christmas program:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

The verse seemed impossibly long at the time.

And then, as the hymns of my childhood began to come back, the memories became more emotionally charged. Recalling their melodies and words moved me greatly as I sat at my desk with the words Me and Jesus staring up at me. As I began to say the words out loud, I found that I could not do so without my voice breaking.

Three hymns in particular came back as favorites from those early years. The first we sang often in youth group as well as in church services:

Jesus, priceless treasure, source of purest pleasure, dearest friend to me.

Ah, how long I’ve panted, and my heart hath fainted, thirsting, Lord, for Thee.

Thine I am, O spotless lamb; I will suffer nought to hide Thee,

Nought I ask besides Thee.

In like manner a second combined praise and devotion:

Beautiful Savior, King of Creation,

Son of God and Son of man!

Truly I’d love Thee, truly I’d serve Thee,

Light of my soul, my joy, my crown.

The third is associated with a particular memory, a missionary conference at a rural Lutheran church a few miles from our town church. I was probably about six. It was a warm Sunday afternoon in June, and I can remember playing with the unfamiliar country kids in the churchyard before the service began. The speakers were a missionary couple from China. I do not remember what they said, but I’m sure they spoke about the importance and challenges of the mission field. Then we sang that great Christian missionary hymn “O Zion, Haste, Thy Mission High Fulfilling.” I can vividly remember sitting next to my parents in that white frame country church, my body still warm and sweaty from play, and how the sunlight looked as the sanctuary filled with the sound of our voices:

O Zion, haste, thy mission high fulfilling,

To tell to all the world that God is light;

That He who made all nations is not willing,

One soul should perish, lost in shades of night.

Publish glad tidings, tidings of peace,

Tidings of Jesus, redemption and release.

It was clear to me in that moment that believing in Jesus, and telling others of the tidings of Jesus, were the most important things in the world. What was at stake was nothing less than souls perishing, lost in shades of night.

It is tempting to see the course of my life ever since as a living out of the messages of those hymns. After all, my whole adult working life, now approaching three decades, has been spent in the scholarly study of Jesus. As my wife says about me, “He’s been looking for Jesus all his life.”

By the end of childhood, the ingredients of the popular image of Jesus were in place: Jesus was the divinely begotten Son of God who died for the sins of the world and whose message was about himself and his saving purpose and the importance of believing in him. Indeed, John 3.16, that verse I memorized as a preschooler, expressed this childhood image perfectly: Jesus is the divine savior in whom one is to believe for the sake of receiving eternal life.

I believed in that Jesus without difficulty and without effort. I now understand why it was so easy: I received this image of Jesus in what I have since learned to call the state of precritical naiveté–that childhood state in which we take for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true.² But this state of childhood belief was not to last.

The problems began not with Jesus, but with God. Sometime in elementary school, my first theological conundrum occurred. I remember being puzzled about how to put together two different things I had heard about God: that God was “everywhere present,” and that God was “up in heaven.” Without realizing it, I was wrestling with the relationship between the omnipresence and transcendence of God.

How could this be? I wondered. My young mind resolved the puzzle in favor of God up in heaven. The omnipresence of God, I decided, meant that God could be anywhere God decided to be. God could even appear right in this room right now. But of course, most of the time God is not here; rather, God is up in heaven. Unwittingly, my resolution of the perplexity reduced God’s omnipresence to a magical potentiality to be anywhere.

Also unwittingly, I had taken the first step in removing God from the world. The solution I arrived at indicated that I had come to think of God as a supernatural being “out there.” God became distant and remote, far away and removed from the world, except for special interventions, such as the ones described in the Bible. But I still had no doubts that God was real. Those were to begin later.

Adolescence

In my early teens, I began to have doubts about the existence of God. It was an experience filled with anxiety, guilt, and fear. I still believed enough to be afraid of going to hell because of my doubts. I felt that they were wrong, and in my prayers I would ask for forgiveness. But I couldn’t stop doubting, and so my requests for forgiveness seemed to me not to be genuine. After all, I had learned that true repentance included the resolution not to continue committing the sin.

Every night for several years, I prayed with considerable anguish, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” The inability to overcome my doubt confirmed for me that I had become more of an unbeliever than a believer. In retrospect, I can also see that, for me at least, belief is not a matter of the will. I desperately wanted to believe and to be delivered from the anguish I was experiencing. If I could have made myself believe, I would have.

Unlike my earlier perplexity about God’s “everywhere-ness,” my doubt about God’s existence was not connected to any particular element in my belief system, but concerned the foundation of the system itself. I now understand what was happening: I was experiencing a collision between the modern worldview and my childhood beliefs. The modern worldview, with its image of what is real as the world of matter and energy and its vision of the universe as a closed system of cause and effect, made belief in God–a nonmaterial reality–increasingly problematic. I had entered the stage of critical thinking, and there was no way back.

And, of course, these doubts about God affected how I thought of Jesus. What does it mean to speak of Jesus as the Son of God when one is no longer sure that God is?

College

As adolescence ended, I went off to a Lutheran college in the Midwest with a conventional but no longer deeply held understanding of the Christian faith. The nightly prayers for belief stopped. Apparently I no longer believed enough to be frightened of hell. The fear and guilt had been reduced to a perplexity that I would occasionally, but not often, think about. Other matters caught my attention.

Then in my junior year, in a required religion course, I was exposed to the scholarly study of theology by a brilliant young professor with a fresh Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.³ Intellectually, it was the most exciting material I had ever encountered. The course covered all the big questions: God, the nature of reality, human nature, evil, atonement, ethics, the relationship between Christianity and other religions, and so forth. It exposed me to the diversity of answers provided by the intellectual giants of the tradition, ancient and modern: Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Schleiermacher, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Eliade, and so on. The experience was fascinating and liberating. Its effect on me was that the sacred cows of inherited belief began to fall in a way that legitimated their demise. But it didn’t help me to believe. Rather, it provided a framework within which I could take my perplexity seriously.

Judging from later conversations with many Christians, I think my journey as described thus far is fairly typical. As college ended, the images of Christianity and of Jesus that I had received as a child were no longer persuasive or compelling. I had become aware that it was difficult and perhaps not necessary to take the Bible and Christian teachings literally, but I didn’t know what a nonliteral approach might mean. My childhood understanding of Christianity had collapsed, but nothing had replaced it. I had become a “closet agnostic,” someone who didn’t know what to make of it all.

Seminary and Beyond

And so I went off to seminary. That didn’t help. To put it more precisely, that didn’t help the faith dimension of my journey, which was still years away from resolution. But seminary was tremendously illuminating; the insights flowing from theological education are immensely helpful in sorting out what it means to take the Christian life seriously.

Jesus once again moved center stage. This happened because of my first-semester New Testament course.⁴ There I learned that the image of Jesus from my childhood–the popular image of Jesus as the divine savior who knew himself to be the Son of God and who offered up his life for the sins of the world–was not historically true. That, I learned, was not what the historical Jesus was like.

The basis for this mind-boggling realization was the understanding of the gospels that has developed over the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship. I learned that the gospels are neither divine documents nor straightforward historical records. They are not divine products inspired directly by God, whose contents therefore are to be believed (as I had thought prior to this). Nor are they eyewitness accounts written by people who had accompanied Jesus and simply sought to report what they had seen and heard.

Rather, I learned, the gospels represent the developing traditions of the early Christian movement. Written in the last third of the first century, they contain the accumulated traditions of early Christian communities and were put into their present forms by second- (or even third-) generation authors.⁵ Through careful comparative study of the gospels, one can see these authors at work, modifying and adding to the traditions they received.⁶ They were continuing a process that had been going on throughout the forty to seventy years when the gospel material circulated in oral form. Much happened in those decades to change the traditions about Jesus.

It is not so much that memories grew dim, or that the oral tradition was unreliable. Rather, two primary factors were at work. First, the traditions about Jesus were adapted and applied to the changing circumstances of the early Christian movement. Jesus himself spoke in a Palestinian Jewish milieu. The gospels were written in and for communities that had begun to move beyond Palestine and into the larger Mediterranean world, and the gospel writers adapted the materials about Jesus to these new settings. Second, the movement’s beliefs about Jesus grew during those decades. We can see that g...