Borg & Wright on Christology

Christology

Borg

             Borg and Wright accept the basic Christian proclamation that “Jesus lives” as “both Lord and Christ” (p.129). For Borg, these affirmations are a post-Easter phenomenon that did not reflect the reality of what the Jesus of history proclaimed nor what his disciples believed during his earthly ministry.  They reflect, rather the simple fact that “the followers of Jesus, then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death” (p. 135).  Thus, whatever actually happened during the ministry of Jesus and in the events surrounding the reports of the empty tomb and the post-crucifixion sightings of the risen Messiah, it is “the post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality” that is of enduring importance.  It is the risen Christ “encountered as a living spiritual reality” (p.135) which is the grounding point of faith for Borg, upon which the authenticity of doctrine and tradition are legitimized as a metaphorical expression for truths that transcend the boundaries of language.

 Wright also accepts Borg’s thesis that the full incarnational view of Jesus was a product of “a developing tradition” (p. 130).  However, Borg does not draw distinctions between Jesus as the Jewish Messiah as plausibly identified by himself and his initial followers both before and after the crucifixion, as does Wright, and the fully formed Christ of the New Testament, the suffering and risen God of the Incarnation.  Thus, for Borg, the various referencing of Jesus in the New Testament, whether as “The Wisdom of God” “The Son of God,” or “messiah,” point metaphorically to the same existential reality; that of “tak[ing] very seriously what we see in him as a disclosure of God” (p. 152).  Wright, by contrast, argues that an implicit incarnational perspective was assumed very early on.  This was reflected, Wright argues, in the letters of Paul (particularly 1Cor 8:6, Phil. 2:5-11, and Col.1:15-20), based on the grounding belief that God’s will in full bodily form was exhibited in the life, teaching, the symbolism of the healings, along with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  This Jesus, perceived as Israel’s Messiah interpreted through the prism of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, was the basis of a more fully developed incarnational perspective, already implicit in key Pauline texts.  In Wright’s words:

 If you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, and of the psalms, and ask what God might look like were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross (p. 167).                                                                                         

 The general point by way of critique of Borg’s position is not that the New Testament does not use metaphor, but the significance in its own right between the images evoked and that to which the images refer, namely to Jesus the Christ as “the image of the invisible God” upon whom “all the fullness [of God] should dwell” (Col 1:15, 19).  With Borg, the metaphorical reality beneath this language has universal significance beyond the thought categories of second temple Judaism and even fully formed christological ones in their symbolic pointing toward a more transcendent and universal reality than that which can be depicted in words.  The metaphorical emphasis in Borg is reinforced through a pre and post Easter dichotomy, which he seems to conflate with a before and after New Testament depiction of Jesus.  For Wright, they emerge from their grounding in Jesus’ messianic vocation in which fully formed christological claims only make sense to the extent to which they maintain their rooting in the creation, covenant, wisdom, and apocalyptic longing based on Israel’s story.  Otherwise one is referring to another story lending toward syncretism.  The force of Wright’s argument cannot be used to substantiate what actually happened in the first few years after Jesus’ death.  However, it does lend support to counteracting the notion that the concept of Jesus as both Israel’s Messiah and the Lord of human history was a product of a latter faith community, which the gospel writers retrojected back into history through their narrative constructions. 

Both Borg and Wright agree that the Christian revelation was not simply a product of the imagination of Jesus, or of the events and beliefs surrounding his life, teaching, death and resurrection, nor even a product simply of the early faith community, and the writings of the books that became the New Testament.  For both writers all of these events are crucial for the understanding of the emergence of first century Christianity.  What both writers would also say is that it was (and is) God working through these events which brought to proximate fulfillment in the mission to the Gentiles,  God’s covenant with Abraham as depicted in Genesis 12.  Where Borg and Wright differ is both in the extent to which they perceive the actual history and the claims of faith as continuous or discontinuous, and its corresponding significance in shaping how faith is defined. 

 For Borg, the importance of the resurrection is “that the risen Christ journeys with us” (p. 134) through our lives.  The cost, as well as the joy, Borg notes, is in following Jesus “on the path of death and resurrection” regardless as to the literal truth of the biblical narrative.  What Calvary signifies in its most fundamental sense is “the path of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being” which is only possible through radical death to old self.  It is in this profound mirroring of the pathway to new life in unswerving faith in God that Jesus as Christ “becomes the incarnation of the Way” (p. 139).  The metaphorical truth, on Borg’s account, beneath, through, and beyond the biblical story is valid whether or not the events in the gospel narratives took place as described, which has its analogues for those of other religious traditions, in the faith traditions that belong to them. 

Whether there was an actual historical reality upon which the gospel writers provided elaborated resurrection accounts, as Wright suggests, is a secondary matter for Borg, of which he is highly suspicious.  What he does argue is that it was the “experiences of the risen Christ as a continuous presence” [that] generated…the story of the empty tomb” (p. 137) and the corresponding sightings, whereas Wright maintains the reverse.  Empathetic identification with the risen Christ leads, on Borg’s reading, to a profound hope, that in some ultimate sense, “the domination system [which] killed him” (p. 137) is reversed.  This, in the most fundamental sense is what the resurrection signifies—“Jesus is Lord.  Rome [as a symbol of the domination system] is not” (p. 136) and that “all the would be lords of our lives,” whether personal and political, would be subordinated to the lordship of Christ, onto life, onto death, and onto new life.  For Wright, this is also pivotal, except for him unless this belief had deep roots in actual history, a gnosticism in the venue of Matthew Fox’s “cosmic Christ” or that of Bishop Spong’s theology “beyond incarnation” or theism is an all-too-present outcome of a disembodied Christian spirituality.

      Unlike Wright, Borg does not think the historical Jesus “foresaw his own death as a sacrifice for sin,” or that he likely viewed himself as Israel’s Messiah.  Moreover, Borg rejects any notion that “God can forgive sins only because of Jesus’ sacrifice” even as the sacrifice of Christ is “a powerfully true metaphor of the grace of God” (p. 140).  On Borg’s account, Christ’s sacrifice “is a metaphorical proclamation of the radical grace of God,” pointing to “the abolition of the system of requirements, not the establishment of” a new set based on a literal interpretation of the atonement.  In this respect, any notion of Jesus as God’s unique son as articulated most fully in the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the Hebrews is viewed by Borg, as a profound and beautiful metaphor signifying the sufficiency of God’s grace which can find congruence in other stories and images reflected in other religious traditions. 

 Viewing the Trinity itself as a metaphor rather than descriptive of something of the essence of the personhood of God, Borg can claim that Christ as Lord is decisive for those affirming the Christian faith as their unique pathway to God, but not decisive in any ontological sense in the claim of Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn. 14:6) without equivocation and remainder as an objective statement of the human condition.  This is a complex issue that requires a much more nuanced examination than is often given that, in the most profound sense, this claim is based on faith rather than knowledge, but which, nonetheless, has the capacity to more than hold its own apologetically as well as doctrinally.  However much work is required to substantively flesh out this foundational belief, invariably through a mirror, dimly, to shift too quickly to a “metaphorical” explanation is to slide too easily over the scandal that God is revealed most fully in a particular religious tradition rooted in a specific time and place.

 This is the central argument of traditional orthodox theology which underlies the mandate to “go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Sprit” (Mt 28:19). Namely, the claim that “for us there is only one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things through whom we live” (1Cor. 8:6).  Such missionary zeal and the theological certitude it presumes would not have a place, except perhaps metaphorically, on Borg’s vision of the Christian revelation, which, if taken on its own terms, could only be interpreted as finds incredibly naïve, arrogant, or both, utterly out of place in the pluralistic multi-religious perspective of the contemporary era.

Wright

By contrast, Wright roots his theology firmly in the radical particularity of Israel’s central monotheistic claim, christologically interpreted through 1Cor 8:6 in which there is no other greater, even as the full mystery of the biblical revelation remains beyond human comprehension.  This requires “great risk,” as Wright puts it partly for rhetorical effect, that “our God is the true God, and your gods are worthless idols” (p. 160), a comment that necessitates much elaboration.  On this, Wright is challenging the “gods of this age” (my quotes), whether “the earth goddess, Gaia, revered by some in the new age movement” (p. 158), the secular project of social integration via Jurgen Habermas’ (1984, 1997) ideal speech act, or the postmodern deconstruction of all mettanaratives, except for that of its own—that all world views are historically construed, and therefore relative in their depiction of truth.  Israel’s God is utterly different, too, from Paul Tillich’s panentheistic “‘God above God’ who transcends the polarity of being and nonbeing, infinity and finitude actuality and potentiality,” the “creative force that moves the world to higher possibilities” (Bloesch, 1995, pp. 21, 19), a process god.  

 In short, Wright rejects the modernist project of correlative apologetics.  Apologetics is essential work in opening space for discussion in the public square.  At its best, however, the effort to “translate” the gospel in other idioms than its own revelatory language only goes so far in communicating the untranslatable, the irrevocable power and Lordship of YHWH, embedded historically “in Jewish soil,” both radically transcendent and immanent, the God of judgment and infinite embrace revealed fully and finally through the Word and the Spirit in Jesus of Nazareth.  Wright’s forte is in placing history and faith claims in closer proximity even while recognizing the invariable chasm between the two, a niche that has given shape to his Christology of a fully embodied and fully transcendent suffering, redeemer, God, of love, judgment, finality, and truth.

Thus, for Wright, as well as for Borg, Christian spirituality, fully rooted in Jewish soil, is not some detached essence beyond the illusion of the body or human history as encountered.  Rather, it is within the location of both the glory and limitations of human finitude where in the midst of human history “the true God is strangely present, knowable, and lovable” (p. 208) revealed through a mirror/dimly in Israel’s story.  Within the context of who we are, both in our personal lives and public culture, the essence of Judeo-Christian spirituality remains the commandment to love the Lord, your God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  It is this gnosis lived through radical faith which gives rise to increasing knowledge about that which is most important, namely, God’s truth as revealed especially in the wisdom literature of the Old and New Testament.  It is in this respect that Wright embraces both creator and creation spirituality “while firmly rejecting the magical” (italics removed) in relation particularly to the latter. Thus, “creation can be the bearer of God’s presence, holiness, love, and grace” (p. 209), but not the source as is at least the temptation in theologies that embrace “mother earth” as the body of God.  To the extent that creation embodies God’s presence its relevance as expressed in Judeo-Christian spirituality is its sacramental power.  So it is with history in which for Wright, there is “no Jesus of history played off against the Christ of faith” (p. 210) even as the relation between history and faith requires subtle mediation.   

The more fundamental point is that the essence of who Jesus is lies in the totality of what this “no other name” (my quotes) represents through whom true God is most fully mediated.  This Wright insists upon much more unequivocally than does Borg, which his historical studies have helped him to confirm.  Thus, for Wright, the essence of Judeo-Christian spirituality lies in the dynamic tension between loving the world to the point of radical commitment toward its reconciliation with God and rejecting any deification of the world, and certainly its evil, which requires an element of radical separation.  For Wright, “Christian spirituality, focused on and shaped by Jesus, looks at the glory and shame of it all and brings both, in prayer and liturgy before the presence of God” (p. 212).  It is this particular spirituality, in all its folly and scandal that speaks to the fullest aspirations and needs of humankind, which, even as “the secret things belong to the Lord, …those things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut: 29:29). Within this context of revealed truth, one finds and is found by the God who can be revered, who desires and commands our full allegiance.  This is the essence of Wright’s historically grounded embodied Christology.

 What then of history?  We cannot leave things at this point without taking a closer look at the nuanced way in which the relationship between history and faith is teased out in Wright’s theology in his desire to “speak truly of God” (p. 214).  Such truth, Wright notes, is a scandal in light of modern and postmodern secular thought which he seeks to counter by pointing to the presuppositions of all world views, while relying ultimately on faith through God’s “self-revelation” via the confluence of Scripture and history.  It is this, Wright claims (pace Deut. 29:29) that “has given us such knowledge as is possible and appropriate for us” (p. 214) even without the capacity to unravel all mysteries in the quest to transcend human fallibility and finitude, the underlying temptation of gnosticism.  Within this framework Wright constructs a methodology that combines building best case plausibilities in juxtaposition to the perceived limitations of other perspectives.  It is this “critical realism” that grounds his analysis of the relationship of faith and history.  In short, “split the historical Jesus off from the Christ known in faith, as some have tried to do [including some narrative theologians], and you are left without a revelation of the one true God within our world, the world of physicality and history” (p. 214).

The question remains not whether, but how faith and history interact, for without question the origins of Christianity were embedded in the dynamic culture of second temple Judaism and the personage of Jesus of Nazareth and his early followers.  What Wright says bears careful observation, for in the final analysis he acknowledges the invariable gaps in the historical record which limit what can be definitively claimed even as there is reasonable evidence to draw upon for best case hypothesis formation.  Rejecting Borg’s characterization of “history metaphorized” on meaning being beyond authorial intent, one of Wright’s central points is that the gospel “authors  thought [italics added] the events they were recording—all of them, not just some—actually happened.”  Noting that they could have been mistaken on, say the resurrection sightings or the transfiguration story, Wright argues that if that were the case the gospel writers would have failed “to convey the most important meaning they had in mind, which was precisely in these events as historical events [italics in original] Israel’s God, the world’s creator, had acted decisively and climactically within creation within Israel’s history” (p. 215).

At this point Wright is parsing matters closely.  It is one thing to say that the Bible speaks of truths that are “dependent on history” and even to argue that events as described have a solid plausibility as to their facticity.  It is another altogether to claim that what is written in the gospels is an accurate description of what actually happened, a position which Wright does not claim, though this begs the question then of precisely “what Israel’s God was doing in actual history” (italics in original) (p. 215).  A major concern of Wright’s is the all-too-prevalent emphasis in contemporary Christian spirituality as reflected in Borg, but especially Bishop Spong and Matthew Fox in their proclivity toward a “dehistoricized spirituality” cut off from the actual personage of the pre-Easter Jesus of Nazareth. 

What Wright is contending for in the most fundamental sense is the veracity of the claim that “our God is the true God, and your gods are worthless idols” (p. 160).  As a historically-based religion that claims to embody the fullness of God in its founder it matters whether there is a solid correspondence between what is stated that happened in the written testimonies and what actually happened in fact, even as the quest for the historical Jesus remains ever elusive in the most fundamental of details.  Working from a “realistic” epistemology, Wright notes that “whether the [gospel] stories really did happen” is beyond the purview of contemporary historical evidence to discern, even as the critical point remains that “everyone who told them thought they did” (p. 216). 

 In light of the cloud of witnesses giving testimony to the resurrection sightings, Wright draws as the most likely conclusion that the sightings on the road to Emanus and elsewhere actually did happen.  For if they did not it would raise the profoundest questions about any such claims having a historical referent as the basis in identifying the universal God in the radical particularity of Israel’s truth.  The full force of Wright’s embodied Christology depends, then, on the accuracy of an actual historical event, namely, the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead, as documented in all of the gospels and the letters of Paul, even given the likely elaboration in some of the texts.   

What Wright does not sufficiently discuss, at least in The Meaning of Jesus is the difference between history as lived and the realistically-based historical description as a biblical genre, which includes both history as lived and history as remembered.  Closely related is history posited in the mouth of Jesus in the manner of the ancient historian who sought through narrative to highlight the essence of the historical character through descriptions that were invariably idealistic, however true to the character and to the era portrayed.  Still with Wright, Paul’s writings provide more than a little persuasive evidence that the tradition, canonized in the gospels formed very early even as the first several years after the crucifixion remain opaque as to precise historical description.  In short, Wright has provided tantalizing insights on the relationship between faith and history even as the questions he raises begs additional ones that require further investigation.

The Historical Jesus and Israel’s Messiah

The Historical Jesus and Israel’s Messiah

 Borg

 Borg posits a radical disjuncture between the pre and post Easter experience, more precisely between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith in which the New Testament is a combination of “history remembered” and history “metaphorized.” Specifically, the notion of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah was a product of the early church and not very likely a contemporary reflection of Jesus’ self-perception.  Since Jesus did not embrace this category for himself, neither did he view a martyred death as central to his vocation (p. 54).  More, the “exalted titles” accompanying the church’s depiction of Jesus as Messiah according to Borg, are really “exalted metaphors.”  Behind and beneath these metaphors was the living presence of Jesus as a spirit filled person mediating the presence of God in pointing beyond language toward “deeper” truths that first century Judaism could at best only partially embody.

The historical personage, on Borg’s interpretation was primarily a teacher, healer, social prophet and “Spirit person” (p. 53), in many respects, the “liberal” Jesus of the late 19^th century.  The categories Borg draws upon to characterize the historical Jesus are based less on Jewish history and Scripture per se “than cross-cultural study of types of religious personality” (p. 60) which may be as applicable to Buddhism as Judaism or early Christianity.  The broader point that Borg makes is that while the categories that he draws on “are not specifically Jewish,” and neither is “the language…specifically biblical,” “the phenomena” Borg describes, have roots in deep Jewish tradition (p. 60).  On this interpretation, both Judaism and Christianity may be viewed as “axial” religions in which their commonalities, an overarching quest for the universal god, are considered more fundamentally important than surface and not so surface differences (Armstrong, 2006).  This includes rejection of “supernatural theism” as a viable concept “for thinking about God’s relationship to the world” (p. 62), as well as any scandal of particularity that God is most fully (if not completely) revealed in a given religious “myth” or “metaphor.”

Thus on Borg’s interpretation, Jesus’ primary vocation was that of “Jewish mystic” (p. 64).  This was the fundamentally what Borg means when he describes Jesus as a “spirit person,” terms he used interchangeably.  Borg draws much on contemporary spirituality in this depiction. Thus, with other mystics, Jesus “had decisive and…firsthand experiences of the sacred” (p. 60).  Such “‘eyes closed’ mystical states” includes “ineffability that cannot be explained “in ordinary language but only with the language of metaphor.”  There is also a transient nature to such experiences and also much “passivity” in that “they are received rather than achieved.”  In addition, they are “noetic” in which there is a high level of certainty based on what is sometimes referred to as conative or embodied knowledge which accompanies these experiences.  These are not just “strong feelings” which are crucial to mystical experience, but knowledge gained through experience that, in some determinative way, requires undergoing to fully obtain.  Borg’s final depiction is the category of the “transformative,” in which the mystic is fundamentally changed as a result of such undergoing (p. 61).

It is this spirit person that most closely conforms to the Jesus as lived as disclosed to the extent possible, in the sources and in the prevailing interpretations of modern biblical scholarship when the New Testament overlay of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah are peeled back.  This Jesus was still Jewish in every way, which provided the religious tradition that shaped the categories of his mystical experience.  Still, on Borg’s interpretation, it is not clear the extent to which this Jewish “peasant” possessed “scribal literacy” (p. 64) and therefore the capacity to study the scriptures in depth as reflected in the midrashic depiction of Jesus of the gospel writers.  Even without such literacy, Borg notes, given his interest, mission, and their general availability, Jesus would have possessed a solid knowledge of the central biblical narratives even if he lacked full capacity to cite chapter and verse.  On this respect, Borg would agree with the New Testament characterization of Jesus as one who spoke with authority, following in the pathway of his mentor, John the Baptist, to establish a revitalization movement, based on the deepest calling of the Prophets, the ushering in of the kingdom of God in Israel.

Based on this interpretation in which the Jesus of history and the Christ of the New Testament diverge in some radical respects, the Jesus that Borg discerns was principally a “healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator” (p. 65).  The scandalous question Borg indirectly puts to more orthodox interpretations is, “had Jesus lived and taught for forty more years as the Buddha did, what more might we be able to discern about his purpose?” (p. 65).  Thus, not only was the cross a tragically inessential aspect of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.  Borg’s implicit message is that neither is it the crucial event in our own interpretation and appropriation of the wisdom and teaching of Jesus in our lives.  The Jesus that Borg presents drew upon the deepest images of the religious and political culture of his time for an understanding of God, in a vision, which, of necessity, invariably transcended finite time and place. It is in this respect that Borg views the New Testament depiction of Jesus as categorically metaphorical.

 Borg views the healing narratives in the gospels as having “programmatic significance,” (p. 67), as signs of Jesus pointing to the breaking in of the indwelling kingdom of God.  In illustrating their metaphorical significance Borg (p. 67) quotes Matthew 11:4 in which Jesus is reported to have said:

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf here [sic], and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”

Borg notes that such healing “points to a time of deliverance” (p. 67), but bypasses the context in which Jesus addresses John; namely, John’s question, “Are you the Coming One or do we look for another?” (Matt 11:3).  On this reading, healings do have metaphorical significance symbolizing the breaking in of the kingdom of God; however, according to the gospel writers, in a manner in which “the proclaimer is also the proclaimed, as Israel’s Messiah.  To be fair to Borg, his main objective in this particular section is to illustrate the importance of healing in Jesus’ ministry, and, also his objective throughout Chapter Four is to describe the pre-Easter, or to be more accurate, the pre-New Testament Jesus as best that can be discerned by the evidence shaped by the interpretive grids through which his analysis is sifted.  On this reading, particularly through dominant modes of form and redactive criticism, Borg can only but draw the conclusion that Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah was a New Testament retrojection. 

 The provability of Jesus’ consciousness is, as Wright, as well as Borg notes, beyond determination through available evidence.  Whether the intellectual mindset through which Borg discovers Jesus anew allows him to rigorously examine Wright’s hypotheses that the messianic identity of Jesus of Nazareth is not only historically plausible, but the most likely explanation of the available evidence is another matter of no minor significance.  This is an issue of considerable importance, since any such self-consciousness, as Wright argues, would have played a major role not only in the textual construction of the New Testament Jesus, but the historical one, too, in the shaping of the mission of the one who lived and died in a specific time and place.

So what was Jesus up to?  This is the question that Borg seeks to answer in Chapter Four.  As someone who shattered “conventional wisdom,” Jesus provided “a new way of seeing,” “a new way of centering” in which “he taught a path of transformation centered in the sacred” (pp. 69, 70, italics removed where applicable).  It was within this context of teacher that Jesus defined his core mission as “social prophet” and “movement initiator.”  As a social prophet, Jesus cast his lot with the poor, the outcast the “marginalized.”  In this respect, borrowing categories from Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, Jesus’ prophetic mission sought to counteract the “politics of oppression” (Rome and Rome’s agents in Israel), the “economics of exploitation” (against the power of the “urban ruling elites”), and the “religion of legitmation” (particularly the Pharisees and Scribes in their pejorative gospel depiction) (pp. 71-72). Jesus’ most fundamental mission, according to Borg, was, in building on the legacy of John the Baptist, to proclaim the kingdom of God through the vision of the inverted world in which the last ones now shall later be first. 

Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God, symbolized by the promise of the redemption of Israel to it rightful relationship with its maker, is a viable metaphor, for Borg, “as equally good as …[his] own crystallization ‘Jesus as Jewish mystic’” (p. 75), as long as the transcultural, metaphorical nature of such imagery is kept in mind.   Otherwise, the scandal of particularity, even of Jewish monotheism as depicted throughout the Old and New Testaments becomes conflated for a more universal truth which, if literally accepted denies on its face such equal legitimacy for other world religious perspectives, a position which Borg categorically rejects.  Borg can say the following about Jesus of Nazareth:

He knew how to heal.  He knew how to create memorable sayings and stories; he had a metaphoric mind.  He knew that God was accessible to the marginalized because he was from the marginalized himself.  He knew that tradition and convention were not sacred in themselves but, at best, pointers to and mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare.  He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God’s will.  And he knew all of this most foundationally because he knew God (p. 76)

 What Borg cannot say is that the historical Jesus was, or viewed himself as Israel’s Messiah, not only proclaiming the kingdom of God, but by being the primary agent through which the realm of God would be ushered in both in Israel and throughout the world, according to the Abrahamic promise.  What Borg most emphatically cannot say is that Jesus is God incarnate in human flesh, except in the most metaphorical sense, given the unfathomable gap between language and historico-cultural experience, and anything resembling transcendent universal truth.  Rather, Jesus was a pointer, an exceedingly profound symbol of such truth, which is manifest in different forms and personages in other cultures and times. It was this Jesus which Borg rediscovered, who, for him and for Christians mediates universal truth and God’s most profound love.  It is similar such experiences that Borg does not want to deny to other religious traditions, which have their own symbols and metaphors for conveying in language that can only falter, the universal search for truth and holiness, which, in many profound respects, can only but remain indescribable.

 Wright                                                                                                                                                                                           

Wright does not categorically reject the depiction of Jesus’ mission identified by Borg, although he does not find it especially useful.  Rather, he roots Jesus’ mission more specifically than Borg in its historical context, and seeks to use as much as possible the language and thought world of second temple Israel to explain what Jesus sought to accomplish.  At the foundation of Jesus’ mission was “the belief [he shared] that Israel had been chosen to be YHWH’s special people through whom the world would be addressed by its creator” (p. 32).  That is, on Jesus’ interpretation the universality of God’s truth is revealed fully and nowhere else than in the Lord, our God depicted throughout the Jewish scriptures.  That truth, as Jesus would have understood it is neither “far off… in heaven” nor an impenetrable phenomenon “beyond the sea.” Neither was it “too mysterious” for human understanding.   Rather, the truth to which Jesus referred, the singular truth, “is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart that you may do it” (Deut 30:11-14).  This singular truth was revealed by Israel’s God in the “commandments and …statues ….written in [the]…book of the law” (Deut 30:10a). 

It was this law that Jesus radically brought to prophetic culmination rather than abolished (Mt 5:17) through his healing, teaching, and movement building, but ultimately through the agency of his own calling as Israel’s Messiah.  This is Wright’s key thesis.  Whatever validity in Borg’s depiction, any effort to reconstruct the historical Jesus through modern categories like spirit person, social prophet, or movement initiator, without a clear focus on the eschatology underlying his mission is likely to be tinged with a degree of presentism that occludes as much, if not more than what it discloses about the historical personage.  So argues Wright.

 In conjunction with Borg’s broader understanding, Israel acknowledged “the secret things belong[ing] to the Lord our God” well beyond human language and comprehension.  The more substantial issue remains that the heart of Israel’s religion was no universality that equally applied to the metaphors and symbols of other cultures and times.  Such cross-cultural sensibility of seeking commonalities rather than positing sharp differences between Israel’s God and other revelations would have been viewed as idolatry, “either concrete creations of human hands or abstract creations of human minds” (p. 31).  Wright contends that Jesus fully shared this perspective in his kingdom proclamation upon which he placed his ultimate concern that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” whom “you shall love…with all your heart with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut.6 4:-5) onto life and onto death.

 Thus, notwithstanding the ineffable mystery beyond human understanding as referenced in both testaments, the heart of Israel’s religion centered on “those things which are revealed [which] belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut:29: 29)—the heart and center of Scripture, the grounding source of Judaism and Christianity.  The Word was no mere metaphor or symbol pointing beyond its actual referent in which, according to Borg, its ultimate significance lies.  Rather, it is the means itself, however elusively, and also contentiously so, at times, through which the revelation of God takes place.  While there are those “secret things” about God’s truth beyond human comprehension, the focal point of Israel’s religion and the mission of Jesus centered on “those things that are revealed,” and the necessity of pursing such truth “with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut 30:10b).  Without that unified level of commitment, at least in intention, the specter of the idolatry of worshipping the creation rather than the creator, which invariably haunts the human heart, becomes the basis for unbelief, rather lack of knowledge itself.  The latter, according to Scripture, is a by product of the former, in an all-too-human desire to escape from the responsibilities and consequences of adherence, however fallibly held and understood to the covenant with the living God.

According to Wright the belief in the radical particularity and superiority of the living God revealed in and through Israel’s Scripture grounded everything that was essential about Jesus’ mission.  Wright accepts Borg’s modernist categories as a type of minimalism, but reference to Jesus as a “spirit person” or even “Jewish mystic” lacks the specificity of who Jesus was in the highly particular context of his times.  More pointedly, intimates Wright, any interpretation of the historical Jesus not deeply seeped in the language and beliefs surrounding second temple Judaism can only be but profoundly flawed on its face.  So, what was this “Palestinian Jew” up to according to Wright?  In broad strokes Wright follows along the trajectory of Borg’s five point depiction, but fills in the description with what he views as the specificity of Jesus’ distinctive Jewish identity.

First and foremost Jesus was a “first century Jewish prophet” (italics removed) (p. 33), a “second temple” religious leader whose mission embodied the imagery of exile and return as exhibited in the political and religious imagination of the period among a wide array of groups.  Among those seeking a restoration of Israel’s greatness in a return to God’s calling of a holy people, the imagery of “new exodus” took on a significant role.  Unlike the Babylonian captivity, with a corresponding quest for a geographical return to a redeemed Israel, the restoration in the second temple period required an internal cleansing in a turning back to God combined with a decisive eradication of the domination of Rome in a perspective in which politics and theology were complexly intertwined.  It was within this context that “Jesus spoke of himself as a prophet …behaved as a prophet, and when others referred to him in this way he did not correct him” (p. 33).  Thus, more than a “spirit person” or even “Jewish mystic,” Jesus was a prophet in the mode particularly of Isaiah, with sharply articulated Jewish connotations based on the imagery of exile, an internal one, in the second temple period, in the establishment of God’s kingdom in Israel in truth and power.

Thus, the second stroke to Wright’s historical sketch. “Jesus was a first century prophet [italics in original] announcing God’s kingdom” (p. 33).  The pivotal point was the restoration specifically to something pointed to in times of old, but never achieved, God’s full indwelling within the nation of Israel, in which the redeemed nation in turn becomes the vehicle for the building of God’s kingdom throughout the world.  Thus, with Borg, there is a universalism implicit in this Isaiac vision, but it is the God revealed to Israel, and to Israel only, which is the basis for the worldwide establishment of the kingdom of God.  Namely:

 I, the Lord have called You in righteousness,

And I will uphold Your hand;

I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people,

As a light to the Gentiles,

To open blind eyes,

To bring out prisoners from the prison,

To those who sit in darkness in the prison house.

I am the Lord, that is My name;

And My glory I will not give to another,

Nor My praise to graven images (Isa42: 6-8)

            This was the light that shone through Israel’s vision of the Lord our God, the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.  According to the Script, this God, who also describes himself as the mysterious “I am who I am,” who keeps “the secret things” to Himself, has given specifically  to Israel, and through Israel to the world, sufficient revelation in Word and in Spirit, a foundational vocabulary and identity in radical fidelity to His Truth and Wisdom.  “Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end” (Isa 8: 7). This, according to Wright, in the most fundamental sense is the kingdom that the Jesus of history and also of the New Testament announced.  As Wright describes it, this kingdom “denoted not a place where God ruled, but rather the fact that God ruled—or, rather, the fact [italics in original] that he would soon rule, because he was certainly not doing so” during the time of Jesus’ ministry “in the way he intended to do so” (p. 33). 

 

Jesus’ understanding of God embodied the ineffable, transient, noetic, and transformative dimensions of spiritual reality as Borg described.  Yet, for Jesus such experiences that Borg identified were manifestations of the presence of God revealed in Israel’s most evocative literature and not the substance of faith itself, which resided, and resided only, for Jesus in Israel’s founding revelation.  It was this religion Jesus sought to revitalize, and, on Wright’s interpretation, to bring to a dynamic fulfillment through the agency of his own personage.

As Wright notes, one could draw on the categories Borg uses in his depiction of Jesus to get a handle on what he was up to.  Without specificity, which Borg does provide in his description, these categories can only be, but highly abstract.  If taken as the summation of religious experience they reflect a sort of empty universality in which the specific context of any particular religion are evaluated not on their own terms, but how they measure up to these intangible depictions.  Truth, in effect, is defined by the authenticity of experience which, in its depth, is beyond the capacity of language to describe, although it can be pointed to metaphorically.  According to Wright what drove this “Galilean Jewish peasant” (p. 59) to the point of ultimate commitment was his proclamation of the kingdom of God in the restoration of Israel’s most fundamental calling as a light onto the Gentiles, which to the Jesus of history was no mere metaphor.  

Without this radical specificity at the heart of second temple Judaism and emergent Christianity, faith becomes, in the final analysis, subordinate to a constellation of experiential categories that then profess to be the basis for religious universality.  The religion of Israel grounded so extensively in the written word and dynamic, historically influenced inter-textual shaping of an emerging and ultimately enduring canon, becomes on Borg’s interpretation, a metaphor, of a profound sort, to be sure, for a more universal truth, transculturally accessible through other images, stories, and doctrines through other religious traditions.  By contrast, as Wright understands it, the symbols, language, and historical unfolding of Israel’s biblical story, carried for Jesus of Nazareth the full significance on its own term through which he encountered the ineffable, whom he named, and lived and died for, namely, Abba Father, the Lord, our God.

The third and most fundamental of Wright’s claim about the historical Jesus (in which Wright’s last two points are briefly incorporated here) was “that the kingdom [of God] was breaking in to Israel’s history in and through his own presence” (italics removed) (p. 37) as the long awaited Messiah.  In line with a broad stream of critical biblical scholarship it is this claim, in particular that Borg rejects, which in turn grounds his proclivity to posit a great divide between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.  Wright notes that that the issue over the consciousness of Jesus lacks sufficient empirical verification to claim as an established fact.  Nonetheless, he puts forward his hypothesis on what he discerns as the most likely conclusion to be drawn from the available evidence particularly when one is not locked into the paradigmatic assumptions of the broad stream of contemporary biblical scholarship extending back to the late 19^th century.  This included not simply the brute claim, which, according to Wright, Borg too easily dismisses, but the nature of the kingdom proclaimed, based on a suffering Messiah who conquered, but only by way of the cross. 

 The cross was not the pathway only of the Messiah, but representative of the paradigmatic suffering a redemptive Israel needed to attain as reflected, in turn in the temptations Jesus faced in the desert.  Namely, Jesus’ repudiation of Satan’s temptations was a call for radical obedience to God to the point of surrendering all efforts of national glorification, and embracing instead the truer vocation of the Suffering Servant in which God, and God only would bring to magnificent consummation His kingdom in His time when the fullness of the Gentiles were brought in.  On Jesus’ messianic vision, Israel was called, but enjoyed no special privileges other than the mandate to be faithful to the call itself to the point of death of any vestige of national triumphalism.  That death to glorification is what Jesus mirrored in and through his own ministry in which Israel—the Israel of the New Covenant— symbolically became the Suffering Servant in carrying out what the nation had not been able to achieve through obedience to the law.  It was in this sense that the blood of the Lamb took on and took away the sins of the world in which the Messiah became the preeminent mediator to the pathway that would lead to full consummation in Israel redeemed.  The Kingdom of God would reign on earth in the era of New Israel ushered in by the messianic prompting of Jesus of Nazareth.

What Wright argues is that given the temper of the times and that all that contemporary scholarship discloses of the period and the historical Jesus, there was nothing in the nature of those times that would have impeded his self-identification as Israel’s Messiah and much to support it based on the trajectory of his mission and the logical conclusions that it assumed.  Wright is quick to point out that this messianic consciousness was still a good distance from a fully developed Trinitarian Christology, a topic to be discussed in the next section, but a logical development, which Wright fleshes out in vast detail in his more extensive works, based on the life, the mission and death of the Jesus, and the proclamation of his resurrection by his earliest followers.  Wright acknowledges theological enhancements of claims linking the constructed Christ to the prophecies of old in the gospel narratives.  Nonetheless, the substance of the literary artifice has, on Wright’s view, a much more substantial historical core than that posited by Borg and his associates of the Jesus seminar.  In conjunction with the main thrust of contemporary biblical scholarship Borg posits a fundamental divide between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith as articulated in the New Testament in which Jesus’ messianic vocation is a literary construct created by the early church.  With Borg, also, there is a nucleus in history—history remembered, yet more fundamentally, history metaphorized.  With Wright there is much greater symmetry between history as lived and faith as received even as the gap between the two remains, in the most literal sense of the term, unfathomable.

Source Materials and the Christian Revelation

Source Materials and the Christian Revelation

 Borg

 Borg refers to the synoptic gospels as “a developing tradition,” “a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorised” (p. 4).  To this Wright does not object, even as for Borg, a much smaller core falls within the category of history as lived than it does for Wright.  Particularly important for Borg is the sharp distinction between the Jesus of history that can be established, to the extent that it can by historical methodologies, and that of the early Christian community, which placed pivotal texts into the mouth of the New Testament Jesus.  For Borg, it is exceedingly unlikely that Jesus referred to himself as “the light of the world” (p. 5).  Rather, this was a metaphor used by the early church to signify that the risen Christ could be compared to light even as this begs the broader issue as to what the vision of “light” actually referred.  There are two issues in play. 

The first is the imagery of the risen Christ in the gospel of John in which the metaphor of light is but one symbol in a constellation of images in which the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Thus, Christ was also the living water, the bread of life, and nothing less than God’s son through whom no man comes to the father except through Him; elsewhere, the true vine.  All of this imagery is grounded in the overarching belief announced in the prologue that in the beginning was the Word and that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  However metaphorical John’s language was, there was something very literal in the key claim that unless one is born again into the light of Christ “one cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5b).  That claim is that in Christ the very “image of the invisible God” is manifest in whom “all the fullness should dwell” (Col 1: 15, 18).  This, in turn raises the issue of who Jesus was and his self-defined purpose, for which Borg posits a significant difference between the pre and post Easter vision; namely in the former the Christological attributes do not pertain, even that of Israel’s Messiah, which Borg, unlike Wright rejects as an authentic self-perception of the historical personage.

 The “lenses” through which Borg constructs his interpretation of Jesus are those of critical historical scholarship and cultural analysis, which he defines as “foundational” (pp. 8-9).  Borg was raised in a traditional orthodox Protestant setting, which had a profound influence on his early Christian nurturance.  His university training introduced him to the depth and richness of the secular intellectual world to which he gravitated for some considerable time.  In the process he became a scholar of the “historical Jesus” through which he grounded his intellectual identity and at least to some degree something of his core being.  This required a rejection of what he viewed as the simplifications of his early faith in which the Jesus of history and the New Testament were synonymous figures.  Borg ultimately came to a rediscovery of the experiential reality of the Christian revelation as depicted in the New Testament, grounded radically in faith for those who are willing, if not compelled to stake their identity on the Christian vision. 

 
In terms of the New Testament claims, “this is the Jesus who is for us” (p. 218) which Borg (2001) is quick to point out, is not synonymous with any universal contention that Christ is the full embodiment of God in human flesh.  Rather, “the gospels…are Christianity’s primal narratives” because “these are the most important stories we (italics added) know, and we know them to be decisively true” (p. 218).  How Borg defines decisiveness is uncertain, but based on what he has written it can only be surmised that he means something less that Christ is the full embodiment of God in human flesh as an ontological statement having universal significance.  If he only means decisive for Christians, there is some question begging to consider, namely, in what sense and on what basis.  Notwithstanding the insurmountable gap between the search and fulfillment, the issue of ultimate truth is a matter that requires addressing.  Otherwise, the faith that he proclaims is at bottom an existential one that has no foundation beyond that collectively experienced by the Christian community over the centuries based on a mythological founding claim that points to something beyond itself toward an undefined universal significance working through, but transcendent of culture and language.

 In this respect, Christianity has no more and no less truth claims than other religion in which all the great faiths represent various communal pathways to the holy, an inexpressible holiness devoid, in the final analysis, of much specific content.  Thus on Borg’s (1999) reading, Christianity is but “one of the world’s great religions[,]… one cultural-linguistic response to the experience of the sacred,” an experience that transcends verbal description and dogma in which words are but pointers to the ineffable.  Consequently, Christianity as one pathway to the holy is in principle, no more or less true than Buddhism in which even the concept of God is but a pointer to that which can only but transcend verbal description. 

 For Borg, language and historical analysis as fallible referents to that which ultimately transcends their boundaries are fundamentally dissimilar epistemological categories than faith which requires a radically different way of seeing. When one pushes on Borg’s assumptions, the divergence is so radical, in fact that, however profound in scope, the Bible and all to which it refers, is ultimately a metaphorized discourse which points beyond the text, to, perhaps, the god beyond the god as described in the Old and New Testaments. Thus, while there are invariable relationships between the two; the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are radically divergent in substantially key respects.  On Borg’s account, the risen Christ, too, is ultimately a cipher, a profound one, to be sure for the ineffable in which in other religious traditions other symbols will equally do in their opening different dimensions of the holy. The exclusivism of Christianity is, therefore relativized in the pluralism of a global reality in which there are various, if not many pathways to the truth.  What that truth is remains highly underdeveloped in Borg’s theology.

 Wright

As he notes, Wright is subject to criticism both from secular historians and from certain streams of evangelical and reformed theology.  Secular academics have grounds to chide Wright for allowing the presuppositions of faith to influence his interpretation of early Christianity.  Biblical theologians, on the other hand, may have concerns about the wisdom of Wright’s extensive reliance on the discipline of history in firming up a stance that is ultimately based on faith.  Wright acknowledges that in certain fundamental respects faith and historical studies are far from completely reconcilable.  Nonetheless, he draws extensively on history as a penultimate resource of major proportions, which provides an embodiment to faith in solid human experience that would otherwise be lacking. 

 One of Wright’s more proximate concerns is the influence of dualism in contemporary intellectual history in which religious faith as an epistemological category has no grounds of legitimacy in the secular academy.  The ghettoization operates in both ways to the extent that theologians cloister themselves by placing a ring around faith which is not subject to rational argument as defined by the rigorous, though ultimately limited categories of secular scholarship.  Wright seeks to reconcile the two in order to escape both the “attic (faith divorced from history) and the “dungeon (history divorced from faith,” p. 16).  Through his massive research project, Wright has found a great deal of symmetry between historical reconstruction and the claims of the gospels and the letters of Paul, which he elaborates upon to some degree in The Meanings of Jesus.  This is a primary difference with Borg, who also seeks reconciliation, at least at a certain level, between the claims of secular scholarship and those of faith.  Nonetheless, Borg points to the radical divergences between academic research on the historical Jesus and his existentialist discovery of Jesus anew.  Because he lacks an epistemological basis for a more direct embrace of the biblical narrative, for Borg, faith claims can only be but interpreted mythologically.  Based on Borg’s epistemology, any reconciliation with the thought world of modern scholarship needs to take into account this grounding point in which beliefs as beliefs are not subject in themselves to critical scholarly investigation.

Viewing faith without history and history without faith as barren, the relationship between the two for Wright is dialectical, namely, “a no-holds barred history on the one hand and a no-holds barred faith on the other” (p. 18). Their mutual power is that each speaks from the vantage-point of their own unique idiom whether in convergence or in opposition to one another.  Even over interpretative problems of a highly obdurate nature, Wright has sometimes “found that by living with the problem, turning it this way and that…, faith has been able to discover not just that the new, and initially surprising historical evidence, was capable of being accommodated.”  Even more, “by looking at the challenge from all angles,” including epistemologies opened up by faith, that “historical evidence was as well if not better interpreted within a different framework” (p. 17) than that provided by liberal (religious or secular) academic scholarship.  Thus for Wright the study of history has confirmed some of the deepest claims of faith even in the awareness that faith, in the final analysis, cannot be squared by historical consciousness and evidence.  This is a reality Wright notes, but which he underplays.

 In approaching Wright’s historical methodology let us note what he critiques as well as hat for which he advocates.  Namely, his target is nothing less than the mainstream orthodoxies of historical biblical criticism, particularly the “belief that isolated fragments of Jesus material circulated, and developed, in the early church divorced from narrative frameworks” (p. 23), as reflected, for example, in form and redaction criticism.  The problem with much of this scholarship, according to Wright, is its limited evidentiary basis in which methodology presupposes key assumptions, particularly a wide gulf between the historical Jesus and his first followers, and the traditions of the early church as reflected in the gospel texts. 

Specifically, there is not sufficient evidence to know definitively all that much to distinguish accurately between original events and later retrojections. Thus, without knowing the narrative framework in which the fragmentary texts (pericopes) were initially embedded, making definitive statements about whether they were early or late is at best problematic.  Wright proposes another approach, which is more fleshed out in his larger writings; namely, starting with what we know and building systematically toward reasoned, evidentiary-based conclusions and filling in the gaps as much as possible.  A key starting point for Wright is the knowledge we do have of Jesus, mostly from the New Testament that he “was a Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God.”  On that, argues Wright, we are on much more solid ground than “what we know about the history of traditions that led up to the gospels as we have them” (p. 23).  Based on this grounding framework the method that Wright proposes is “to draw in more and more of the evidence within a growing hypothesis about Jesus himself and Christian writings, including the writing of the gospels” (italics in original) (p. 23).

  That hypothesis is that the historical Jesus of Nazareth self understood himself to be Israel’s Messiah, his earliest followers perceived him as such, and both acted accordingly.  Closely related is Wright’s assumption that the Resurrection motif was very early, and moreover, that the evidence is stronger that the depiction of the empty tomb and the resurrection sightings as described in the gospels, actually happened than arguments to the contrary which seek to dismiss these phenomena as a fabrication of the “post Easter” early church.  Based on these hypotheses, Wright, in his various books has sought to work through the following expanding set of questions through “the scientific method of hypothesis and verification” (p. 22):

• What can be known about Jesus?
• Where does he belong in the world of his day (the world of Greek-Roman antiquity and of first-century Judaism in particular)?
• What were his aims, and to what extent did he accomplish them?
• What caused him to meet an early death?
• Why did a movement claiming allegiance to him spring up shortly after his death, taking a shape that was both like and significantly unlike other movements of the time? (p. 19).

As a “big picture” Christian historian, Wright (2002a) argues that focusing on these more fundamental questions, as the basis to guide the search for increasing knowledge, will cumulatively provide a clearer and more important picture of Jesus than currently available through much of mainline liberal critical scholarship.  It is this critically realist scientific approach that Wright (2002b, p. 12) posits against the Jesus Seminar, in which Borg and Dominick Crossan have been leading lights, in the radical gulf they presuppose in the juxtaposition between the time of the historical Jesus and the rise of the early church.  Of course, Wright, himself, has his own presuppositions and Borg and Crossan have marshaled more than a little evidence on behalf of their scholarship.  Consequently, Wright might be a little less than fair in his broad brushed critique of the liberal biblical scholarship extending back to the late 19h century.  Nonetheless, on the historical Jesus and the rise of the early church, his cumulative research is substantial.  Moreover, he offers the tantalizing prospect that there may be considerably more congruence between the historical figure of Jesus and the Christ of faith even as he is not always appreciative as he might of the persistent gulf between the two. 

This may be both a source of enlightenment and a profound source of temptation in seeking to know God, ultimately through history instead of faith, particularly on the matter of the Resurrection of Christ where Wright is most susceptible of conflating the two.  To reiterate, I said, a temptation.  While there is need to work against any polarity between the attic of faith without history and the dungeon of history without faith, there may be less need for integration than simply for further light in our looking in a mirror, dimly in the ongoing pilgrimage in which our meat is nothing more and nothing less than the daily manna provided to us.  This, at its best, is what Wright, as a highly committed historian and Christian, is searching for, which, to be fair, is the motivation of Borg, as well, even as they have taken some different pathways along the journey.

A review of Marcus Borg & N.T. Wright's The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

I will add several posts here reviewing The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions one section per post.
_____________________________________________________

Overview

 Critical issues in contemporary Protestant theology can be further distilled in the pivotal discussion between Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright in their collaborative book, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.  Borg was one of the members of the Jesus Seminar, and is professor of religion at Oregon State University.  Wright is Canon of Westminster Cathedral, historian, and a major biblical theologian of the “New Paul” school.  Their alternative perspectives crystallize key theological issues in dispute between liberal and evangelical theology particularly on the relationship between the “historical Jesus” and biblical theology.  The cover of the book hypes the contrast between the “liberal and conservative” credentials of Borg and Wright respectively, a point to be taken, yet with some advisement. 

 The contrast is clear enough in that Borg’s grounding point throughout is the tension between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.  Borg points to the many retrojections of key Old Testament passages and allusions by the early church in the New Testament that the biblical writers draw upon to highlight the Christological significance of the Risen One, depicted as the “son of God.”  In addition, Borg notes, the New Testament contains deified depictions of Jesus, which, according to the proponents of the Jesus Seminar, are well beyond any self reference the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth would have likely said about himself. 

Borg accepts the Christological claims in faith as God indwelling in Christ and discovers both Jesus and the Bible anew.   However, it is a depiction which is metaphorical, the way in which God speaks to a specific faith community in and through its own particular idiom.  This keeps open the possibility, and on Borg’s reading, the likelihood that God speaks as fully to other faith communities in other ways.  The claim of exclusivism, of Christ as the full embodiment of God in human flesh, as the way the truth and the life without equivocation is categorically rejected by Borg even as such imagery speaks profoundly to the believing faith community.  The question of ultimate truth remains largely unexamined in Borg’s depiction in his primary focus on the existential significance of Christ’s mediation of God in the light of the compelling challenges of modernity/ postmodernity and the ongoing work of constructing the historical record.  There is an implicit acceptance of a non-foundational postmodern credo in his theology, itself, an invariable form of foundationalism.

 Building on the work of E.P. Sanders, J.D. Dunn and others in reconstructing the “Jewish Jesus,” whom Borg accepts, N.T. Wright places the mission of Jesus within the historical context of second temple Judaism.  From such a vantage-point, this makes plausible the view that Jesus self understood his calling as Israel’s Messiah, which was not simply a later retrojection by the early church.  Notwithstanding this grounding in Israel’s history, the Messiah as embodied by Jesus radically reconstructed prevailing perceptions of a liberating king in the image of a conquering David.  This somewhat altered perception of God on a cross, nonetheless, could find justification in Jewish scripture as a legitimate midrash, once the vision was unleashed of Christ as a crucified and resurrected redeemer king.  In this respect Wright takes on the challenge of historical Jesus scholarship, but gives it a new twist in drawing out the ample ground of considerable continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith as expressed particularly in the synoptic gospels and the letters of Paul.

 On Wright’s interpretation the gospel supersedes the Torah while noting that Christ revealed is the fulfillment of the law in light of Adam’s sin and Israel’s inability to fulfill both its letter and spirit through acts of human righteousness and unrelenting faithfulness to the core credo (Deut 6:4-9).  In his various work, Wright provides a profusion of evidence to demonstrate the plausibility of Jesus’ self-understanding based on this reconstructed messianic vision, thoroughly congruent with the deepest teachings of Israel’s God as suffering servant, as most fully embodied in Isaiah.

 Wright’s argument is a double-edged sword for Reformed-based Protestants.  On the one hand, he has made a massive contribution in locating New Testament theology firmly in Jewish soil, therefore helping to establish the historical credibility of at least a good potion of its basic texts.  The connection between Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the Suffering Servant as Israel’s God, in turn, provides justification for the more creedal-based texts in some of the latter epistles and the Gospel of John.  Thus, on Wright’s reading, with God acting in and through the process, the Jesus of history, both pre and post crucifixion leads cumulatively to the Christ of faith and the means by which the Abrahamic vision of bringing God’s kingdom to the world is imaginatively realized. 

 The lurking concern remains the place of historical accuracy as the basis for faith.  From the perspective of narrative theology establishing greater linkages between history and the text enhances credibility, if only in the respect that if an utterly radical disconnect between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith existed, credulity would, at the very least, be severely strained.  That is, narrative theology works, to the extent that it does, because at the least there is a modicum of connection between that which is depicted in the text to that which actually existed as far as the historical record can disclose.  Borg and J.D. Crossan accept this, too, except they emphasize the discontinuities and the retrojected nature of the New Testament depiction of Jesus in conformity to the image of the early church, while Wright draws out the continuities grounded in Jewish history.  Even the mission to the Gentiles provided, on Paul’s argument, the basis for the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, and is congruent, therefore, with the most basic teachings of the Torah.  This is a major argument Wright (1991) draws out in The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology.

In the very process of establishing a tighter connection between faith claims and the historical record, a concern arises that Wright might be placing too much emphasis on historical accuracy as the basis for a faith stance that needs to remain grounded in “the substance of thing hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1).   Thus, with Borg, the historically marginalized figure of Jesus of Nazareth residing in the outpost of the Roman Empire some 2000 years ago cannot be the basis for faith.  It is, rather, on God working through Christ and placing him, as Christian theology has it, as the central figure in human history even if the events described in the New Testament are not historically accurate.  Wright does not deny this in his embrace of both history and faith, allowing each to have its say at their appropriate levels of discourse. The question remains how far the disconnect can go.  On this, Borg and Wright diverge even as both acknowledge in different ways the invariable tension between the claims of history and those of faith.  These issues go to the heart of The Meaning of Jesus:  Two Visions.

Thematization Vs Systemizartion in Walter Brueggemann' Theology of God (more cut material)

Israel’s Countertestimony

 Given the inevitable selectivity in processing the massive amount of material characteristic of any discipline or field, Brueggemann notes that “the decision to include or exclude, to accent or deemphasize, is never innocent.”  What emerges in any given work are the “presuppositions” that underlie the interpretive biases of the selection process.”  While the interpretive process is inescapable by the constructive nature of theological probing, what he describes as “themetization “violates the very character of the testimony that relishes the detail” embedded in exacting description.  As further put, “themetization is our required work and our most profound hazard” (italics in original).[i]  Other than noting this dilemma, he does not directly confront its implications at this point, which, as always with Brueggemann, requires further amplification.

 As Brueggemann further explains, thematization is not synonymous with systematization in that the former “aims only at a rough sketch and not close presentation.”  In resisting “closure,” thematization “allows for slippage, oddity, incongruity, and variation,”[ii] while providing some basis for coherent argumentation.  In short, without making thematic claims there would be little of value to say, in which all cats would be grey, even as claiming too much carries its own set of problems.  Wrestling with the gap between core assertions and the multitude of facts on the ground requires a perpetual winnowing process where for Brueggemann boldly sharp claims are made as central arguments which then become qualified as additional considerations are brought into the picture.  Thus, the emphasis he places on Israel’s core and countertestimony is qualified by what he refers to as “Israel’s embodied testimony” in which the various testimonies provided within the Old Testament narrative are arbitrated themselves through continuous negotiation.

 This goes as well for Brueggemann’s account of texts that speak of radical disjunctions between God’s uncompromising standard of holiness and his unyielding faithfulness to an often unfaithful Israel.  Although he states that he does not want to exaggerate these seemingly irreconcilable tendencies, sharply dualistic polarization is built into the very thematization that structures his text.  This tension needs accounting for, which he partially undertakes in the later sections of Theology of the Old Testament, where he offers important qualifying commentary.  While duly noted, “Core Testimony” and “Countertestimony” provide the dramatic structure and organizing framework for Brueggemann’s courtroom drama. 

---

[i] Ibid. p. 267.

[ii] Ibid., 268.