Book Review Marcus Borg
Book Review/Marcus Borg. Jesus: A new Vision.
Sprit, Culture and the life of Discipleship.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987
Borg has synthesized the findings of many of his colleagues like John Donahue, Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann to only mention a few. Borg makes no immodest claims, he simply examines the gospels record under the twofold aspect of Jesus and the Sprit and Jesus and culture. By “culture “the author means religious and political setting or life-world generally. Borg’s book is divided into three sections and each section develops a major themes.
The introduction, introduces two images of Jesus which has dominated Christian conversation for the past century: popular culture, the image of Jesus who was aware of his divine nature and it’s relationship to his ministry; and biblical scholarship, that has discounted as genuinely historical the figure of a Jesus who knew without a doubt that he was God incarnated, and openly proclaimed that message about himself. While scholarship has tried to correct, it “has not generated a persuasive alternative vision of the historical Jesus” (p.8). Borg sees Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who expected the struggle between the forces of good and evil to be resolves within his lifetime. The second major theme “Jesus and the Sprit,” Jesus would have been shaped and nurtured by his life setting and experiences.
The core argument of this section is Borg’s belief that Jesus knew himself to be a sprit-filled mediator who possessed a deep affinity with transcended Reality: ”Jesus stood [in the tradition of] the experience of Sprit endowed people who became radically open to the other [transcended] world and whose gifts were extraordinary” (p.32). Borg argues that bible scholarship has never come to grips with a means of taking the reality of his other world seriously, and so consequently its categories have been mostly absent from historical analysis of Jesus. Borg points out that this charismatic dimension of human experience comprised perhaps the most vital aspect of the life-setting and the religious tradition inherited by the historical Jesus.
The third theme “Jesus and Culture” attempts to understand Jesus through a variety of socio-religious lenses reconstructed from the influences alive within the ancient setting of an occupied Roman, it’s conventional thinking and religious-political practice. Jesus’ proverbs, parallels and “lessons from nature”, helped Borg to see Jesus as a sage, healer and prophet who challenged the conventional wisdom of the time. Critiques of the religious establishment on his sayings suggest that Jesus was a religious reformer, rather than one who was interested in founding a new religion. Jesus identified with the prophets, so he must have been seen as one, for he presented “an alternative consciousness to society’s most cherishes beliefs (p.55).
The death of Jesus must be seen as a historical consequence of the challenge he leveled against the socio-religious power structures of the time. Borg holds that the historical Jesus ”saw reality very different from both us and most of his contemporaries” (p.100).This is a book about the Jesus of history. Borg’s “new vision” offered is primary Jesus’ own vision of life, which “radically calls to question our most common way of being and invites us to see differently”(p.100). This “new vision” also challenges our preoccupation with wealth, power, and worldly securities. Jesus retains relevance for both the church and contemporary culture.
Borg’s “alternative view of Jesus” must be seen as a historical figure that is a product of his time and was faced with many socio-political, socio–economic and socio-religious influences. Jesus rose above his situation with a unique vision of reality and a rare empathy that transcended reality. Jesus used this transcended reality to speak on behalf of God, to call Gods people to a moral accounting, and to reform the rituals religious. The force of his book’s argument is magnified by its interdisciplinary conversation with the social sciences and the general study of religion. For this reader Jesus: A New Vision has cast a fresh light which was coherent and convincing on one of the most important of New Testament issues “the historical Jesus”.
