Last summer when I ordered a political science book on Amazon for my dissertation research, I went ahead and ordered another book so that I could get the free shipping. Upon my sister's suggestion, I bought The Meaning of Jesus by Marcus Borg and NT Wright. She read this book for a class while attending seminary and said that it was one of the best ones she read. Borg, the leading liberal scholar, and Wright, the leading conservative scholar, debate back and forth about several topics concerning the historical Jesus, including the gospel's reliability, Jesus' message, the crucifixion, the resurrection, His divinity, the birth stories, and the second coming. I had read NT Wright when a church I attended in college gave me his book Simply Christian as a graduation gift (this book is the best introduction to Christianity I've read and summarizes my own beliefs rather closely). However, I haven't read much legit liberal theology, so I was eager to read this book to see how the arguments developed.
Overall, Borg followed the idea that there was a pre-Easter Jesus and a post-Easter Jesus. The first century Christian community changed the historical Jesus into a 'history remembered' image or metaphor after His death. Therefore, Borg goes back through scripture to see what Jesus actually did and what the gospels merely claimed He did. I've heard similar arguments from atheists and Christian critics as reasons to reject Christianity, but Borg insists that even if the events did not occur in the manner as the gospels claim, Jesus is still Lord and so forth; it is still better to follow Christ. Though I found his logic and arguments interesting, I thought NT Wright's positions made more sense. For instance, Borg argued that Jesus' followers turned Him into a 'messiah' after the crucifixion and that Jesus didn't think of Himself in such terms and never talked about it. Wright responded that we cannot know definitively what Jesus actually thought, but because they were under Roman occupation the first century Jewish community in which He grew up had a lot of debates and discussions about who the 'messiah' would be and what he would do. There are lots of Jewish texts from this era to attest to this debate, even if most of the would-be messiahs attempted to use military force to overthrow Rome. Considering how Jesus behaved, people would have wondered about His position on the messiah debate. It seems very unlikely that He would have grown up in this environment, been asked for His opinion during this popular discussion, and not make up His mind one way or the other, as Borg argues. In this case, I find Wright's argument more reasonable.
On another note, I tend to dislike Borg's theory about a pre- and post-Easter Jesus for one main reason: the traditions that he argues developed after Easter happened rather suddenly and depart greatly from traditional Judaism's or any other religion's theology. I'm used to the idea that what people remember about history and what actually happened can be very different. Last year I studied about how people remembered wars and traumatic experiences differently from what happened. However, even in the Second World War in which the Russians and Americans remember the war very differently, there is general agreement about most events that have happened because people are still alive to verify certain theories and confront misconceptions. I'm not sure how long it would take for a society to develop a huge distortion of interpretation that Borg alleges happened to the early Christian church within only a couple years, but from looking at how societies have distorted what wars have meant or why they happened, I suppose it would take multiple generations. The gospels were not written 200 years after Jesus' crucifixion, so I doubt Borg's assertion.
Another point that Borg makes confuses me when I consider what else he says. In his last chapter he argues that Christians should focus on the historical Jesus, who was a huge proponent of social justice. Borg writes, "Jesus knew that the desperation of life flowed from systematic injustice" (pp. 244-245). I have no problem with the idea that Jesus had a problem with social injustice and that the church should confront these injustices. However, Borg's methodology confuses me. How does he, on the one hand, say that Jesus did not think of Himself as divine or as the messiah because the early church created those beliefs and corrupted the gospels but then, on the other hand say that Jesus did think that social injustice was a problem? If we can't trust the our sources because the early church created them, then how can we determine Jesus' opinion on the economic status quo? After all, Jesus probably didn't take Economics 101 so that he could understand how the Roman Empire worked economically and how best to undermine this system (though He probably did learn about Jewish beliefs and debates like the messiah issue at the synagogue). If the early church created the divine side of Jesus and put it into its early texts, then surely they could have created the social gospel side and put it into the same texts. How can we exclude one and not exclude the other? I'm sure Borg has elaborated on this point in other works but perhaps did not have space in the book I read. For me, I exclude neither because I believe the gospels give a fairly good representation of what happened.
After reading this book, I've learned that I am in fact a conservative Christian. I've actually wondered a bit about this point because I do believe that women should be allowed to be ministers and leaders within the church if they should so choose, which in Mississippi makes me a raging liberal according to conventional wisdom there.
Finally, I end this post on an except from this book. Over the past year I've thought a bit about suffering and how it relates to the Christian life. So often I've heard from the pulpit of different churches that if Christians follow Jesus, they'll have a better life; they'll have a good spouse, marriage, descent children, and so forth if they follow Jesus. It almost sounds like a variation of the 'health and wealth' gospel. When I read the Bible, I find the opposite is true. Jesus warns His followers that following Him will make life more difficult ('foxes have holes but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head' and so forth). Even in the Old Testament I see that those who followed God did not necessarily have a better life, at least not in terms of this life. Look at Hosea. He had a pathetic wife precisely because he followed God. Yet there is a purpose in suffering. Wright hits on this point in his last chapter:
Paul writes in several of his letters about his own suffering and that of other Christians, being used in the economy of God to bring about life and healing for others. 2 Corinthians as a whole reflects this belief: there, Paul's suffering as an apostle (directly caused by his challenging the principalities and powers with the news that the crucified Jesus is the Lord of the world) is seen as itself part of the healing process whereby the Corinthian church is built up in faith, renewed in Christ. [...] I have increasingly seen as central and climatic the Pauline and indeed New Testament theology as a whole is Romans 8:18-27. There, within the context of the hope for the renewal (healing?) of the whole creation, Paul sketches a picture of the church's task. The church is not called to stand on the sidelines watching the world from a distance as it groans in travail, longing for redemption. The church finds itself caught up in the same groaning, suffering at the heart of a world in pain. But within the church's groaning Paul detects the groaning of the Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the living God. God does not stand aloof from the pain of the church and hence from the pain of the world. Rather, God is present in the church, calling forth prayer, even inarticulate prayer, precisely at the place of the world's pain. Thus, the church is called to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel: not just a moral lecturer, nor even a moral example, but the people who, in obedience to God's strange vocation, learn to suffer and pray at the place where the world is in pain, so that the world may be healed. (pp. 223-224)
In this and other works, Wright emphasizes that the church should build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth in order to prepare for Jesus' return. In order to build this Kingdom, Christians will suffer and sacrifice. Personally, I believe that this message of selfless service and sacrifice is not emphasized enough, at least not in many of the churches I've attended.
No comments:
Post a Comment