Borg & Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two visions

A book review of Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

Over the last two or three decades, there has been an explosion of  books, articles, college courses, and websites devoted to the "search for the historical Jesus." Jesus scholarship has become a big business, and there is far more out there than anyone could ever read or watch let alone master.  It is, furthermore, a, tumultuous and highly contested field with scholars arguing (sometimes vehemently) almost every perspective one could imagine.  There are liberal Jesus scholars and conservative ones, secular Jesus scholars and faithful ones—all pushing their version  of the historical Jesus.

Borg & Wright's The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions is different.  Representing distinct strands in the larger debate, the authors have written a friendly book intended to describe and explore their differences.  They see themselves as being in dialogue, valuing each other's views and disagreeing about them "without being disagreeable."  They transcend thus the usual "my interpretation is the right one" approach of many Jesus scholars and, instead, affirm the fact that there are numerous ways to understand the historical Jesus, all of them incomplete.

The book starts out somewhat slowly with one chapter by each author describing their historical methodology.  The prose is a tad ponderous, especially in Wright's chapter, but even so readers immediately begins to see the distinction between the two.  Both consider themselves faithful Christians and affirm the authority and importance of the Bible.  The issue that divides them is the historical reliability of the four gospels.  For Borg, the gospels are "metaphorized" accounts that reveal more about what the earliest Christians believed about Jesus than factual information concerning Jesus himself.  Wright contends that the gap between the historical Jesus and the gospels is much narrower, and we can largely bridge it by immersing ourselves in the historical context of first century Judaism.  The rest of the book reveals how this central difference between Borg and Wright plays out across a number of key issues.

The Meaning of Jesus is divided into eight parts beginning with methodology and then going on to cover Jesus' teachings and actions, death, resurrection, divinity, birth, second coming, and relationship to the Christian life.  Borg and Wright contribute a chapter to each section, carefully alternating who presents the first chapter.  Borg went first in Part I, so Wright begins Part II, and so it goes: Borg, Wright; Wright, Borg; Borg, Wright; and so forth.  As it works out, Borg gets the first and the last word.

N. T. Wright

Wright tends to be more of the historian, immersed in details and less apt to reach large theological conclusions.  It often feels as if he "beats around the bush," considering the minutiae of the data and making careful limited judgments based on it.  The result is that he seems indecisive, even obscure at points.  In his chapter on the divinity of Jesus (Chapter 10), for example, he never quite brings himself to say, "yes," or "no," or even "maybe." It is clear from all he has written that he does think Jesus was/is divine, but the best he can bring himself to write is that if we start with the Old Testament, "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..." (p. 167).  Similarly, when it comes to the virginal conception of Jesus, Wright never does state whether or not Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus.  He somewhat lamely concludes that if the birth narratives in Luke and Matthew never existed it wouldn't make much difference to the church's faith or to his.  He says, "I hold open my historical judgment and say: if that's what God deemed appropriate, who am I to object?"  He does not say whether or not God did deem a virginal concept "appropriate" or not.

To be fair, in his concluding chapter (Chapter 15) Wright states directly that the events described in the Gospels did happen, otherwise they would not be meaningful.  He uses the example of the Emmaus Road story (Luke 24:13-35).  If it didn't take place, then it isn't true.  For Wright, then, the truth of Jesus is tied to the factual truth of the gospels.

Marcus J. Borg

Borg is the theologian-historian.  Believing that the gap between Jesus and the gospels is generally wide and next to impossible to bridge, Borg is more interested in the metaphorical meanings of the early church's stories about Jesus.  He has no trouble rejecting the historicity of most of the gospels' stories.  Thus, for example, he denies from the beginning of his chapter on the birth narratives (Chapter 12) that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus.  He outlines his reasoning and then returns to the metaphorical truths he sees encased in the stories.  In each of his chapters, Borg seeks out those truths, largely rejecting the historicity of the gospels.  Where Wright generally does not divorce historical factuality from the truth about Jesus, Borg clearly sees Christian truth as resting on a deeper, spiritualized plane where "objective" historical "facts" are of less concern.

In one telling exchange, Borg insists that the "pre-Easter" Jesus would not have thought of himself as being the messiah, let alone divine.  He did not have the mind of God or the power of God as such.  The pre-easter Jesus was an incarnation of God but did not think of himself that way.  To do so would have betrayed in him a mental illness.  Healthy individuals just do not think of themselves as God.  The "post-Easter" Jesus, however, is a divine reality, and is "one with God."  Wright, of course, disagrees and believes that it would have been natural for Jesus to understand himself as the messiah.  Other Jewish figures before him had thought of themselves that way.  We cannot, Wright argues, rely on modern psychology to understand Jesus' frame of mind or self-understanding in the first century.  Where Borg thinks the gospel writers read the whole idea of Jesus being the messiah back into his life afterward, Wright sees no evidence it happened that way.  They wrote that Jesus was the messiah because he had said as much to them.

So it goes through each subject.  For Wright, the gospels largely reflect Jesus' self-understanding and events that actually took place.  For Borg, they reflect the early church's metaphorical interpretations of Jesus, which had relatively little to do with actual events.  On the whole, Borg seems to make his case more clearly and in less ponderous prose.

The Meaning of Jesus provides a useful introduction to the contemporary scholarly quest for the historical Jesus.  It is not for the faint-hearted, and most lay readers will find that they need a dictionary to get through especially the early chapters.  For those who make the effort, however, there are important rewards.  One key thing this book and the larger quest for the historical Jesus does is to make us think more concretely about the humanity of Jesus—and to discover that the humanity of Jesus matters as much as his divinity.  The book also helps readers to think more concretely about the relationship of the gospels to Jesus.  It becomes clear that the gospels are faith documents, not historical biographies, and that they are not infallible and untouchable.

Finally, the friendly but intense dialogue between Borg and Wright, close personal friends, offers readers the opportunity to take less seriously what they believe about the Bible and various biblical doctrines.  What the two authors share is a faith in the living Christ, and The Meaning of Jesus is an invitation to share in that common faith in the face of different beliefs.  For those open to the possibility of dialogue across theological differences, Borg and Wright have given us a useful, encouraging model for how that dialogue can work.  And that alone is worth the price of admission.

Links for Marcus J. Borg:

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Borg's Official Website
Wikipedia article
A Portrait of Jesus website
Spirituality & Practice website

Links for N. T. Wright:

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N. T. Wright Page website
Wikipedia article
Open Evangelicalism Wikipedia entry

Links for the Study of the Historical Jesus:

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"Historical Jesus Theories" webpage
Wikipedia article

McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity

A book review of Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010).  

Brian McLaren has established himself as an iconoclastic Christian thinker committed to discovering new forms of the Christian faith appropriate to our times.  Author of a series of groundbreaking books, A New Kind of Christianity carries his arguments forward another important step, one that has proven controversial among conservative evangelicals who once considered him one of their own.  The book, in part, is an answer to his critics, in part it is an indictment of them, and in part a conscious attempt to move forward with those who share his quest for a new Christianity in a new age.

The book, in a sense, represents a new-age catechism containing ten questions and extended answers concerning the Bible, God, Jesus, the Gospel, the church, homosexuality, the future, pluralism, and how to move into the future.  The point of the catechism is to chart new directions for the Christian faith.  It represents McLaren's description of the quest.  Depending on one's theology, the answers are either excitingly helpful or dangerously radical.

Those answers begin with a rejection of mainstream Christian thinking going back almost to the early church.  McLaren contends that for most of our history, Western Christianity has been dominated by a Platonic, dualistic "Greco-Roman narrative."  It is an "us-against-them" story line that has forced Christians to behave in narrow-minded and violent ways that are not in keeping with Christ.  Among other things, it has foisted a false understanding of God on us.  McLaren names this false Christian god, "Theos."  He writes, "Theos loves spirit, state, and being, and hates matter, story, and becoming...So, having created a perfect world, now Theos is perfectly furious because it has been spoiled and is now decaying." (p. 42)  McLaren argues that the new Christianity has to reject Theos and leap back over the centuries and rediscover the biblical God, Elohim, who is peace-loving and compassionate, as well as just.  In doing so, we must also stop reading the Bible as if it is a code of laws or a legal constitution.  What the Bible actually is, he writes, is "a portable library of poems, prophecies, historical, fables, parables, letters, sage sayings, quarrels, and so on." (p. 79)  He understands that the Bible is a culturally-bound human artifact, but  also believes it to be inspired in its diversity.  Although the Bible retains its authority in McLaren's "new kind of Christianity," he subordinates that authority to Christ.  We have to understand (and accept) that parts of the Bible represent an earlier, more primitive spirituality; Christ is the measure of what we take from scripture.  McLaren embraces the Bible because when read in its original setting it helps us to "become more sensitive than ever to the wonderful dance of the Spirit of God" and the minds of it authors at critical times in the history of the faith (see p. 146).

Jesus, then, takes us beyond Theos and away from the Greco-Roman narrative to discover in the Bible that "the humble man of peace is Lord."  He is the one we trust and give our allegiance to.  Jesus is not about power but about love.  In working through his view of Jesus, McLaren provides an extended discussion of the Gospel of John, which is often used to support a narrow, exclusivist understanding of salvation.  He sees a different narrative in John, one with clear parallels to the Old Testament; and he concludes that Jesus did come come to save people from hell but to "launch a new Genesis, to lead a new Exodus, and to announce, embody, and inaugurate a new kingdom as the Prince of Peace." (p. 131)

Brian D. McLaren

McLaren contends that his "new" Christianity is actually a rediscovery of the faith of the earliest church.  He sees himself as a true conservative who is seeking to bring to center elements of that faith, which the Greco-Roman ideology has long shoved into the shadows.  In keeping with his program of rediscovery, he seeks to get back to basics so far as the church is concerned.  The church should be a "school of love," a place where we learn and practice "spiritual formation in the way of Christ." (p. 170)  By a school of love, he means, "...a school of listening, dialogue, appreciative inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation, nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and social transformation." (p. 171)  This school of love rejects the old, dualistic (I'm in - you're out) way of looking at others.  It embraces what McLaren calls "participatory eschatology," by which he means that humanity participates with God in creating God's future.  The future is not about wrath, armageddon, and an angry God dividing the damned from the saved.  In the school of love, we read the Bible with new eyes that affirm rather than condemn our neighbors of other faiths.

The last of McLaren's questions is, "How can we translate our quest into action?"  He charts the evolution of human spirituality in the context of seven stages or successive quests, which he categorizes with colors.  They are the quests for: survival (red zone); for security (orange zone), for power (yellow zone), for independence (green zone), for individuality (blue zone), for honesty (indigo zone), and for healing (violet).  Each age or quest contains the seeds of the next quest, and the human race does not pass through each stage uniformly.  Many are still "stuck" in older stages, and those trapped in an earlier quest reject, often angrily, the reality of the succeeding stage.  McLaren believes that the cutting edge of spiritual evolution has not reached the indigo zone of honest and that our quest is now to move forward into the stage of healing the destructive consequences of the previous quests.  It is a quest for peace (he prefers to use the African word, ubantu).  He also imagines an eighth quest, as yet unborn, the quest for sacredness (ultra violet zone).  The ultimate goal of human spirituality is the Kingdom of God, which lies still far in the future.  Working toward the Kingdom is what gives our lives purpose and direction in the present.

One of the characteristics of those like McLaren who now reside in the indigo zone is a tendency to look down on people who are still inhabiting earlier zones—and attack them as being primitive or conservative or fundamentalists.  He believes that the inhabitants of the indigo zone should resist that urge and, instead, seek to rise to the next level, the violet level of peace and healing.  Indigo zone folks thus should not be defensive or prideful but look to the future with hope.  McLaren is sure that there is a better world coming because that is God's will: "This is God's world.  It is clearer to us than ever that God created a universe of expansion and evolution."  As strong as resistance to growth and change might be, what abounds is "God's grace, God's invitation to grow into evert increasing aliveness, goodness, and love.  So I cannot help but have hope, because God is present with us." (p. 240)  McLaren concludes A New Kind of Christianity with several points of practical advice, among which is the admonition not to fight with those who resist but to gently move beyond them.

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Conservative evangelicals don't like this book and have written a number of reviews highly critical of it.  One of the most detailed is by Mike Wittmer in his blog, "Don't Stop Believing."  In a series of postings he wrote in February 2010, Wittmer comments on each of McLaren's questions, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes with a little irritation, and sometimes with a disdain that matches the same disdain he feels McLaren has toward him and those like him.  For those seeking "the other side of the story," Wittmer is a good place to start.

Mainline progressives, on the other hand, will find McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity a comfortable read.  His description of the Greco-Roman captivity of the church and its false god, Theos, ring true. His use of scripture to make his points and the fresh perspectives he brings to the Bible are especially helpful.  More largely, progressive readers will find fresh perspectives on things that they already believe or understand.  McLaren doesn't so much break new ground as to provide additional tools for cultivating ground already dug.

Where McLaren is less than persuasive is in his sweeping rendition of human history as a series of quests.  It sounds spiffy and all, but it really doesn't make much sense, and it perpetuates the view that prehistoric peoples' lives were always a struggle to survive.  Not denying that it was, still one wonders if small bands of pre-historic humans living off the land struggled for survival any more than millions of homeless Americans who often don't know where their next meal will come from.  As we watch people in the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa struggle for a voice and for power, it is clear that in our age the quest for power remains potent, almost omnipresent.  And have we not been engaged for hundreds and thousands of years in a search for ubantu (santisuk in Thai)?

Besides the fact that it doesn't work historically, McLaren's color coded version of the human journey has a self-satisfied and slightly arrogant ring to it.  He clearly believes that he and those who travel with him have moved ahead of all others in terms of human spiritual evolution.  He dismisses his critics as inhabitants of the earlier stages of that evolution—people stuck in older quests.  As hard as he tries to warn his readers (and remind himself) that arrogance and judgment is not the way forward, a thread of disdain for his adversaries winds its way through the text.  He honestly believes that he knows more and sees with greater clarity, and he is not particularly humble about it.  That's fine, but it really isn't helpful to assign his critics and large numbers of faithful Christians to a lower rung on the spiritual evolutionary totem pole—especially when that totem pole is largely fanciful anyway.

That being said, there is a great deal to commend in this book.  It helps those who are searching for new ways to think about their faith to understand the sources of their discontent with the inherited traditions and doctrines of the church (the Greco-Roman narrative).  It takes the Bible seriously while freeing scripture from biblical literalism and narrow constructions.  Looking at the Bible through the lens of Christ and making him the measure of scripture provides a helpful, faithful, and Christ-like way to use the Bible as a resource without having to buy into the less happy aspects of the ancient text (such as those passages that subordinate women or the ones used to damn homosexuals).

A New Kind of Christianity is an important book.  It addresses the feeling among many faithful Christians that something is wrong, that something no longer satisfies (or never did).  It helps individuals who are seeking new directions to reconnect with the Bible in its own setting and to make sense of those new directions in light of the person of Jesus.  It is, in sum, a catechism for the 21st century, a set of questions and answers that make sense for many faithful followers of Jesus in the real world of today.

Links for Brian D. McLaren

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Official Website
Wikipedia article

Fest, Hitler

Joachim C. Fest. Hitler. (Translated by Richard and Clara Wilson, London: Penguin Books, 1974).

[I originally wrote this book review in 2002. At the time, I was a church history researcher in Thailand, and most of my work was on Thai church history directly.  Fest's Hitler, however, caught my eye for the theological issues it raises.  It makes a good start for Rom Phra Khun Reviews.  Herb]

Some months ago, I went back to my slightly battered copy of Fest's Hitler, a book I'd started many years' ago and never finished. I intended to read it casually, but it soon dawned on me that Fest's interpretation of Hitler's life and accomplishments is an important twentieth-century theological treatise. It helps to define the theological context in which all of us still live today; it describes, that is, the "mother of all theological contexts," be they Karen, Thai, Australian, European, or whatever. However profoundly sad and regrettable the fact, Adolph Hitler was a dominant figure of the twentieth century, to the point that if we have to choose the one political figure from that century who most influenced the shape of the twenty-first century it would probably be him. While World War I was the formative event of the twentieth century, Fest makes it clear that Hitler embodied and carried forward the consequences of that war, thereby shaping the world that emerged after 1918 and after 1945.

Fest wrote this biography, which emphasizes Hitler's intellectual and ideological development, as a revision of and correction to previous studies, notably biographies written by British and American authors. Those studies largely perpetuate the Hitler "myth," which portrays him in demonic terms and obscures both his humanity and accomplishments. Those histories also interpret Hitler, conveniently, as a uniquely German phenomenon, the result of peculiarly German historical forces. Fest's biography is the first major, influential German historical interpretation of Hitler, and the differences in interpretation are important—evidently, controversial. Fest spends most of the book explaining Hitler's accomplishments rather than his failures. He points out that the actual events of Hitler's life prove that he was a gifted politician who knew how to play his opponents off against each other, how to take immense risks successfully, how to lie with deceptive candor, and how to grasp opportunities ruthlessly. After he became chancellor, he quickly gathered all of the reins of power into his own hands, in spite of widespread opposition. Eventually, he practiced these same skills on all of Europe, dividing Germany's potential enemies and overturning the European diplomatic system in a remarkably short time. Fest's Hitler is sometimes brave, frequently daring, and usually politically insightful.

In the course of this revisionist study, Fest defends various decisions made by Hitler, which decisions have been widely seen as irrational and, again, demonic. He, for example, explains Hitler's rationale for the German invasion of Russia in 1941, one of those events generally interpreted as a case in point of Hitler's hubris and reckless disregard for common sense. The author shows that Hitler had his reasons for invading Russia, ones based on the logic of the situation that confronted him in 1941 and on his own experience as a politician and a "generalissimo." Fest has written thus an "apologetic," which seeks to correct the non-German tendency to shift all the blame for Hitler and, ultimately, the vast disaster of his rule, onto Germany alone. Fest points out the underlying ambivalence of the German populace towards Hitler's militarism as well as the real-life historical circumstances in Europe that permitted Hitler's rise to power. The author argues that Hitler was a manifestation of the post-World War I European situation and not, therefore, "merely" a German phenomenon. He makes a good case, at least so far as a non-specialist is concerned. It is weakened only by Fest's failure to give sufficient attention to Hitler's racist policies, which had massively tragic consequences for our world—consequences we are still suffering through today.

One of the central themes of the book, however, deserves serious theological reflection and response. Fest makes it clear that Hitler personally and his followers generally relied heavily on inherited Christian categories, beliefs, and archetypes. The Nazi use of religious thought was partly pure propaganda, but on a deeper level many Nazis also accepted Christian categories as their own. As described by Fest, Hitler and his followers made use of those categories in the following ways:

First, Hitler was born a Catholic and saw in the Catholic Church important lessons on how to organize and control "the masses." He, at times, claimed political infallibility, which he compared to the Pope's ecclesiastical infallibility. He also occasionally referred to the Nazi Party or to the SS as being secular monastic orders. Hitler devised a whole annual cycle of psuedo-religious ceremonies, which consciously mimicked the Christian liturgical year. Second, Hitler saw himself as Germany's and, ultimately, Europe's savior He sometimes compared himself to Christ as did his followers.Third, Hitler consistently saw himself as a child of Providence, one who was guided by and protected by God. He believed, consequently, that he had a call from Providence to carry out a mission to save the German people. This call and mission justified any action, any policy, and any lie. Fourth, Fest repeatedly points to the eschatological nature of National Socialism under Hitler. It strove for "final solutions" and believed itself to be engaged in an epic, final battle with Communism for world domination. Fifth, the fabled emotional hold Hitler exercised over his mass meetings reminds one of nineteenth-century American frontier revivalism or even of the Sung revivals in Thailand in the 1930s. There is that same sense of rapture, the same powerful religious oratory that called forth deep wellsprings of feeling among the "congregation." Sixth, underlying all of these beliefs was the dualistic substrata common to all of Western thinking, especially Western Christian religious thought. Like the great majority of Westerners, Hitler believed he was engaged in a vast battle against evil, evil for him including Bolshevism, Judaism, racial impurity, and anything that impinged on his vision of a strong Germany.

Fest demonstrates that Hitler and his followers thus used essentially Christian theological categories to organize their thinking. Yet, it is clear that those categories are Christian only in form, not in content. Hitler's version of messiah-ship, for example, was based on the model of the white knight rather than the crucified Christ. His view of salvation was a world dominated by Europe, a Europe dominated by Germany, and a Germany dominated by a pure Aryan race—a world in which inferior races existed only to serve the "true" race. His salvation was the end of Communism and the acquisition of sufficient "living space" for Aryan Germany. Hitler himself eschewed Christian values of humility and transformed the Christian life of suffering and service into a quest for power, the quest that ultimately destroyed him. Where Christians struggle to serve, Hitler struggled to dominate.

Hitler, as portrayed in this biography, presents those of us who care about the Christian faith and seek to live faithful Christian lives with a frightening reality check on the power of religion to go wrong and do wrong. Based on Fest's interpretation, it is arguable that Hitler was as much a religious figure as anything else. People had faith in him to the point that many truly did believe he was politically infallible and that he was God's chosen savior for the German people. He appealed to that faith and manipulated it. He gave people hope in the otherwise hopeless world of the Great Depression. Yes, of course, his religion was actually an anti-religion, but this fact did not reduce his ability to manipulate religious values and categories for his own ends. It does not change the fact that the religious mentality can always become and frequently does become a manipulative, predatory one. All manner of wrongs, small and large, are perpetrated in the names of Christ, the Buddha, and Muhammad.

Stated differently, Fest's biography of Hitler reminds us of the intimate relationship between ideology and religion. Ideology is the set of ideas (beliefs) humans use to construct a social-political-economic reality they take to be desirable and often includes unacknowledged, self-serving assumptions about the world. Religious faith is the set of beliefs (ideas) humans use to construct ultimate meaning. The distinction between faith and ideology is not, however, as clear-cut as these definitions imply. Fest makes it clear that faith is frequently (generally?) a form of ideology and ideology is also a form of religious faith. Hitler's power-hungry, white knight version of Christianity serves as an important reminder that none of our wide variety of Christianities is Christ. They are, rather, human responses to the Incarnation, which at their very best are occasionally vaguely Christ-like.

Finally, this biography of Hitler serves as a clear warning that contextualized Christian theologies are not necessarily Christ-like theologies. Hitler, we can argue, reshaped the European Christian tradition into a profoundly relevant theology, which proved meaningful to tens of millions of Depression Era Europeans (not just Germans, as Fest points out) in the context of post-World War I Europe. National Socialist revivalism transformed their shabby and crisis-ridden lives into ones filled with new hope and purpose, and Fest makes it abundantly clear that Adolph Hitler was a masterful politician who knew how to respond to the wants and needs of the people. The Nazi "miracle" can be partly explained by his ability to create a contextual politics that had a strong religious-like component in it. The drive to construct contextual theologies in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the West is a worthy one only to the extent that the results tend to be Christ-like, self-critical, and self-consciously tentative.

Fest's Hitler should be required reading in every Christian theological seminary in the world. It is not merely a history of key events in the twentieth century. It is also a description of our present theological context and, potentially, a warning against what seems to be the fundamentalist religious direction of the twenty-first century.