Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  3. In Leander Keck’s striking phrase, the historical Jesus is a “parable of God.” See his A Future for the Historical Jesus (New York and Nashville: Abingdon, 1971).

  4. For Jesus as “image of God” in the New Testament, see 2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15.

  5. “Icon” is the Greek word for “image.” Within the Eastern Orthodox tradition of the church, icons are “sacred images,” highly stylized paintings of religious subjects. As objects of contemplation, they function as “windows into the other world”; they mediate the Spirit.

  6. See especially Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), and Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

  7. Discipleship is not equally emphasized by all Christians. Some imply (or even state) that following Jesus is not important at all because Jesus “has done it all”—his death on the cross atones for my sins, and therefore I need do nothing but rest confidently in his blood and righteousness. There is some truth in this; the mainstream of the Christian theological tradition over the centuries has persistently insisted that we are saved by grace and not by our own effort, known by God long before we know that we are known, and loved by God long before we return that love. But once one sees that, believes that, knows that, then what? Discipleship is the response; it does not challenge the priority of grace, but is the response to grace.

  8. 1 Corinthians 11:1. Paul actually wrote, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” See also Philippians 2:5-8, which is dominated by an imitatio Christi motif; the self-emptying, servanthood, and “obedience unto death” of Jesus are held up as a model to be emulated.

  9. I am not arguing that historical knowledge about Jesus is essential for the life of Christian discipleship. Ever since the death of Jesus, discipleship has been a response to the living Christ and not to the historical Jesus. It is the living Christ who is still known as lord, still issues the call to “follow me,” and still stands in the relation of master and disciples with his followers. Moreover, centuries of Christians have lived lives of discipleship without knowledge of the historical Jesus; prior to the modern period, no distinction had yet been made between the Christ of the gospels and Jesus as a figure of history. Clearly, historical knowledge about Jesus is no more necessary for the life of discipleship than it is for Christian faith (see chapter 1, page 13). Nevertheless, what Jesus was like is not irrelevant to discipleship. Indeed, we may suppose that for the earliest Christians in the first decades after Easter, the still-vivid historical memory of what he was like must have shaped their understanding of what it meant to “follow him.” My claim is simply that an image of the historical Jesus illuminates the path of discipleship.

  10. Mark 8:34; see chapter 6, pages 112-114.

  11. See chapter 6, note 67. Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a German Lutheran pastor and theologian, was martyred by the Nazis in the last month of the Third Reich. Thus for him the words had a literal meaning which he probably did not anticipate when he wrote them some eight years before his death.

  12. This birth is not to be identified only with a narrowly defined understanding of the “baptism of the Spirit”; clearly, the lives of the saints indicate that being “born to the Spirit” cannot be restricted to sharply defined experiences that fit a certain formula. But neither is it to be denied as central to the Christian life; at its more mature levels, that life intrinsically involves a “lived” relationship to the Spirit.

  13. That is, community is an intrinsic part of it. Though there have been exceptions in the Christian tradition (hermit monks and Christians isolated by circumstance), both Jesus and his followers used rich communal images to describe the new life: family, Israel, kingdom, a banquet, a vine with many branches, a single body with many organs.

  14. Matthew 5:14.

  15. “Babylon” in the Bible has both a literal and symbolic meaning. On the one hand, it refers literally to the empire which destroyed the people of God in 586 B.C. In the New Testament (as well as in other Jewish writings of the time), it becomes a symbol for Rome, described as “Babylon,” “the great whore drunk with the blood of the saints” (Revelation 17), the “new” imperial power which stood opposed to the people of God. Babylon thus stands for culture in so far as it is opposed to God.

  16. See John 17:14-18.

  17. The classic study is H. Richard Niebuhr’s masterfully insightful Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951). Niebuhr actually catalogs five ways the relationship has been seen; for the sake of simplicity, I have reduced those five to four. His more subtle distinctions are illuminating at a more refined level of analysis.

  18. This case for a Christian involvement in politics should not be confused with current attempts by some Christian groups to legislate a sharply defined understanding of righteousness which is often the historically conditioned product of an earlier cultural period, and which seems more like a “politics of holiness.” Rather, the “politics of compassion” is an ethos which is to shape all programs and all legislation.

  19. We often think of “ideals” as politically irrelevant, but this is not so. Even though one cannot imagine a perfect incarnation of the politics of compassion in any historical future we can foresee, it (like “freedom” or “justice”) can have the “relevance of an impossible ideal,” a phrase central to the thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), the most influential Christian social ethicist in North America (and the world?) in this century.

  20. Twentieth-century scholarship has regularly treated it as the central element of Jesus’ preaching and ministry, indeed seeing it as the “key” to understanding the ministry of Jesus. Many studies of the historical Jesus thus focus on it. I have deliberately avoided referring to it until now, except incidentally, for two reasons. First, it does not seem to be a good beginning point for the historical study of Jesus. Rather, as a century of scholarship devoted to it has demonstrated, it is a phrase capable of very diverse interpretations. When this is the case, it is a sound procedure to begin one’s historical study in another place where matters are clearer, and then move to the less clear. This is the procedure I have sought to follow. What Jesus said about the Kingdom of God becomes tolerably clear when seen within the gestalt of Jesus sketched in the book as a whole. Second, its centrality may be overemphasized. Burton Mack has argued perceptively and persuasively that a century of scholarship has been bewitched by Mark’s advance summary of Jesus’ message (“The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand”), treating it as if it were accurate historical recollection rather than the Marcan redaction it clearly is. See B. Mack, “The Kingdom Sayings in Mark,” Foundations and Facets Forum, 3, no. 1 (March 1987): 3-47.

  The literature on the Kingdom of God is voluminous. Three especially important recent books are Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); Bruce Chilton, God in Strength (Linz: Plochl, 1979); and an anthology and history of research edited by Chilton, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). For my own more detailed treatment, see Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 248-263, and “A Temperate Case for a Non-Eschatological Jesus,” Foundations and Facets Forum, no. 2, 3 (September 1986): 81-102, especially 92-95.

  21. Perrin’s work (see note 20, above) is especially helpful for understanding the phrase “Kingdom of God” as a symbol which evoked the “story” of God’s kingship.

  22. Matthew 12:28 = Luke 11:20.

  23. The double expression renders two ways of speaking found in the gospels. Some texts clearly speak of the Kingdom as a present reality, others as “coming” or being “at hand.”

  24. Matthew 8:11-12 = Luke 13:28-29. Jesus thus does speak of “Kingdom-as-end,” though it is only one nuance of “Kingdom of God,” and present in only a relatively few texts. Jesus does not speak of the “final” kingdom as often as one might expect, given the emphasis of twentieth-century sch
olarship. Moreover, it is not said that “Kingdom-as-end” is imminent, as scholars are increasingly recognizing (see chapter 1, page 14). When Jesus does speak of the last judgment, it is not said that it will be soon (see, for example, Matthew 12:41-42 = Luke 11:31-32; Matthew 11:20-24 = Luke 10:13-15). Moreover, it is interesting that what he says consistently reverses the expectations of his hearers: you will be shut out, you will fare badly in the judgment. That is, the “function” of end-of-the-world discourse in the gospels is not to announce the imminence of the Kingdom, but to invite a change in perception. It is as if Jesus had said, “You believe in a last judgment. Well, in the last judgment, let me tell you how it will be.” The point is not that the judgment is imminent, but a reversal of the taken-for-granted expectations of that judgment.

  25. It is not to be identified with the institutional church, of course, for the “visible” church is a radically imperfect community. In its brightest historical moments, it has sometimes incarnated the new way; and even in its darker periods, it at least preserved the symbols of the tradition. Nevertheless, the struggle between the Kingdom of God as life in the Spirit and the dominant consciousness of conventional wisdom goes on in the history of the church, just as it did in the history of Israel before.

  26. “Life in the Spirit” and “life in the Kingdom of God” as two phrases which speak of the same reality complement and qualify each other in an interesting way. Thinking of the new life as “life in the Spirit” helps to prevent “life in the Kingdom of God” from having only a moral or ethical meaning; and “Kingdom of God” with its rich communal meaning prevents “life in the Spirit” from becoming simply spiritual, unconnected to history and human community.

  27. See Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “Embarrassed by God’s Presence,” The Christian Century (January 30, 1985): 98-100.