Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  Mysticism and Empowerment, Resistance and Advocacy

  I turn now to part two, which leads to my conclusion. Part two is based on four words: “Mysticism and Empowerment, Resistance and Advocacy.” My claim in this section is very simple; namely, it is important that we have a spiritual center, a grounding, a base that empowers us to resist the forces that create injustice and violence and to advocate for alternatives.

  I owe two of these terms to the subtitle of an important book by the theologian Dorothee Soelle, who died in April 2003. It’s a book I really commend to you. The main title is The Silent Cry. The subtitle is Mysticism and Resistance. The central claim in this book is that mysticism, far from being otherworldly or escapist, has often been the source of Christian political resistance throughout the centuries. It’s interesting to reflect on the great reformers, and not just the Protestant Reformers, but monastic and other reformers in the history of Christianity. I think they all were mystics or certainly had mystical experiences. That was really what gave them the impetus for what they were doing.

  To her two words “mysticism” and “resistance” I have added “empowerment” and “advocacy.” These may be implicit in her title, but I think it’s important to make them explicit. So let me now very briefly say something about each of those words.

  I use the term mysticism in its broadest sense, and I want very quickly to name two kinds of mysticism. One is ecstatic mysticism, by which I mean the vivid experience of God or the sacred that involves a nonordinary state of consciousness that makes ordinary consciousness seem like sleep or a kind of blindness and makes God utterly real for those who have such an experience. Then there is what I am going to call nonecstatic mysticism. Now, I haven’t really thought very much about this kind before, but I am very much aware that Gandhi could be spoken of as a mystic, even though I am not aware that he spoke of having any ecstatic experiences. Nonecstatic mysticism I would define as union with the will of God, ecstatic mysticism as communion with the sacred. What these two forms of mysticism have in common is a deep centering in God.

  And that leads to the second term, empowerment. Centering in God empowers. It’s a source of courage. It gives you a place to stand. It is the source of what philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich called the “courage to be”: the courage to stand against the powers, to stand even when steeples are falling. Mysticism and empowerment most often or at least very often lead to resistance, the third term, resistance to the way things are, because you have come to know that things can be different and that the powers that rule this world are not the ultimate powers. And then the fourth term, advocacy. It’s not just about standing against; it’s about standing for. It is about both.

  If we only stand for without standing against, we risk becoming banal. Most people want the world to be a better place. But if we don’t take seriously a critical discernment of and name what is wrong, our desire for a better world risks becoming a cliché. So yes, it’s both a standing for and a standing against. Does this mean we are to stand against domination systems, domestic, national, and international? Of course. It means that we are to stand for an alternative vision of what life on earth can be like. Does this mean that we, as American Christians, are to stand against American imperial behavior? Of course. This involves minimally a renunciation of the right to preemptive war and a deep commitment to multilateralism, for the only way an empire can control its intrinsic tendency toward hubris is to relate to the other nations of the world as if they are peers and take their perspectives very, very seriously. We all know that if an individual has narcissistic tendencies, the only real cure for that is for that person’s judgment to be subject to the critical reflection of others. Empires are intrinsically narcissistic.

  Does this mean we will stand against the exploitation and degradation of the environment? Of course, for nature, the nonhuman world, matters not just for our future; it matters to God. Here one of the most familiar passages in the whole of the Christian Bible says it so simply: “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16). Not just you and me and us, not just Christians, not just people, but God so loved the world. The world matters to God. “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Ps. 24:1). It is not there for us to divide up, so that some people get a lot of it and other people get none of it, and it’s not there for us as a species to use as we wish.

  To bring this to a close, ultimately it seems to me the Christian message is simple. We have sometimes made it so complex with our tendency toward overprecision in matters of doctrine, attempts at great clarity, and all of that. It’s so simple. Ground yourself in God, center in God. It is the way of life. It is the way of empowerment. Participate in God’s passion, participate in God’s dream. Love the world as God loves the world, and change the world.

  * * *

  Keynote speech to Progressive Christians Uniting, Pasadena, California, February 19, 2007.

  Chapter 13

  Facing Today’s Challenges

  AN INTERVIEW

  MY NAME IS MARCUS BORG. I am probably best known as an author of books on the Bible and Jesus and God or generally, I suppose, religion. I taught for many years at Oregon State University, where I held the Hundere Chair of Religion and Culture. I retired from that about a year ago, and I’m now Canon Theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. Most of my time these days is spent traveling—mostly in the United States—and speaking to church groups. I travel about a hundred thousand miles a year. The other thing that I do professionally, vocationally, is to write books. My most recent book just published, right around March 1, is The First Paul, coauthored with John Dominic Crossan. It’s a book that separates the genuine letters of Paul—the seven all scholars agree were written by him—from the six letters that are probably not written by him. The title, The First Paul, refers to the Paul of the seven genuine letters, and he’s an incredibly attractive figure, as radical in his own right as the figure of Jesus is. Dom Crossan and I think that’s an important case to make, because many people who like Jesus find Paul to be a real turnoff. In fact, the opening chapter of our book is called “Paul: An Appealing or Appalling Apostle?” And then, in addition to that, my first novel has been accepted, and it’ll be published in about a year, early winter of 2010. The title is Putting Away Childish Things.1 I’ve never written fiction before, so maybe this is a new chapter in my life.

  The past few years have seen numerous bestsellers from a group of writers known as the New Atheists. These writers claim that there is no proof that God exists and that belief is naive, delusional, and has resulted in great evil. What is your response to these charges?

  I think the best known of the books on atheism that have made the New York Times bestseller list are Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. What these books share in common is that they attack the most common understanding of the word “God,” at least in Western culture, namely, that the word “God” refers to a personlike being, a superpowerful authority figure separate from the universe who created the universe a long time ago and, from time to time, intervenes.

  In shorthand, I call that way of thinking about God “supernatural theism.” And I think they’re right about that “God.” I don’t believe in that understanding of God either. However, their books basically ignore another understanding of what the word “God” means that goes way back to antiquity. It’s found in the most ancient forms of the religions of the world—so does the other understanding of God, by the way; they run side by side throughout the history of the religions.

  This other understanding of God does not think of God as a personlike being separate from the universe, but, rather, understands that the word “God” refers to a, for want of a better word, a “spiritual reality that interpenetrates the universe.” That God is the encompassing spirit, if you will, in whom everything that is lives. I think the most compact biblical expression of that is found in Acts 17:28, in w
ords attributed to Paul, that God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Notice how the language works: we are in God, we live within God, we have our being within God, so that God is this encompassing spirit in whom everything that is lives.

  To give you a postbiblical expression of this, the early Christian theologian Irenaeus, writing around the year 200, said this: “God contains everything, and nothing contains God.” Again, it’s the same image: everything is in God, and yet God is more than the sum total of everything. That understanding of God has a technical name: it’s called panentheism. All three parts of that word are important: it means that everything is in God.

  These three writers, the New Atheists, if you will, seem to know nothing about that other understanding of God. Or when they do occasionally mention it, they dismiss it almost immediately as playing with words, not understanding that this is a very ancient understanding of God, probably most directly associated with the mystics and mysticism.

  So when somebody says, “Well, I don’t really believe in God” or “Those New Atheists, they really make a good case for there not being a God,” my response always is, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in” and almost always it’s the God of supernatural theism.

  There is truth in these books by the New Atheists, but I think it’s a limited truth. The truth that is in those books is that a very common understanding of God makes no compelling, persuasive sense. This is that understanding of God as the “Big Eye in the Sky” that sees everything we do and keeps kind of moral track of us. This is the God who sometimes intervenes to help people, but not consistently. This is the God in whose name the most horrible things have been done. God has been used to legitimate perhaps the most brutal activities that human beings have engaged in. So these writers correctly point out that religion—and let me use the plural, religions—as historical phenomena are profoundly ambiguous. Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world has been done in the name of religion.

  At the same time, the religions have produced some of the greatest saints and greatest human beings who have ever lived. So there’s a half-truth in these books and that half-truth is: every religion has much to be ashamed of. But it’s only a partial truth.

  What does Jesus teach us about prayer?

  We know from the Gospels that Jesus practiced a form of contemplative prayer. We’re not told exactly what kind, but we know that there was contemplative prayer in the Jewish tradition.

  Contemplative prayer, of course, is the prayer of internal silence; we seek to sit silently in the presence of God and oftentimes experience ourselves descending to a deep level of the self, where we open out into that sea of being that is God. The reason we know Jesus practiced contemplative prayer is because the Gospels refer several times to his praying for a few hours at a time or going to a solitary place and praying all night long. Unless we imagine that his prayer list had become enormously long, it’s impossible to imagine that he was doing verbal prayer all that time.

  Beyond that, of course, Jesus, when asked, taught his disciples to pray, and it’s the most famous prayer in the entire world; we call it the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know if we can really imagine Jesus saying, “I want you to memorize this prayer and use it.” Rather, I see the Lord’s Prayer as more or less a summary of what we might pray for.

  The contents of the Lord’s Prayer are very interesting. After the initial “Our Father in heaven” and “hallowed be your name,” it moves to a prayer for the coming of the kingdom: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is the petition for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth; it’s not about heaven. In fact, the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t say, “Help us to get to heaven.” It’s a very this-worldly prayer.

  Then, of course, the next line is about bread: “Give us this day our daily bread.” And for those of us who have plenty of bread, we perhaps hear that almost as a thank-you, an expression of gratitude, or perhaps even as meaning, “Keep giving us bread, as you’ve been doing.” But this prayer was taught to a peasant audience, for whom bread, the material basis of life, was the central survival issue, so the coming of the kingdom of God means enough bread, enough food.

  The next line is the one that we have to pause at if we visit another congregation, to see how they’re going to say it: “Forgive us our trespasses, sins, debts.” In two of the three versions of the Lord’s Prayer that have come to us from the first century, the words are “debt” and “debtors” in both places. Debt was the other central survival issue of peasant life. So when Jesus was asked, “Teach us to pray,” the prayer he responded with said the coming of God’s kingdom meant enough food and mutual debt forgiveness. So in that respect the Lord’s Prayer is very much focused on what we need for our lives in this world.

  Many people view the Bible as the inerrant, literal word of God, but for many others this view of scripture is very problematic. You have written that seeing the Gospels as human products involves no denial of the reality of God or the presence of the Spirit in the process. Can you talk about this further?

  I think the single most divisive issue in American Christianity today concerns the nature of the Bible. Many Christians, perhaps even a majority—I don’t mean 98 percent, but more than half—are parts of Christian communities that affirm that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, the infallible Word of God, and therefore factually and literally true in everything it says. This is the basis for the evolution-versus-creation controversy that’s so prominent in the States. By the way, we’re the only country in the world that even has a controversy like that. But, according to a number of polls I’ve seen, apparently half of American Christians believe that the universe and the earth are less than ten thousand years old.

  Now, why is that? Is it because of invincible ignorance or the utter failure of our public school system? No, it’s because a good number of Christians belong to churches that teach biblical inerrancy or infallibility, and they think you’ve got to deny science whenever it conflicts with something in the Bible.

  It’s important to remember that the notion of biblical inerrancy—that it’s free from errors—is not the ancient teaching of the church. Biblical inerrancy and biblical infallibility are both mentioned for the first time in the second half of the 1600s and became relatively common in a stream of Protestantism only in the last century.

  Fundamentalism, as a specifically named movement, began around 1910. I mention that because a good number of Christians as well as non-Christians think that believing in biblical inerrancy is orthodox Christianity. It’s not at all; it’s a modern development.

  The alternative to biblical inerrancy and biblical infallibility is the recognition that the Bible is a human product. To say that it’s a human product means something very simple, that it’s the product of two ancient communities: the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament) is the product of ancient Israel, and the New Testament is the product of the early Christian movement. The Bible tells us what our spiritual ancestors in those two ancient communities thought. It tells us about their experiences of the sacred. It tells us the stories they told about God. It tells us about what they thought life with God involved. It is their witness, their testimony. Our spiritual ancestors also canonized those documents; they declared them to be sacred, to be constitutive for religious identity and self-understanding.

  To be Christian means to accept that this is our primary collection of documents, but it does not mean believing that they’re inerrant, infallible, or to be interpreted literally. The Bible is full of poetry; it’s full of hymns. It also, of course, has many stories and narratives. But to insist on a literal interpretation of these not only raises questions like, “What’s the literal meaning of a poem?” and “What’s the literal meaning of a hymn?” It also creates unnecessary problems by insisting that stories, like the story of the talking snake in the third chapter of Genesis, really happened. It creates
an unnecessary intellectual stumbling block.

  If we ran into a story in any other literature in the world with a talking snake and two magic trees—a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a tree of life—we would instantly recognize that as a symbolic narrative, a metaphorical narrative, or a myth, if you will. It’s important to add: poetry can be true, but it’s poetic truth. Myths can be true, but it’s mythical truth.

  Here German novelist Thomas Mann’s definition of “myth” is wonderful. Thomas Mann says, “A myth is a story about the way things never were but always are.” There never was a Garden of Eden. There never was a talking snake. Yet that story, understood mythically and symbolically, is a story about the way things always are. The Fall happens again and again and again. So when people talk about biblical inerrancy, they might be genuinely coming from a place of utter sincerity. They might think taking the Bible seriously means saying it’s inerrant, but, ironically, to affirm biblical inerrancy and biblical literalism often involves not taking the Bible seriously at all.

  Can you talk about the distinction between the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus, and why it’s important to see those differently?

  It’s very helpful to realize that the word “Jesus” refers to two quite different, even though related, realities, and to distinguish between the two I refer to the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus.

  The “pre-Easter Jesus” is Jesus before his death, a flesh-and-blood historical figure who was maybe 5 foot 1 and probably weighed 110 pounds—we don’t know that, but that’s the average size of a man in that world. He had to eat and drink and was flesh like us, no different in kind from you and me. This is what the tradition means when it speaks of Jesus as fully human.