Jesus, Son of God... Really?

"MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME" Marcus Borg
CHAPTER 5


Starter Questions For a Study Group
   

1. Share the best thing that happened to you this week.
2. Share the worst thing that happened to you this week.  
3. Share a time last week when you saw God at work in your community or in another person. 

   
Questions for the Passage Below

1. How does it affect you to hear that there was no official Christology in the New Testament period? 
2. What difference does it make to think of the son/father Christology as literal or as metaphorical? 
3. How many other images of Jesus are you aware of other than the son/father Christology? 

   
Take Time to Pray Together and Bless One Another
    

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The most familiar Christology (the branch of Christian theology that deals with the nature of Christ) to people within and outside the church is one that images Jesus' relationship with God as Son of the Father... So familiar is it that it is easy to think of it as the normative or definitive Christology. 

But this had not yet happened in the New Testament period. There was as yet no official Christology.  Rather, the New Testament contains a variety of Christological images, which function as metaphors for imaging the significance of Jesus and his relationship with God...  Developing alongside the early Christian movement's embryonic image son/father Christology was an embryonic wisdom Christology that ultimately saw Jesus as the embodiment or incarnation of "the wisdom of God."  
  
~ Marcus Borg 
  
CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION   

Jesus and the Afterlife

The emphasis upon the graciousness of God in the message of Jesus often leads to questions about whether there is any element of of judgment at all.  A number of clarifying remarks may help.  The passages in the synoptics that speak of a last judgment with eternal consequences are largely the products of Matthew's redaction. Moreover, the notion that our life on earth is primarily about meeting God's requirements so that we may have a blessed next life is, it seems to me, foreign to Jesus.  Though I think he probably "believed in an afterlife," I don't think his message was about how to get there.  
    
~ Marcus Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", excerpts from Chapter Four

     
TALK ABOUT IT

• What is the difference between "going to heaven when you die" and "entering the Kingdom of God which is at hand"?
• How do we enter the Kingdom?    

   

CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION   

Jesus vs Christianity

This is the strongest consensus among today's Jesus scholars.  Whatever else can be said about the pre-Easter Jesus, he was a teacher of wisdom - a sage, as teachers of wisdom are called...
   

The way of Jesus also challenges many common forms of Christianity... In particular, it invites us to move from "secondhand religion" to firsthand religion.  Secondhand religion is a way of being religious based on believing what one has heard from others.  It consists of thinking that the Christian life is about believing what the Bible says or what the doctrines of the church say.  Firsthand religion, on the other hand, consists of a relationship to that to which the Bible and the teachings of the church point - namely, that reality that we call God or the Spirit of God.  

~ Marcus Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", excerpts from Chapter Four
  
TALK ABOUT IT

• Why is Christianity built more on dogma (subscribing to truth statements) than most religions?  
• How do we rise above that level of religion?  
• What practices help to build a firsthand relationship with God? 

     
CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION   

"Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", Marcus Borg | Chapter Four

"The narrow way, the way less traveled, is the alternative wisdom of Jesus...  It is an invitation to a path that leads away from the life of conventional wisdom [the culturally reinforced wisdom of how to live the successful, affluent, or respected life based on standards set by society or religion] to a ... deepening relationship with the Sprit of God, not as a life of requirements and reward.
  
Jesus used imagery of the heart to speak of the need for an internal transformation...  What is needed is a new heart - an internal transformation brought about by a deep centering in God...  The narrow way as the path of internal transformation is a ... dying to the world of conventional wisdom as the center of one's security and identity and a dying to the self as the center of one's concern ... the ultimate letting go, and thus the opposite of grasping that marks the life of conventional wisdom."  
  
Marcus Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", excerpts from Chapter Four
  
TALK ABOUT IT
Where does the alternative wisdom of Jesus challenge our culture?  Our religion?  
     
CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION   

"Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", Marcus Borg | Chapter Three

In the midst of our modern culture, it is important for those of us who would be faithful to Jesus to think and speak of a politics of compassion not only within the church but as a paradigm for shaping the political order.  A politics of compassion as the paradigm for shaping our national life would produce a social system different in many ways from that generated by our recent history...
  
Such an emphasis on could involve a recovery of ... "covenant" and "civic virtue" as images of community.  The issue of community (rather than the maximizing of individualism) would become the primary paradigm for thinking about the political order. It seems to me that, although Christians might disagree about the best way to implement such a system, a politics of compassion in our day clearly implies universal health care as an immediate goal.
    
Marcus Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time", excerpts from Chapter Three
   
TALK ABOUT IT:
What other political issue comes to mind that would look different through the lens of compassionate communities rather than through the lens of individual rights?  How far would you go with this politics of communitarian compassion?  
   
CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION 

"Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", Marcus Borg | Chapter Three

Though compassion as the content of Jesus' imatatio dei (way of life as "imitation of God") was rooted in the Jewish tradition, it was not the dominant imatatio dei of the first-century Jewish social world.  Instead, a different imatatio dei, also grounded in the Hebrew Bible, had become the primary paradigm shaping the Jewish social world: "Be holy as God is holy".    

It is in the conflict between these two imatatio deis - between holiness and compassion as qualities of God to be embodied in community - that we see the central conflict in the ministry of Jesus: between two social visions.  The dominant social vision was centered in holiness; the alternative social vision of Jesus was centered in compassion...  

To sum up, the effect of the purity [holiness] system was to create a world with sharp social boundaries: between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not whole, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile...  There was something boundary shattering about the imatatio dei that stood at the center of Jesus' message and activity: "Be compassionate as God is compassionate."  Whereas purity excludes and divides, compassion unites and includes...  

This conflict and social vision continue to have striking implications for the life of the church today...  In parts of the church there are groups that emphasize holiness and purity as the Christian way of life, and they draw their own sharp boundaries between the righteous and sinners.  It is a sad irony that these groups, many of which are seeking very earnestly to be faithful to Scripture, end up emphasizing those parts of Scripture that Jesus himself challenged and opposed.  An interpretation of Scripture faithful to Jesus and the early Christian movement sees the Bible through the lens of compassion, not purity. 

   

Marcus Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", excerpts from Chapter Three

   

TALK ABOUT IT:

Where do you personally experience the conflict between being right and being compassionate?  In the church, in the world, and in yourself?  

   

CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY: WISDOM AND PRACTICE: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION 

"Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time", Marcus Borg | Chapter Two

Jesus used spiritual practices, including both fasting and prayer.  We are told that he prayed for hours at a time, sometimes all night long, and presumably not because his prayer list had gotten exceptionally long.  Rather, it seems more likely that he practiced a form of contemplation or meditation similar to that of Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer.  About them it is said in the Jewish tradition that they would still their hearts before God before they would heal.  The practice of wordless meditation is not simply Eastern tradition, but is central to the Jewish-Christian as well. 
  
... It is plausible to locate Jesus' own spirituality within what we know of Jewish mysticism in his day.  Our picture of early Jewish mysticism has been growing, especially in the last several years.  The more we realize that there was a form of Jewish mysticism in first-century Palestine, the more likely it seems that Jesus stood in that experiential tradition.  
  
Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp 35, 36 
   
TALK ABOUT IT: 
If Christianity is uniquely grounded in historical reality rather than simply philosophical ideas, then how do we (the Church) incorporate the Jesus of history who is emerging as a "spirit person" or mystic?  
  
APPRENTICES OF JESUS, MARCUS BORG: CHURCH OF RECONCILIATION