Borg Hunting and an Appeal to Paul

This is a piece I wrote several years ago. Silver Heron brought up Borg’s name the other day and I decided to post this hear in honor of progressive Christians everywhere:

Dr. William Lane Craig, apologist and author of Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan takes to task one of the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and seems to pursue the task with special zeal. What is this scholar’s offense? It seems that Marcus Borg has dared to have some extra-canonical mystical religious experiences of his own which have flavored his understanding of Jesus.[1] What sort of experience did he have? Craig offers the following explanation: “As a teenager Borg lost his faith in God, Christ, and the Bible. But a few years after graduating from seminary, he had a number of mystical experiences which gave him a new concept of God.”[2] Surely not! One almost gasps at the outrageous display of impiety evidenced by Borg. Surely, no one would dare presume to have direct communication with God that flies in the face of accepted belief.

Oh wait! Wasn’t there a fellow named Paul who had that very thing happen to him on the road to Damascus? Paul, you see, like Mr. Borg (and William Craig too) didn’t know Jesus personally. He’d never met him, by his own admission. He’d never actually spoken to Jesus face to face or communicated with him via the written medium so common to people of that era. But he did talk to Jesus. He received directives straight from Jesus’ own mouth. How is this so, you ask? By means of direct mystical experience. And the things that Paul asserted as a result flew directly in the face of accepted belief, in this case represented not by Dr. Craig and his fellow apologists, but by James the brother of Jesus, the twelve disciples who had traveled with him and learned at his feet, and the Jewish followers who remained true to the teachings of Jesus after his death. Sparks, naturally enough, flew. They might be downplayed by the Acts of the Apostles, but Paul’s letters are clear enough. He was not a popular man in Jerusalem. Why? Because he did exactly what Mr. Borg did. And what was the result in that instance? A religion built up around Paul’s mystical experiences. James, the disciples, and the other followers of Jesus who had known him, traveled with him, heard his voice, were marginalized and forgotten.

But what is Borg’s sin? Borg says that as a child he had a typical “precritical naiveté” concerning Jesus and God but that in elementary school he had to resolve the conundrum presented by the conflicting Christian teachings that God is at once “up there” and “everywhere”:

And unwittingly, I had taken the first step in removing God from the world. My solution involved thinking of God as a supernatural being “out there.” God became distant and remote, far away from the world, except for special interventions, like those described in the Bible. In my young mind, I was reliving the early history of the Enlightenment, the period of western intellectual history that removed God from the world, and that, among other things, involved the “disenchantment of nature.”[3]

This led, says Borg, to doubt and anguish and by the time he graduated from college, he says, “the images of Christianity and Jesus I had received as a child were no longer persuasive or compelling.” But he attended the seminary and began to study the New Testament, a study he says he found “rich and rewarding.” But what of the experiences that so offend Craig? It would be best to let Borg speak for himself:

The second set of events was the most decisive. In my early to mid-thirties, I had a number of experiences of what I now recognize as “nature mysticism.” (Note that the ironic sequence of my leaving the church and starting to have religious experiences should not be considered a “religious recipe.”) In a sense, these experiences were nothing spectacular, at least not compared with those described by William James almost a century ago in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. Yet the experiences fundamentally changed my understanding of God, Jesus, religion, and Christianity.

They were marked by what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel calls “radical amazement.” They were moments of transformed perception in which I saw the earth as “filled with the glory of God,” shining with a radiant presence. They were also moments of connectedness in which I felt my linkage to what is. They seemed similar to Rudolf Otto’s description of experiences of the “numinous,” the awe-inspiring and wonder-evoking “holy,” the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the tremendous mystery that elicits trembling even as it also attracts us in a compelling way). They involved a rediscovery of mystery—not an intellectual mystery, but an experience of holy mystery.

He calls these “ecstatic” and more: “ah ha” is how he characterizes their meaningfulness.[4] Anyone who has seen Winnie the Pooh knows the importance of those ah ha moments. Nor do I do not trivialize. As Jesus himself pointed out, only those who see the world like children will reach the Kingdom of God. I would argue that there is nothing ungenuine about Borg’s experiences, not unless you want to argue against Paul’s own.

Ecstatic. Nothing describes Paul’s own passions or the churches he founded better than that single word. It echoes throughout his epistles. It is no wonder, when I read Craig’s comments about Borg’s experiences that I first thought of Paul. Borg’s own thoughts turned that direction:

They gave me a new understanding of the meaning of the word “God.” I realized that “God” does not refer to a supernatural being “out there” (which is where I had put God ever since my childhood musings about God “up in heaven”). Rather, I began to see the word “God” refers to “the sacred” at the center of existence, the “holy mystery” which is all around us and within us. God is the non-material ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

“At any rate,” laments Craig, “Borg then reinterprets Jesus in light of his own mystical experiences. Jesus becomes a cross–cultural religious mystic.”[5] But isn’t that exactly what Paul did to Jesus? Jesus was a Jew and his followers were Jews. His teachings were to be understood in a Jewish context by his fellow Jews. Jesus did not teach to Gentiles. Gentiles were swine and one did not throw pearls before swine, after all. But Paul, through direct medium with Jesus after his death, changed all this. Through Paul, Jesus became a “cross-cultural religious mystic” in a way entirely foreign to the Jewish worldview of that age.

As Geza Vermes says of Paul’s teachings, “The Jesus of Paul has no earthly identity, he is without human face or character. And since no evidence whatever is extant to suggest that his Christians had a Gospel or Gospels at their disposal – our written Gospels are all post-Pauline – Paul and his church members could seek only a spiritual-mystical encounter with the death and resurrection of a superterrestrial, meta-historical being.”[6] Borg is doing no less than Paul or his followers. Certainly Paul had no gospel, but he had no need of one. He had access to men who had known and walked with Jesus – Peter, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, several Marys – all, indeed, save Judas. And there were doubtless other, unnamed men and women who had interacted with Jesus in some way. Jerusalem must have been full of them and Galilee as well. The information was there; Paul simply did not deem it relevant. If Paul, why not Borg, or you, or me?

Notes:

[1] Marcus Borg holds a masters in theology and a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University and is the author of 11 books, including The God We Never Knew (1997) and with N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (1999).

[2] William Lane Craig, Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover1.html

[3] Marcus J. Borg, “Me & Jesus. The Journey Home: An Odyssey,” The Fourth R Volume 6,4 July/August 1993.

[4] Marcus J. Borg, “Me & Jesus. The Journey Home: An Odyssey,” The Fourth R Volume 6,4 July/August 1993.

[5] William Lane Craig, Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar, http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover1.html

[6] Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 106.