Jesus

Jesus

Marcus Borg will be familiar to many British Christians not only through his very readable popular writing but also through his frequent lecture tours. He wrote about Jesus of Nazareth twenty years ago. Now he gathers together the fruit of both more recent scholarship and his own thinking since his previous book.
Borg’s thesis is that there are two ways of ‘reading’ Jesus. The two approaches divide Christians today and run across all denominations. He calls them, variously, ‘a belief-centred way of being a Christian’ and ‘a transformation-centred way of being a Christian’; or ‘an earlier Christian paradigm’ and a ‘later Christian paradigm’; or ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’. He writes, of course, from an American perspective. The division is between those who see Jesus through the lens of Christian doctrines and creeds whose Christianity is therefore centred on developments that occurred long after the historical Jesus, and those who accept the findings of modern biblical and historical scholarship and allow the Jesus that emerges from that to impact on them and their life.
Most of the book is concerned with explaining this distinction in relation to the gospels and how we understand them, the person and work of Jesus, how we understand God, what it means to be a follower of Jesus now. This latter concern leads him to coin a new term – ‘participatory eschatology’. In other words, those who follow Jesus are inevitably called to be as passionate about making the world a better place as God. God’s transformation of the world will not be his work alone – an idea that leads to non-participatory understandings of eschatology.
According to Borg, those who follow Christ today have a life deeply centred on God (as it was for Jesus), are open to being transformed personally and are passionately (a word he uses frequently) committed to change the world for the good. It is a life lived out in gentle certitude but in which beliefs are secondary.

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