Book Review

Marcus Borg Lights a Path

to Religious Revolution

Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and

Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary

Marcus Borg is a scholar, not an activist. So despite the “religious revolutionary” reference in the subtitle, his new book Jesus focuses on who Jesus is and was, not on how we should respond. But anyone reading with an open mind and heart can’t help feeling there must be something we should do.

A professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, Borg shook the Christian world with his recent bestseller, The Heart of Christianity, and now takes the challenge a step further with Jesus, Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. Walter Wink, author of The Human

Being, calls Borg one of this generation’s “Handful of writers of whom it can be said, ‘Read everything they write.’” But don’t do so lightly, because like it or not, it could be a life changing experience.

Borg is a leading light in the new Christian movement often called “the emerging church,” or the “emerging paradigm” of Christian faith. Among its defining characteristics is seeing God’s kingdom as a spiritual and political reality for the here and now, rather than in the afterlife or with the “second coming” that some traditional Christians place at the center of their belief system. The new paradigm sees “being Christian” as a way of living that makes God presence real here on earth, rather than an adherence to a specific set of beliefs which will be rewarded by eternal life.

Just to be clear, Borg doesn’t question the truth of an afterlife, but he traces what we would call traditional Christianity—the system under which most of us were raised—back several hundred years to the scientific revolution. In an intellectual world enamored with the idea of scientific facts and certainty, the church responded with formulaic certainties of its own. Anyone who grew up in the church knows the formula: Jesus died for our sins, we believe it, God rewards us with eternal life. Nice and neat, but not very responsive to the question, “How then shall we live?”

In pursuing an understanding of the historical Jesus—who he was and is—Borg contrasts the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus. It is his illumination of the pre-Easter Jesus that answers the “how to live” question by revealing how this man we call the Christ lived his life.

For Borg Jesus was, among other things, a mystic of the highest order, animated by a keen sense of God’s presence in the world. In Jesus the spiritual and the temporal, the infinite and the finite lived in complete harmony. For Jesus, God is defined by compassion and justice. This is who God is and who God would have us be. And because God is so real to Jesus, he is left with no choice but to pursue the defining mission of his life: challenging the oppressive religious and political systems of his day.

There’s much more to be learned here from Borg. Along the way he details the origins and implications of the New Testament Gospels, and explains how the early church began to develop many of the theological concepts of the “post-Easter” Jesus which remain with us today. And unless one goes into it looking for a fight, Jesus can be read without feeling Borg is out to debunk or “demythologize” the Christ we know as a part of the Trinity.

But for those who feel our culture—and the way we as Christians live within it—is in bad need of transformation, Borg represents a clear call to action. In the concluding chapter of Jesus, he puts it this way:

“Two transformations are at the center of this life. For want of better language I call them the personal and the political. The Christian life is about personal transformation into the likeness of Christ; and it is about participation in God’s passion for the kingdom of God. The personal and the political are brought together in ‘the way of the cross’—an image of personal transformation and confrontation with the domination systems of this world.”