Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 18:01:53 -0800 From: "Marcus J. Borg" To: JESUS2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Week 5, Response, Part One In my response this week, I decided to comment on several themes from the last two weeks. To some extent, they seek to discover or refine the differences among us, but I choose them primarily because I think they are matters of general interest. A brief prologue before I turn to them, namely two (possibly) final comments about the "rhetoric issue." So, to you, Luke. In your last message, you said, "Borg continued to dwell on my rhetoric and on my attack on the Jesus Seminar." Let me simply point out that you made some very deprecating remarks about the Jesus seminar in your previous entry. It should not be surprising that I replied to them, but only to be expected. And to address the question which you repeated (why have Dom and I continued to be associated with the Jesus Seminar?), the obvious answer is: because we experience the Jesus Seminar very differently from how you describe it. If it were as you describe it, of course we wouldn't be part of it. The fact that we are suggests that there may be something skewed about your description, culled from your pile of newspaper clippings. A second comment about rhetoric, taken from your statement about me in your message this week: your description of me as having "written some popular works on Jesus AS THOUGH they were serious scholarship." I trust the negative spin in the statement is not heard by only me. What am I (what is a reader?) to make of the statement? That I pretend (implying deceit) that this is seriously scholarship? That it is bad scholarship? That I may genuinely believe this is scholarship, but of course it isn't? I'm not asking you to choose - I'm simply indicating the range of possibilities your rehtoric implies. Can you hear the discrediting tone (perhaps even a sneer) in your language? It seems to me that it is possible to have a rigorous sharp-edged debate (the kind of "peer review" you rightly ask for) without introducing the red herring of tone-laden rhetoric. Or is the real issue (the real crime) that I (and Crossan, et al) sometimes write at a popular/accessible level? Are we not supposed to do that? Are we to keep this stuff in the classroom, as you have written? And if so, why? And for how long? Are we all to wait until the scholarly community has "decided" or reached a consensus? And how long will that be? We both know: never. And who is being protected? Does the public need protecting? Can the public not be trusted to do its own "peer review"? Well, I have perhaps written too much to now say, "I'm willing to drop the rhetorical and Jesus Seminar issues if you are." I am. Now to some issues evoked by the last two weeks of messages. First, some comments directed to Dom. 1. About Jesus as a "God-intoxicated Jew" or "Spirit person." I agree with you completely that we need to be able to discern among different types of God-intoxication - religiously-motivated car bombers may both claim and feel "God-intoxicated." In my own work, the basis of discernment is compassion. I have consistently emphasized that the two focal points of Jesus' own life were Spirit and compassion, and that the twin focal points of a life that takes Jesus seriously should be Spirit and compassion (which sounds in the same ballpark with your affirmation, Luke, with which I would agree). Importantly, compassion, in my understanding of Jesus, is both a personal virtute AND a political value/paradigm. Indeed, Dom, my insistent emphasis on both Spirit and compassion may be the equivalent of your emphasis on TheKingdomOfGod, which I might therefore put as "SpiritAndCompassion" (though I have not thought of this before). Thus, about an allegedly "God-intoxicated" car-bomber or Jim Jones or David Koresh, I would say, "This is not the Spirit of Jesus," whatever Spirit it might be. In short, an image of Jesus (as the compassionate one who also taught compassion - though I am not reducing Jesus to this single phrase) provides the basis for saying about a car-bomber, "This intoxication is not from God." The above point is related to the larger question of the role of the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. It seems to me that such study is an important source of content for our image of Jesus and for that discernment. The reason we can say, "This is not the Spirit of Jesus," is on the basis of such an image. I am not sure, however, that we NEED the historical Jesus in order to make such discerning judgments. It perhaps can be done completely on the basis of the canonical Jesus. But even at the level of the canonical Jesus, historical judgments and value judgments are required. Why, for example, not make Revelation's image of the warrior Christ who destroys the wicked the model for Christian discipleship? Of course, I don't think we should. My point, rather, is to suggest that locating the model simply in the canonical Jesus (and not also in the historical Jesus) does not eliminate the need for historical and value judgments (it's not only historical Jesus scholars who are involved in this kind of process). (And I realize that the last three or four sentences are more addressed to a point raised by Luke's position.) One more comment about Dom's comments on God-intoxication. Why the implicit "either/or" (or at least almost an "either/or") near the end of your response, in which you say that however important ecstatic or altered states of consciousness were for Jesus' PRIVATE experience, what matters FOR US is his PUBLIC discourse about "radical divine justice standing flatly against normal human violence"? Several points: 1. I agree with what you put in your affirmation. 2. Why does one need to subordinate the first to affirm the second? And, as a question of history, is it reasonable to think that the private religious experience of Jesus that disconnected from his public discourse? Do not the central prophetic figures of the Jewish tradition (Moses, Elijah, most of the classical prophets) provide models for exactly the connection between experience of the sacred and social passion? 3. Is your emphasis based on your perception of what people in general, Christians, and the church in our time most need to hear, including perhaps an apprehension that people will focus on the spiritual rather than the political if thje foermer is affirmed? My own perception is that people in our time need to hear BOTH emphases - the emphasis on Spirit, and the emphasis on politics. Now to some observations about healings/cures, elicited by Dom's comments. 1. I was not asking about miracles, if by miracles we mean either special divine interventions of potentially unlimited power/efficacy, or miracles as supernatural interventions into a universe understood as a closed system of cause and effect operating in accord with natural laws. Rather that speak of "miracles" (a term which typically implies a supernatural interventionist notion), I prefer to speak of "the paranormal" (meaning experiences/events for which we don't have a very good explanatioon within our world-view). It is obvious to me that paranormal events/cures happen. The question for me thus concerns the "limits of the paranormal," and not "miracles." Your examples of things you see as impossible suggest that you and I see the limits of the paranormal similarly. I agree with your putting certain things beyond the limits of the paranormal. Like you, I do not imagine that MISSING limbs are replaced, or that genuinely dead people are resuscitated. So, simply a clarification that I wasn't asking about "miracles" in any of the sense I've specified. 2. I appreciated your clear affirmation that cures, and not simply healings, happen; and I appreciated your comparisons to Lourdes, Fatima, and Epidaurus. Thus, Jesus not only healed; he cured. 3. I want to press you on whether you push the socio-political understanding/explanation too far when you write, "Jesus' first healing was ideological, without which no further healing would have worked" and "It is that initial ideological healing that makes further healing of illness possible and even, thereby and indirectly in some cases, the curing of disease." (The context suggests that you see such "ideological healing" as primarily re-orientation of political consciousness - if I'm wrong about this, let me know.) First, I don't think your comparative material supports the claim that ideological healing precedes phsical healing/cures. There's no reason to think that all or most of the healings/cures at Lourdes, Fatima, and Epidaurus involved an "ideological healing" (unless you simply mean by "ideological healing" the eliciting/arousing of faith - but I hear you meaning something more socio-political). That is, "cures" in a sacred place/shrine don't seem to depend upon political consciousness raising. To make the point only slightly differently, I think there are paranormal healers who aren't political/ideological. I don't see that the first typically goes with the seconbd (though it can, and though I agree that some illnesses/diseases are related to social and political oppression - that isn't the point). To relate this to the historical Jesus. I think Jesus was a healer/curer; and I think he was a radical peasant social prophet (as you see him; I have no significant disagreement with you about that). But I don't ground the former in the latter. I don't separate them; they're both there. But I don't derive the one from the other. Instead, I would locate Jesus' healing/curing powers in people's experience of him as a "manifestation of the sacred" (just as a place experienced as a manifestation of the sacred can heal, so can a person thus experienced). Now he was also, as I've mentioned, everything you say about him as a religious voice of social protest and alternative social vision. But I think he was also a healer, and that we need not (and plausibly should not) make his healings/cures derivative from his social passion. Now to Luke, a couple of briefer questions/comments. 1. Both Dom and I have agreed with what is included in your one sentence description of Jesus' character. Our disagreement with you is about whether it should say more. So let me ask you if you would be willing to ADD to your sentence something like this, "and he was executed because of his social passion for `the least of these.'" The addition takes seriously that Jesus was executed (and didn't simply die). Without it, my apprehension is that we domesticate Jesus too much - we remove from him the passion and political vision/edge that cost him his life. And if your're not willing to add a clause like that, why not? Because it's historically inaccurate (and if so, would you identify a different cause for his execution?)? Or because the fact that he was crucified is insignificant? I recall that you have suggested that we talk about your "strong reading" of the resurrection (a subject I plan to bring up next week); what I am suggesting here is a "strong reading" of the crucifixion. So, what do you think about adding something like that? Can we hammer out a statement we can agree on? 2. When you write about the importance of the canonical Jesus in the second half of your book, I find myself basically agreeing with everything you say (and you say it well). But my question remains: in order to affirm the canonical Jesus as strongly as you do, does one have to give up the historical Jesus (the figure standing behind the texts, as glimpsed by our relative and changing efforts at historical reconstruction)? To repeat last week's question: granted that the canonical Jesus is centrally important/crucial, why do you think it MUST be an either/or choice between the canonical Jesus and the historical Jesus? A final word to both of you. Next week in my primary message, I plan to talk mostly about how I see the death and resurrection of Jesus. I thought we might want to get started before Holy Week. Best wishes to you both.