Marcus Borg...

Certainly one of the great voices in helping to formulate an understanding of Jesus is Marcus Borg, a Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion at Oregon State University and author of The God We Never Knew.

Borg is a member of the often-malaigned Jesus Seminar, the group of scholars known for meeting and voting their sense of the authenticity of Jesus' words, saying by saying.

Borg's reasonable voice comes alive in a recent book that he did with N. T. Wright, a conservative Anglican clergyman and outspoken critic of the Jesus Seminar. In The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, the two men have a remarkable conversation (although, alas, it's chapter vs. chapter and not person to person) that state their opinions of just who Jesus was and what he wanted to do.

It is Borg's vision that, for me, is the more striking of the two. He presents his ideas with a clean prose I'd personally love to master, and the place where he shines is in his discussion of Jesus as a Jewish Mystic.

Borg sees Jesus in five different ways: (1) Spirit person; (2) healer; (3)wisdom teacher; (4) social prophet; and (5) movement founder. It is under the first classification that Borg sees Jesus most clearly in the identity of a Jewish mystic.

For Borg, there is a clear definition of terms. "My claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic means Jesus was one for whom God was an experiential reality. He was one of those people for whom the sacred was, to use William James' terms, a firsthand religious experience rather than a secondhand belief.."

Borg goes on to give a straight forward definition of a mystic: "As I use the term, people who have decisive and typically frequent firsthand experiences of the sacred.."

In delving deeper into this concept, Borg differentiates between two types of experience - the kind which occur in "eyes open" and in "eyes closed" forms. The first would consist of someone who sees the world as an epiphany in which the Eternal breaks through, with "light shining through everything or bathing everything in its glow."

The second type, "eyes closed", involves experiences that are associated with contemplation or meditation, a rising up (or deepening) that brings one to communion or union with God.

Finally, in terms that are of great help to our own understanding of what it is to be a Christian Mystic, Borg mentions what he calls "defining characteristics of mystical states of consciousness." The source of these are William James' remarkable work.

•Ineffability: Direct explanation of the experiences cannot take place with words, as in, "I walked across the room and saw a bird on the window sill." Instead, one must resort to the language of metaphor.


•Transiency: One does not constantly live in this altered state of consciousness. Instead, the vision or perception will come and go.


•Passivity: One cannot make these things happen. They are, to use Christian terms, the product of grace. At the same time, there is evidence that one must psychologically prepare one's self - make the house ready for guests, as it were.


•Noetic: There is, in those who experience these mystical states of consciousness, the conviction that they now KNOW something that they didn't know before. It is a deep, certain understanding and not something merely intellectual, as in the solution of a puzzle.


•Transformative: The person finds that how they see and how the are undergo a radical change. The person who once saw the everyday world not sees the presence of God, the dance of the world.
Borg goes on to state, "The portrait of Jesus as a Spirit person is history remembered and not simply history metaphorized. This is the basis for my claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic, for him, God was an experiential reality. He knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. And this claim leads to a second claim: Jesus' experience of God was foundational for the rest of what he was."............from Christianmystics.com