Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  In the religious traditions, this “more” is commonly named with the language of the tradition: as God, Lord, Allah, Brahman, Atman, and so forth. When French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) had a mystical experience of a fiery cross in 1654, he exclaimed, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” We name and talk about mystical experiences with the language we know.

  My experiences changed my sense of what is real. Like many people who grew up in modern Western culture, I had absorbed a way of seeing what is real that defined reality as the space-time world of matter and energy. That is the modern scientific worldview as most often understood at the popular level. What is real are those things we can observe and analyze through the methods of modern science. In retrospect, I understand that that worldview was primarily responsible for my adolescent and young adult doubts and skepticism about the reality of God, the sacred.

  How Mystical Experiences Affected My Understanding of God

  The contrast to the concept of God I absorbed as I grew up is dramatic. Sometime in childhood, I began to think of the word “God” within the framework of “supernatural theism.” Namely, “God” referred to a supernatural being separate and distinct from the universe, a supreme being who had created the universe a long time ago. In addition to being the creator, God was also the supreme authority figure who had revealed how we should live and what we should believe.

  Supernatural theism and parental imagery for God, especially as “Father,” often go together, producing what might be called “parent theism.” The imagery of God as parent is rich. It suggests a relationship of intimacy, dependence, and protection. Our parents, if we had good parents, loved us and took care of us when we were little. Considerable evidence shows that most of us have a deep desire, sometimes unconscious, for a cosmic parent who will take care of us as our parents did when we were infants and toddlers and children. Or, if we had negligent parents, we want a parent who will take care of us better than our parents did.

  Parent theism, especially God as “Father,” also creates an image of God as the authoritarian parent: the rule giver and disciplinarian, the lawgiver and enforcer. This is “the finger-shaking God” whom we disappoint again and again. It is the God whose demands for obedience were satisfied by Jesus’s death in our place.

  The God of supernatural and parent theism is the God about whom I had become doubtful and anxious during my teens, agnostic during my college years, and then more and more atheist during my twenties. It became increasingly difficult and finally impossible for me to imagine that such a being existed.

  The Alternative to Supernatural Theism

  Mystical experiences change the question of whether God exists. To say the obvious, “is-ness,” or “what is,” is. It exists. What would it mean to argue about whether “is-ness” is? The question of God’s existence is no longer about whether there is another being in addition to the universe. Rather, the question becomes: What is “is-ness”? What is “what is”? What is reality? Is it simply the space-time world of matter and energy as disclosed by ordinary sense perception and contemporary science? Or is it suffused by a “more,” a radiant and glorious more?

  A theology that takes mystical experiences seriously leads to a very different understanding of the referent of the word “God.” The word no longer refers to a being separate from the universe, but to a reality, a “more,” a radiant and luminous presence that permeates everything that is. This way of thinking about God is now most often called “panentheism.” Though the word is modern, only about two centuries old, it names a very ancient as well as biblical way of thinking about God.

  Its Greek roots indicate its meaning: the first syllable, pan, means “everything.” The middle syllable, en, means “in.” “Theism,” comes from theos, the Greek word for “God,” the sacred. Simply and compactly, “panentheism” means “everything is in God.” The universe—everything that is—is in God, even as God is “more” than the universe.

  Though panentheism is unfamiliar to many Christians, especially to those who know only supernatural theism, it is foundational to biblical ways of speaking about God. Its most concise crystallization is in words attributed to Paul in Acts: God “is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being’” (17:27–28). Where are we in relationship to God? We live in God, move in God, have our being in God. God is not somewhere else, but all around us. We and everything that is are in God like fish are in water.

  So also familiar language from Psalm 139 affirms. The psalmist asks: “Where can I go from your spirit? / Or where can I flee from your presence?”

  If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

  if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

  If I take the wings of the morning

  and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

  even there your hand shall lead me,

  and your right hand shall hold me fast. (139:7–10)

  The language reflects the three-story universe of the ancient imagination: whether one journeys to heaven above, descends to Sheol below, or travels to the limits of the sea, God is there. There is nowhere one can be and be outside of God—because God is everywhere.

  These are not isolated examples. Though the Bible often personifies God as if God were a being separate from the universe, it also affirms that God is more than that. As King Solomon dedicated the Temple he built in Jerusalem to be God’s dwelling place on earth, he asked, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?” The text continues, “Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27).

  To use semitechnical language from the history of theology, panentheism combines the transcendence and immanence of God. “Transcendence” refers to the “moreness” of God—God is more than the space-time universe of matter and energy. “Immanence” (from a root meaning “to dwell within”) refers to the presence of God everywhere. Christian theologians since antiquity have affirmed both.

  Most of us heard about both the transcendence and immanence of God as we were growing up, even though we may never have heard those words. We learned, in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, that God is “in heaven.” But we also learned that God is everywhere—that is, omnipresent. When one combines the two, the result is panentheism. It is orthodox Christian theology.

  But supernatural theism, especially since the 1600s, has dominated popular Christianity. The belief that there is a parentlike all-powerful being who can protect and rescue us has always been attractive—even as it can be terrifying when God’s wrath is emphasized. But in the 1600s, something new happened; namely, the birth of modern ways of knowing essentially removed the sacred from the world. What happened has been called “the disenchantment of nature”: God, the sacred, was removed from the world. It has also been called “the domestication of transcendence,” namely, the notion that the word “God” refers only to transcendence.

  Supernatural theism has affected intellectuals as well. About a decade ago, I was one of several lecturers at a symposium called “Nature and the Sacred.” The others included a Native American, a Buddhist, a Muslim, and a couple of nature philosophers. All of us were published authors and well known in our fields. About half described themselves as atheists. But all of us spoke about experiences of wonder. It became clear that we had all had mystical experiences of radical amazement.

  But we were divided about God. Our division flowed from different understandings of the word. For the nontheists, “God” referred to the God of supernatural theism: the God I stopped believing in sometime during my twenties, the God critiqued in recent bestsellers on atheism, the God some of my students had in mind when they told me that they didn’t believe in God. I learned many years ago to respond, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” It was always the God of supernatural theism.

  My religious experiences and conversion also affected my intellectual convictions. I have already mentioned two: they made God real t
o me, and they changed my understanding of the word “God.”

  But there is a third: I am convinced that there are no intrinsic conflicts between the intellect and Christianity, reason and religion. When there are, they are the unnecessary product either of a misunderstanding of religion and its absolutization or of the absolutization of a nonreligious worldview. Often both: most of today’s “New Atheists” contrast the least thoughtful forms of religion with their robust confidence that contemporary science has the ultimate word on what is real.

  And there is a fourth: being Christian is not about getting our intellectual beliefs, our theology, right. I emphasize this because much of this book is about a different understanding of Christianity, a change in how we think about God, the Bible, Jesus, and so forth. But being Christian is not having an intellectually correct theology.

  There have been millions of “simple” Christians throughout the centuries. I do not mean “simpleminded” in a pejorative sense; I mean the people for whom the life of the mind was not central to their Christian lives. They were neither preoccupied with correct beliefs nor bothered by intellectual issues. Instead, Christianity was about loving God and Jesus and seeking to love one another. Many of the saints were “simple” Christians in this sense.

  Thus Christianity is not about getting our theology right. Theology is the intellectual stream of Christianity. In its narrow sense, it refers to an intellectual discipline that has been practiced by theologians from the earliest centuries of Christianity: the thoughtful articulation of what it means to be Christian.

  Theological controversies over the centuries have sometimes been treated as if they were really important even though they were also often arcane. For instance, a trinitarian conflict split the Western and Eastern churches in 1054: Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only? In the 1600s, “supralapsarianism” versus “infralapsarianism” almost divided the Reformed tradition. At issue was whether God decided to send a messiah (Jesus) before the first sin (because God knew it would happen) or only after it had happened (because only then was it necessary). More familiarly: infant baptism or adult baptism? Christians have often thought it is important to believe the right things.

  In a broader sense, theology refers to “what Christians think.” In this sense, all Christians have a theology—a basic, even if often simple, understanding—whether they are aware of it or not. In this broader sense, theology does matter. There is “bad” theology, by which I mean an understanding of Christianity that is seriously misleading, with unfortunate and sometimes cruel consequences. But the task of theology is not primarily to construct an intellectually satisfying set of correct beliefs. Its task is more modest. Part of its purpose is negative: to undermine beliefs that get in the way of taking Christianity seriously. Part of its purpose is positive: to construct a persuasive and compelling vision of the Christian life. But being Christian isn’t primarily about having a correct theology by getting our beliefs right. It is about a deepening relationship with God as known especially in Jesus.

  To return to mystical experiences, these episodes of sheer wonder, radical amazement, radiant luminosity often evoke the exclamation, “Oh my God!” So it has been for me, and for me that exclamation expresses truth. It is the central conviction that has shaped my Christian journey ever since. God is real, “the more” in whom we live and move and have our being.

  It has also shaped my understanding of religions in general and major religious figures, including the central figures of the biblical tradition: Moses, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, and others. They were all people for whom God, the sacred, the more, was an experiential reality. That is where their way of seeing—their wisdom, their passion, and their courage—came from. They didn’t simply believe strongly in God; they knew God. The central convictions and foundations of this book are that God is real and that the Bible and Christianity are the Christian story of our relationship with God, “the more,” “what is.”

  * * *

  Originally published in Convictions (2014).

  Chapter 4

  Jesus, Our Model for Being Spirit-Filled

  GIVEN THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE of Jesus, it is remarkable that his public activity was so brief. The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) imply that his ministry lasted only a year, the Gospel of John that it lasted three years or a bit more. Which is correct we can no longer know, but both agree that it was brief, extraordinarily so. The Buddha taught for forty-five years after his enlightenment, Muhammad for about twenty years. According to Jewish tradition, Moses led his people for forty years. But Jesus’s ministry was brief, a light flashing momentarily but brilliantly like a meteor in the night sky. What was he like?

  Jesus was born sometime during the waning years of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. Nothing is known about his life prior to the beginning of his ministry as a mature adult, except by inference.1 He grew up in Nazareth, a hill town in the northern province of Galilee, some twenty miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, fifteen miles from the Sea of Galilee to the east, and roughly one hundred miles north of Jerusalem. Most of his neighbors would have been farmers who lived in the village and worked the fields nearby or workers in the relatively small number of trades necessary to support agricultural life. He may or may not have been a carpenter; both “carpenter” and “carpenter’s son” were used metaphorically within Judaism to mean “scholar” or “teacher.”2

  We may surmise that he experienced the socialization of a typical boy in that culture. Growing up in a Jewish home, most likely he attended school from roughly age six to at least twelve or thirteen, as a system of “elementary education” was widespread in Palestinian Judaism. His “primer” would have been the book of Leviticus. Whether he had formal training as a teacher of the Torah3 beyond the schooling given to every boy, we do not know.

  As a boy and young man, Jesus almost certainly attended the synagogue (a place of scripture reading and prayer in local communities) every Sabbath, and perhaps on Mondays and Thursdays as well. As a faithful Jew, he would have recited the Shema upon rising and retiring each day, the heart of which affirmed: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5).4 Presumably, he participated in the Jewish festivals and went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem. From the Gospels, it is clear that he was very familiar with his scriptures, the Hebrew Bible. He may have known it from memory, a feat not uncommon among the learned. The Psalms were probably his “prayer book.”

  That is about all we can know about Jesus prior to his emergence as a public figure, despite attempts to fill in the missing years in later apocryphal Gospels and occasional scholarly speculations. Suggestions that Jesus lived among the Essenes,5 studied in Egypt, traveled to India, or somehow came in contact with the teachings of the Buddha are not only without historical foundation, but also unnecessary. We need not go beyond the mainstream of the Jewish tradition to find a “home” for everything that is said about him.

  The Source of Jesus’s Ministry: The Descent of the Spirit

  When Jesus does appear on the stage of history as an adult, the first episode reported about him places him directly in the charismatic stream of Judaism. His mission began with a vision from the other world and the descent of the Spirit upon him. At about the age of thirty, early in the governorship of Pontius Pilate,6 something impelled Jesus to go to a wilderness preacher of repentance named John and known ever since as “John the Baptist.” All of the Gospels (as well as Acts) connect the beginning of Jesus’s ministry to his baptism by John.

  Known to us from both the New Testament and the Jewish historian Josephus,7 John stood in the charismatic stream of Judaism. His style of dress emulated Elijah’s, and his contemporaries compared him to a prophet.8 Renowned for his eloquent and passionate call for repentance, John proclaimed that it was not sufficient to be “children of Abraham”; the Jewish
people were called to a more intense relationship to God sealed by a ritual of initiation (Mark 1:4–6; Matt. 3:7–10; Luke 3:7–9).9 Crowds flocked to this charismatic, some to be baptized.

  Jesus was among them. As he was being baptized by John, he had a vision.10 It is very tersely described: “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him” (Mark 1:10).11 The language recalls earlier experiences of the other world in the Jewish tradition. Like Ezekiel some six centuries before (1:1), Jesus saw “the heavens torn apart,” momentarily seeing into the other world as if through a door or “tear.” Through this door he saw “the Spirit descending . . . on him,” echoing the words of an earlier Spirit-filled one: “The Spirit of the LORD God is upon me” (Isa. 61:1).12

  The vision was accompanied by a “heavenly voice” that declared Jesus’s identity to him: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). About the historicity of the baptism and the vision itself, there is little reason for doubt. Unless we think that visions simply do not happen, there is no reason to deny this experience to Jesus. However, about the “heavenly voice” there is some historical uncertainty, simply because the words so perfectly express the post-Easter perception of Jesus’s identity. As such, they must be historically suspect as the product of the followers of Jesus in the years after Easter.

  Yet how we interpret the words affects the historical judgment. If “my Son, the Beloved” is taken to mean “unique” Son of God in the sense in which the church uses that term, then the phrase must be viewed as historically suspect. But if it is given the meaning that similar expressions have in stories of other Jewish charismatic holy men, then it is historically possible to imagine this as part of the experience of Jesus. They too had experiences in which a “heavenly voice” declared them to be God’s “son.”13 If read in this way, the words not only become historically credible, but are a further link to charismatic Judaism.