The Borg & Mr. (w)Right?

Borg/Wright: We are both committed to the vigorous practice of the Christian faith and the rigorous study of its historical origins and to the belief, which we find constantly reinforced, that these two activities are not, as is often supposed, ultimately hostile to each other. Rather, we find them mutually informative and supportive. To put this another way: we both acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as Lord, and we regard a no-holds- barred study of his actual history as a vital part of what we mean by that. (The Meaning of Jesus, viii)

N. T. Wright: I think the critical thing to say is that Jesus believed he was living at the climactic moment of history. He wasn't just a teacher of general timeless truths or even of a general political agenda that might be applied any time any place. He believed he was standing at the corner of history - the corner of Israel's history and hence because of Israel's calling, the corner of world history. And he believed that it was his vocation to announce God's Sovereign Rule - God's Kingdom if you like - not just in the ordinary Jewish sense of God is going to be "King or the Romans are going to get their come-uppance" but in the much more specific sense that now at last God was going to be King of the whole world, everything was going to be different. And he believed that it was his calling to take Israel and hence the world around that corner once and for all time. And one of the words that got attached to that in various senses was this word "Messiah" or "Christ" but Jesus redefined that around himself. He drew upon himself the whole picture of Messiahship that different Jews in that period might have been sketching in different ways. And within that again Jesus believed that he had the vocation to deal with the radical evil that had infected the world once and for all. And that is why he not only announced the Kingdom of God, he lived it, he enacted it symbolically, and ultimately he died for it. And that is at the heart of what it meant for Jesus to be the one who would bring the world to its great climatic moment.

Marcus Borg: My image of Jesus actually combines two images of Jesus in a dialectical relationship - an image of the Pre-Easter Jesus and an image of the Post-Easter Jesus. By the Pre-Easter Jesus I mean of course, Jesus as a figure of history before his death. And I see my image of the Pre-Easter Jesus that he has a spirit dimension to him, a wisdom dimension to him, a political dimension to him. And of those three the one that I highlight most in my own work is that he was a spirit person, that is one of those people with an experiential awareness of the sacred. A Jewish mystic if you will. But to return to the three, he was a God-intoxicated Jew who was a wisdom teacher and a social prophet. And then by the Post-Easter Jesus I mean what Jesus became after his death. It's the Jesus of both Christian tradition and experience. Both nouns are important. By the Jesus of Christian tradition I mean the Jesus who emerges in the New Testament in the Gospels and ultimately also in the Creeds. And of Christian experience I mean the Post-Easter Jesus is actually experienced as a living reality both then and now. And then in a nutshell my image of the Post-Easter Jesus would be th at the Post-Easter Jesus is the Son o f God, the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, and ultimately One with God.

Luke Timothy Johnson: I begin with the belief that Jesus is a living person. So the response to that question is that Jesus is risen Lord, Jesus is Lord. And as a living person, I think the images that we have for Jesus are multiple, as multiple as the experience of Jesus that continues in the world. The sacramental experience of Jesus. The experience of Jesus in prayer. The reading of Jesus out of the pages of the Gospels. So, thinking about Jesus as a living person, I find it impossible to attach a single image. Jesus is as richly diverse and multifaceted as my wife Joy is - actually more than my wife Joy is. No offence to Joy but an honor to Jesus. When I first met my wife, I felt fairly confident about being able to say who she was. After 20 years of marriage I find that it's less and less possible to reduce her to a simple image or to a single story. She constantly reveals herself in new ways. And when I read the pages of the Gospels, I find the same multi-faceted rendering of Jesus. Each of the Gospels renders Jesus in different ways - Jesus as Prophet, Jesus as Revealer. If I were to say that there's some central governing image of Jesus in the Gospels, that for me the most telling, the most normative, I find it in the narrative rendering of Jesus as the suffering obedient Son of God who in radical obedience to God gave his life in loving service to others. That image of Jesus I find pervades the Gospels and the other early Christian writings and gives some kind of normative shape to the continuing experience of Jesus in the Church.