Marcus Borg,Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

This is a posthumous collection of lectures, sermons and interviews by Marcus Borg (1942--2015), with a foreword by his widow Marianne. It concludes with Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon at his funeral.

For fans of Borg’s writings, it reveals the man behind the ideas. Perhaps the most telling is the chapter describing his mystical experiences. Recent research has shown that such experiences, making people aware of spiritual reality beyond the physical, are common; but in Borg’s case they informed his scholarship, leading him to understand Jesus as a mystic, among other things. For other readers, the book would make a good introduction to Borg’s scholarship. His three emphases are explained and related to each other: Jesus was a mystic, a wisdom teacher and a social prophet. We are introduced to ways of understanding Christianity that challenge much church teaching. Faith is a matter of trust, not assenting to statements of belief. God, far from being a supernatural being distant from the universe, contains the universe. Jesus rejected the idea that holiness is a matter of keeping away from the unholy. His healings do not produce that modern dilemma between accepting that he performed miracles and refusing to believe in them; on the contrary, the gospels present him as one of many healers, but one particularly good at it.

At the same time, we are introduced to a Jesus who challenges some of the assumptions of modern secularism. The idea of another reality, a spiritual world over and above our physical universe, ‘was the common property of virtually every culture before ours’ (p. 3). Mystics ‘are known in every culture that we know anything about’ (p. 132). As a social prophet, Jesus challenged the world of his day – which was politically oppressive, economically exploitative and chronically violent. He appealed to the kingdom of God, a divine authority transcending the interests of the ruling classes. One cannot help thinking of parallels today, and wondering where we will find comparable social prophets.

My favourite quote is this:

I oftentimes say the pre-Easter Jesus was one of the two most remarkable people who ever lived. Of course, somebody always asks me, ‘Who’s the other one?’ And I always say, ‘I really don’t care.’ I’m simply making the point that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility. (p. 187)

There is some repetition, but this is inevitable in a book of this type. For me, Borg is one of the New Testament scholars who rescued Jesus from being the irrelevant and boring figure he had previously seemed to be – part spiritualist apparition, part petty miracle worker, living in a distant age when the impossible used to happen. Borg and his colleagues have shown how he was an exciting character, challenging the norms of his day – and the norms of our day, too.

Jonathan Clatworthy

University of Liverpool