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

by Marcus J. Borg

As omnipresent and immanent, God and the world of Spirit are all around us, including within us. Rather than God being somewhere else, we (and everything that is) are in God.12 We live in Spirit, even though we are typically unaware of this reality.13

Most biblical scholars work within the modern academy, whose canons of respectability include a methodology that assumes the truthfulness of the modern worldview. Typically spending eight or more years in college and graduate school and often remaining as teachers, we often measure our time in the academy in decades rather than years. Texts that report “paranormal” happenings, whether they are visions of another realm or miracles, are either largely ignored or else interpreted in such a way that they do not violate our sense of what is possible or real.25 Thus, because we do not know what to do with the world of Spirit, we tend not to give it a central place in our historical study of the biblical tradition.

The primary intellectual objection to it flows from a rigid application of the modern worldview’s definition of reality. Yet the modern view is but one of a large number of humanly constructed maps of reality. It is historically the most recent and impressive because of the degree of control it has given us; but it is no more an absolute map of reality than any of the previous maps. All are relative, products of particular histories and cultures; and the modern one, like its predecessors, will be superseded.

The worldview that rejects or ignores the world of Spirit is not only relative, but is itself in the process of being rejected. The alternative to a one-dimensional understanding of reality can claim most of the history of human experience in its support. People throughout the centuries, in diverse cultures, regularly experienced another realm that seemed to them more real, powerful, and fundamental than the world of our ordinary experience. Not only is there no intellectual reason to suppose the second world to be unreal, but there is much experiential evidence to suggest its reality.

I now see the Christian life very differently. I now see it as a journey.

The journey image suggests that the Christian life is more like following a path than it is about believing things with our minds.

A journey also involves a leaving, a departing, a setting out. It involves leaving home.

The modern distortion of faith is the one I learned growing up around the middle of this century: faith as believing. Faith as believing the doctrines of the Christian tradition, faith as believing that there is a God, faith as believing that Jesus is divine, faith as believing that Jesus died for your sins—in short, faith as believing certain statements to be true.

faith as believing the right things is not only a modern distortion, but in many ways it is absolutely impotent in our lives. You can believe all the right things and still be a jerk. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. Faith as believing, that is, believing with our head, is really pretty impotent.

The first of these last three is faith as fiducia. We get the word “fiduciary” from it. This is basically faith as trust, faith as radical trust in God, which can go along with great uncertainty about beliefs.

The opposite of faith as trust is not doubt. The opposite of faith as trust is anxiety. You can measure the amount of faith as trust in your life by the amount of anxiety you have in your life.

The second of the ancient and authentic meanings of faith is fidelitas in Latin. The English, of course, is “fidelity.” This is faith as fidelity to a relationship, fidelity to the relationship with God, in other words faithfulness. Again, it has very little to do with what we believe with our heads; it’s faithfulness to that relationship.

faith as a way of seeing and, in particular, faith as a way of seeing the whole, the whole of that in which we live and move and have our being.

The third and final way that Niebuhr says we can see reality is to see the whole as gracious, nourishing, and supportive of life, to see it as that which has brought us into existence and continues to nourish us.

Faith is thus about setting out on a journey like Abraham’s in a posture of trust, seeking to be faithful to the relationship we are called into. We are invited to make that journey, that journey of faith, in which we learn to trust our relationship to God, learn to be faithful to that relationship, and learn to see in a new way.

At the same time, I felt a falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary everyday consciousness—that “dome” of consciousness in which we experience ourselves as “in here” and the world as “out there.” I became aware not just intellectually but experientially of the connectedness of everything. I “saw” the connectedness, experienced it. My sense of being “in here” while the world was “out there” momentarily disappeared.

a falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary consciousness. During the experience, it was not I listening to the music but something outside myself. Only the music was left.

Especially important was William James’s classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published more than a century ago, still in print, and named by a panel of experts in 1999 as the second most important nonfiction book published in English in the twentieth century.

Part of his book is about mystical experiences. Based on James’s study of accounts of such experiences, he concluded that their two primary features are “illumination” and “union.” Illumination has a twofold meaning. The experiences often involve light, luminosity, radiance. Moreover, they involve “enlightenment,” a new way of seeing. “Union” (or “communion”) refers to the experience of connectedness and the disappearance or softening of the distinction between self and world.

What is known is “the way things are” when all of our language falls away and we see “what is” without the domestication created by our words and categories. This way of knowing might be called direct cognition, a way of knowing not mediated through language.

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) called them experiences of “the numinous,” that which is behind and sometimes shines through our experience of phenomena. Abraham Heschel (1907–72) called them moments of “radical amazement,” when our domestication of reality with language falls away and we experience “what is.” Martin Buber (1878–1965) spoke of them as “I-Thou” or “I-You” moments in which we encounter “what is” as a “you” rather than as an “it,” or an object. Abraham Maslow (1908–70) called them “peak experiences” that involve “cognition of being”—knowing the way things are. Mircea Eliade (1907–86), one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of comparative religions, called them experiences of “the golden world,” referring to their luminosity. Others have referred to them as moments of “unitive consciousness” and “cosmic consciousness.”

For the first time in my life, I understood the affirmation that the earth is full of “the glory of God.” Perhaps the most familiar biblical example is in the prophet Isaiah. As he has a mystical experience of God, he hears the words, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; / the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3).

“Glory” in the Bible most often means radiance, luminosity. To affirm that heaven and earth (all that is) are full of God’s glory means that everything is filled with the radiant luminosity of God. God, the sacred, pervades all that is, even though we do not often see it.

In the final chapter, he exclaims, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear—but now my eye sees you” (42:5). Job experienced the glory of God in the created world—and it changed his convictions about God. Believing or not believing in a concept of God was no longer an issue. Job learned that God, the sacred, is, and that God, the sacred, is both more than and other than Job had imagined.

The most abstract and generic terms for what is experienced include “reality itself,” “ultimate reality,” or “Reality” with a capital R, “what is” when all our words fall away, or “is-ness without limits”—without the limits created by our language and categories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

being Christian is not about getting our intellectual beliefs, our theology, right.

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.

The task of theology is... Being a Christian is...

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

Indeed, the sequence of initiation into the world of Spirit (the baptism) followed by a testing or ordeal in the wilderness is strikingly similar to what is reported of charismatic figures cross-culturally.15

But verbal prayer is only one form of prayer in the Jewish-Christian tradition. Indeed, it is only the first stage of prayer; beyond it are deeper levels of prayer characterized by internal silence and lengthy periods of time. In this state, one enters into deeper levels of consciousness; ordinary consciousness is stilled, and one sits quietly in the presence of God. Typically called contemplation or meditation, its deepest levels are described as a communion or union with God.18

if “son of God” is given the meaning that it carried within Judaism at the time of Jesus, then it is possible he did. There, “son of God” was used in three different contexts to refer to three different entities, though with a common nuance of meaning. In the Hebrew Bible, it referred to Israel as a whole or to the king of Israel.40 Contemporary with Jesus, the image of God as father and a particular person as God’s son was used, as already noted, in stories about Jewish charismatic holy men. All three uses have one element in common. All designate a relationship of special intimacy with God—Israel as the chosen people, the king as the adopted son, the charismatic as one who knows and is known by God. In this Jewish sense, Jesus may have thought of himself as “son of God.” He clearly was aware of a relationship of special intimacy. His use of the term Abba has as its corollary the term “son.” In a number of passages that may plausibly be attributed to him he uses father-and-son imagery to speak at least indirectly of his relationship to God.

it does not matter whether he thought of himself as Messiah or Son of God, for his identity as either of those does not depend on whether he thought so.41

The cumulative impression created by the synoptic Gospels is very strong: Jesus stood in the charismatic tradition of Judaism, which reached back to the beginnings of Israel. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray him as a Spirit-filled person through whom the power of Spirit flowed. His relationship to Spirit was both the source of and the energy for the mission he undertook. According to these earliest portraits, Jesus was one who knew the other world, who stood in a long line of mediators stretching back to Elijah and Moses. Indeed, according to them, he was the climax of that history of mediation. Moreover, Jesus’s relationship to the world of Spirit is also the key for understanding the central dimensions of his ministry: as healer, sage, revitalization movement founder, and prophet.

a Spirit person’s experience is one form of mystical experience, a union or communion with God, or even with “God beyond God,” that is, with Reality itself, that which lies behind all conceptualizations, including all conceptions of God. Those who have such experiences speak of them as ineffable, incapable of being described precisely, for the experience is beyond thought and beyond the subject-object distinction or classification that both thought and language presuppose. Yet those who have such experiences also insist that it is a knowing, and not just a feeling; it is a noetic and not simply a subjective emotional state. The knowing is direct, immediate, intuitive, quite unlike the modern Western understanding of knowledge as necessarily involving observer and observed and thus subject-object separation.2

As a Spirit person who knew the nature of the sacred, the “numinous,” from his own experience, Jesus proclaimed the acceptance of the outcasts in both his teaching and actions. Moreover, his articulation of inclusive compassion as the paradigm for Israel to follow was similarly grounded in his own experience. Thus Jesus’s basic “program” for the internal reform of Israel—“Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6:36)—flowed out of knowledge of God that he, as a Spirit person, was given in his own internal experience.

The admonition “love your enemy” would have been understood as an explicit reference to the Roman enemy and an unmistakable command to eschew the path of armed resistance. The saying, a source of perennial debate in Christian ethics, was in fact intended not simply for personal relationships, but as “public policy” at a particular time in history toward a particular state.14

because of this reversal of Israel’s political aspirations, the injunction to nonresistance, and the advice to pay tribute, Jesus is widely held to be nonpolitical. But such a conclusion is incorrect. Jesus’s attitude toward Rome was not based on an apolitical stance, but on the conviction that in the political affairs of the world the judging activity of God was at work. Regarding his own society, he was intensely political in the sense we have given to that term: he was concerned about the institutions and historical dynamic of Israel. The means he used, including public revolutionary gestures, challenged current practice. The end he sought was the transformation of the cultural dynamic of the quest for holiness into a cultural dynamic that would conform Israel to God as compassionate.

For repentance, though done by individuals, was not a turning from individual sins so much as a turning from a certain understanding of God and Israel to a transformed understanding.20 It called for a departure from the established structures that had shaped and nurtured the existence of those who heard Jesus to a new understanding of Israel as a community of inclusive compassion that would allow it to face a future that was largely unknown, with only the promise that ultimately God would vindicate them. Repentance so understood entailed risks. There was not only a risk to the individual who responded, but also a risk to the existence of Israel, for the function of Torah and Temple as institutions preservative of Israel’s cohesiveness would largely disappear if they were subordinated to the paradigm of compassion. Indeed, the perception of the importance of these institutions for Israel’s survival was a fundamental reason for the opposition offered to Jesus by his contemporaries. What seemed threatened by the transformation of these institutions was national identity and national survival itself. Yet what was called for was a course of reckless abandon in a time when the destiny of Israel was at stake. Thus, like the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Jesus sought to divert his people from a course that was leading to catastrophe. Apparently knowing that the likely outcome would be his death, he went to Jerusalem during the season of Passover, there to make one final ...

The risk of preaching and executing repentance...

Vast in its scope, ranging from matters that are virtually questions of etiquette to ultimate matters such as human nature and the nature of ultimate reality, the source of sagely teaching is reflection upon existence from a particular perspective. To put that negatively, its source is not revealed esoteric truths from another world or deductions logically derived from an authoritative tradition (even though the tradition may affect the sage’s reflection). The authority of the teaching depends upon its own perspicacity rather than upon some external authority.

The mystical perception of both self and world is sub specie aeternitatis, a vantage point beyond time from which ordinary consciousness and experience seem like a state of estrangement. Indeed, the stronger the mystical perspective, the more sharply ordinary existence appears to be a life of blindness, bondage, and misery, a plight that triggers compassion, sadness, and sometimes even anger. When this experience is combined with a sagacious intellect, the result is insight.

The other renewal movements intensified the Torah in the direction of holiness, emphasizing various forms of separation—from society as a whole, from the Gentiles, from impurity within society. Jesus, however, intensified the Torah primarily by applying it to internal dimensions of the human psyche: to dispositions, emotions, thoughts, and desires.

The rabbinic tradition affirmed that the heart in turn was ruled either by the “evil inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-ra) or the “good inclination” (ha-yetzer ha-tob).23

In his teaching, he regularly identified four centers as most typically dominant in people’s lives: family, status, possessions, and piety.