Jesus was a teacher of unconventional wisdom—a culturally subversive wisdom that challenged conventional wisdom. As an enlightened teacher of an enlightenment wisdom, he sought to lead others to a new way of seeing. His aphorisms and parables functioned to invite a radical perceptual shift in how one sees life and God. Tradition-sanctioned statuses (of family, wealth, position, gender, righteousness) were subverted. Requirements were replaced by relationship as the central dynamic of the religious life.
The way of Jesus was (and is) not about living within tradition and observing its requirements but about a new way of seeing. It is a vision of the religious life as a relationship to that which is beyond tradition. The contrast between tradition and Spirit does not mean that tradition has no value or that it is always an obstacle. Rather, the indictment is against one way that tradition can function.
Namely, when tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.
The alternative wisdom of Jesus—the way of Jesus—challenged the conventional wisdom not just of his world but of every world. 54 It involves a radical recentering: from being centered in our tradition—that is, in our map of reality, whether religious or secular—to being centered in that to which these maps (at their best) point. Life within tradition is transformed to life in the Spirit. The life of performance becomes the life of relationship.
Borg, Marcus J.. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion To A More Authentic Contemporary Faith (pp. 99-100). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
- I want to emphasize that the problem with the conventional wisdom that Jesus subverted was not its specific content (that is, that it simply had the wrong requirements). This way of seeing it usually leads to a negative impression of Judaism, as if the problem was that the tradition of Jesus’ day was Jewish and needed to be replaced. When it is seen this way, the message of Jesus is turned into Christian conventional wisdom: Jesus replaced wrong beliefs with right beliefs or an inadequate set of requirements with the right set of requirements. The framework of conventional wisdom (including the dynamic of “measuring up”) remains. But this is precisely the framework that Jesus subverts, and it applies equally to all forms of conventional wisdom, whether Jewish, Christian, or secular.
Borg, Marcus J.. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion To A More Authenthic Contemporary Faith (p. 108). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
