[Note from Rowland. I’ve shared a conference or two with Greg. He’s on the liberal end of the theological spectrum, and/but always worth reading. This article sent by my liberal mate Mark].

by Gregory C. Jenks

In 2000, Gregory C. Jenks was Associate Director of the Westar Institute, parent body of the Jesus Seminar. The following is a transcript of a speech delivered at the National Forum of the Center for Progressive Christianity, in Irvine, California, June 1-3, 2000. Information and resources from the Center for Progressive Christianity are available at http://www.tcpc.org.

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WHAT THE JESUS SCHOLARS ARE TELLING US

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If one proclaims that God raised Jesus from the dead, that Jesus is the Son of God, then it makes a difference what he said and did, what people experienced of him that moved them to say such things. (p. 52)

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Thumbnail Sketch of the Historical Jesus

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What we are dealing with here is best summarised as the “Jesus of the parables and aphorisms:”

Jesus appears to have been an itinerant sage-a wandering wise man-who delivered his parables and aphorisms in public and private venues for both friends and opponents in return for food and drink.

He never claimed to be-nor allowed others to call him-the Messiah or a divine being.

Jesus taught a wisdom that emphasised a simple trust in God’s unstinting goodness and the generosity of others. Life was to be lived and celebrated without boundaries and without thought for the future. He rejected asceticism.

For Jesus, ritual ceremonies had no value. Purity taboos and social barriers were never allowed to come between the people who responded to God and one another in simple trust.

There were no religious “brokers” in Jesus’ vision of God’s domain. No priests, no prophets, no messiahs. Not even Jesus himself was to be inserted between a person and God.

To experience forgiveness one simply had to offer forgiveness to others.

No theological beliefs served as a test for participation in God’s domain.

Apocalyptic speculation with future punishments for the wicked and rewards for the virtuous played no part in Jesus’ teaching.

Jesus was killed because he refused to compromise this radical vision of life. He may even have taken direct action in the Jerusalem Temple to express his view of God’s imperial rule. Those defending the status quo with its elaborate brokerage system for religious favors had to destroy him or lose their hold over others.

If that glimpse of Jesus is valid to any extent, it poses a significant challenge for the Christian churches. After all, we claim his name and to be his exclusive representatives in our society. Yet, on virtually every point in that sketch, the churches’ views are in contrast to those which now seem to have been typical of Jesus!

The ordained sons of Adam, have numerous places to lay their heads, offer little by way of original wisdom, and have become settled householders rather than itinerant sages.

The churches insist that Jesus was both divine and the Jewish Messiah

We have often embraced asceticism, and we have certainly encouraged a negative attitude towards bodily life in this natural world. If it feels good it must be bad for (the real eternal spiritual) you.

Rather than teach a wisdom that supports simple trust, the churches have often cultivated a fear that feeds on guilt and anxiety.

Church experience is full of boundaries. Living dangerously in the freedom of God’s sons and daughters is rarely encouraged.

Ritual and sacrament have immense value, as seen by the steps to protect the privileges of those authorized to celebrate them.

Purity taboos and social barriers have too often crept back in; and especially those based around gender and sexuality.

Religious brokers have established and sustained immense power within the church.

Many a saint and a cleric have been inserted between Jesus and us, let alone us and God.

Forgiveness was meted out by the clerical brokers, and even sold for financial and other gain.

Theological beliefs have certainly served as tests for participation; indeed even for physical survival as heretics and schismatics have been hounded and slain.

Apocalyptic expectation has been used to sustain a hold over people, and to validate accommodation with the present empires of human society.

Dying for the integrity of one’s radical vision is hardly typical of church life.

It is not hard to sense that the institutional church would most often vote with the Sanhedrin. The churches have had many hundreds of years experience in handing Jesus over to the Governor. I believe that we gladly accept Barabbas in place of the disturbing Jesus of Galilee. Were Jesus to arrive at many of our congregations today he may find us no more inclined to embrace his vision of God’s domain in everyday life than his peers in ancient Galilee.

WHAT THE NEW INSIGHTS INTO JESUS MEAN FOR THE CHURCHES

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The church must take seriously what scholars today are saying about the Jesus tradition. But for this to happen, scholars must also be willing to say what they think their work means

Reinventing Church as the Community of Jesus

Whatever our approach to Scripture and to faith, people of faith will always need to articulate our understanding of Jesus. For some of those people, and I am one of them, that will no longer be in the concepts and language of the ancient world.

For people such as myself, the processes and the findings of recent Jesus studies are part of a movement of God’s Spirit in the contemporary world. They free us from nonsensical affirmations that none of us take seriously, but few of us dare question.

Of course, we believers in exile find ourselves not just in an alien space far from the multi-layered worlds of antiquity-but also in a church that often seems far removed from the first disciples of Jesus. We are part of a church much compromised by our alliances with the rich and powerful over the centuries. It has been a rare and a brave Christian soul who has stood with the poor against the rich and powerful, and for truth against the magisterium of the Church.

If there is even a pinch of truth in the glimpses of Jesus that emerge from the research of the Jesus Seminar, then the historical churches of Christianity have much to answer for. There is, after all, an Evangelical impulse at the center of Seminar’s portrait of Jesus that our critics find so offensive.

A Church in Crisis

There is no need me for me rehearse in this forum the challenges facing the churches at this point in our history. It may suffice to note that Loren Mead of the Alban Institute considers that we are going through the most significant changes since the period of Constantine. That’s a once in 1,500 years type of transition. No wonder it hurts!

The rulers of our world no longer want or need the churches as they once did, but we act as if the old order remains intact:

most of the generation that now leads our churches grew up with [this old paradigm] as a way of thinking about church and society. And all the structures and institutions that make up the churches and the infrastructure of religious life, from missionary societies to seminaries, from congregtional life to denominational books of order and canons, are built on the presuppositions of the Christendom Paradigm-not the ancient, classical version of the paradigm as it was understood centuries ago, but the version that flourished with new life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paradigm in its later years flourished and shaped us with new vigor, just as a dying pine is supposed to produce seed more vigorously as it senses the approach of its own death. (p. 18)

As Mead sees it, the old paradigm has collapsed. We are in the “time between the paradigms” and we find ourselves: pulled by the new and constrained by the old. (p. 22) I find that a poignant description of my experiences as a Christian and as a parish priest. Pulled by the new and constrained by the old

Typical reactions include:

is there a future? is there time to find a future? will a new paradigm emerge?

Taking the historical Jesus to Church

I want to consider now what might happen if the historical Jesus is brought into the picture. What if we set Jesus free from our Sunday School portraits and let him loose in our communities? Can we take the Jesus of the Red & Pink material into our churches?

Would he be welcome there? Would he fit in? Would it be an explosive combination? Would it renew and invigorate the churches?

I am also mindful of the Jesus sayings about new wine in old wineskins (or, new patches on old cloth)!

The Jesus Seminar suggests only 18% of the sayings attributed to Jesus are authentic. Might it be that a similar proportion of the church’s historical baggage must be jettisoned? Is there a sufficient core of tradition and practice left? Could Christians handle a less supernatural Jesus and a lesser role for dogma and ritual?

I think we must embrace such a reduction in our metaphors for the sake of credibility

So what are the implications of Jesus studies for the churches today? In very broad terms, they might be described as follows:

1.They include the assertion that the historical Jesus deserves to have a powerful say in the way people imagine their religion and express that faith in word and symbol.

2.They include the idea that people have a right to know that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the various frames of faith in which he has so often been presented by the churches.

3.They include the insight that we can learn more about being people of faith in our own day by listening to both the original voice of Jesus and also to the voices of his first followers. [There is much wisdom in the Gray and Black materials! But we are best to not confuse this traditional material with the distinctive voice of Jesus.]

4.And I believe that they also include the realisation that the actual historical humanity of Jesus is the focus of his divine significance to us. It is in Jesus-as-human that Christians see God at work within and amongst us. Not as the Holy Stranger, but as the Familiar Sacred. The one who called us into being, who would call us out of our exile, and into that reality beyond personal death that we presently label “resurrection.”

I believe that the findings of recent Jesus studies do have implications for church life. Critics and friends alike are correct in sensing that, but they are not just for church life. The implications run wider to include also the place of our Christian tradition within a wider (emerging, global)

community. The implications touch the daily lives of both individuals and communities They will affect anyone who want to form and sustain lives that integrate faith and everyday life

So what are the implications of the Jesus Seminar for the churches today? How do we take this kind of Jesus into our churches? Dare we do so? That is our focus in the time ahead of us, as we consider the topics of Scripture, community, worship and discipleship.

Scripture as Text of Liberation

The Problem

I am aware that I am starting with the Bible. I am doing that because the problem of the Bible lies at heart of our dilemma as progressive churches.

In the popular mind, the Bible has become in many ways a substitute icon for God. Here is a tangible symbol for the transcendent reality. The battle over the Bible is a struggle for a lexicon to speak of the sacred.

It is not entirely inappropriate that this is so. The Bible lends itself to serve as a proxy for God/Religion in this struggle. It is the product of human creativity and effort (as is Religion and idea of God). If we can turn around people’s attitudes to the Bible, perhaps we change their ideas about faith.

The core problem in the area of Scripture is our failure to integrate critical Scripture scholarship into the life of the churches. We have left our people functionally illiterate in using the Bible. This not a new problem. It emerged slowly over several hundred years, but it has now become critical.

The responsibility for this lies with both the churches and the scholars. The churches did not want to know-and the scholars were happy not to say! But that conspiracy of silence will no longer serve us well; if it ever did.

Jesus and the biblical tradition

Jesus was not a biblical fundamentalist. Nor was he a liberal Scripture scholar! He belongs outside both those categories and the arguments that lie behind them. And that is a significant insight in itself. Our anxieties over the place and meaning of the Bible were unknown to Jesus, and played no part in his thought.

Jesus did not stand within the scribal traditions of his time. He is remembered as someone unlike the scholars. And yet he clearly valued the biblical traditions and was profoundly shaped by them. At the same time, Jesus seems to have enjoyed an authority sourced from something other than Scripture.

It seems reasonable to conclude Jesus would have developed the idea of Scripture differently had his experience been more like ours. I suspect that he would have integrated scholarship better than we have done up until now. In any case, we can see that his metaphors for God’s active presence enlarged upon and enriched the biblical tradition, rather than being simply derivative.

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READING LIST *[What I have read]

Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. The historical Jesus and the heart of contemporary faith. HarperCollins, 1995.

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Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus. Jesus for a new Millennium. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

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John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. A bishop speaks to believers in exile. HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.

from http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1643