As promised in my previous discussion I have scanned a few pages from the book, "Honest to Jesus" by Robert W Funk chapter 3, Barriers Blocking the Way. I found it very interesting and would liek to open it up for comments.
Chapter Three
BARRIERS BLOCKING THE WAY
A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse.
The return road to Nazareth is beset with numerous roadblocks and detours, obstacles and pitfalls. They are mostly of recent vintage, but some of them are hoary with age. It is necessary to be aware of these impediments and barriers and be prepared to do battle with the trolls and dragons that guard the way back, exacting heavy tolls from submissive travelers. And formidable monsters they are because we ourselves have created and nourished them, often in spite of ourselves.
This territory will seem familiar, to be sure. In traversing that terrain, however, it is possible to lose one's way almost immediately. Confusion results from the lack of clear signing at forks in the road. The demons that patrol the route and thwart discovery, that blind us to fresh perception, that cloud the open mind are especially resistant to dragon slayers because the fire-breathers we aspire to destroy turn out to be our alter egos! Among these barriers are the following:
- Popular images of Jesus
- The gospels as inerrant and infallible
- Monolithic literalisms and the death of the imagination
- Spirituality as self-indulgence
- A self-serving church and clergy
- The foibles of biblical scholarship
All of this treacherous territory must be mastered if we hope to recover the faint figure of the Galilean now encrusted with centuries of adoration and piety but more recently tarnished with disdain and suspicion.
IGNORANCE
The strategy immediately available to many Americans for frustrating any attempt to recover the historical Jesus is to remain piously ignorant while rigidly opinionated. This contradictory combination is unassailable. Americans of all ethnic origins and every religious persuasion take the doctrine of the separation of church and state to imply their right to remain ignorant about religion. It is a right exercised with untiring vigor. For example, opinion polls reveal that a majority of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God; more than half of those who adhere to this conviction cannot name the four canonical gospels. They apparently have not read them in English, much less in Greek. As a consequence, it is difficult to take seriously their strident defense of the Bible as divine communication. In spite of their ignorance, many have deceived themselves into thinking that their judgments are beyond criticism and correction.
The reason for this strange posture is that Americans consider religion entirely a private affair. For most, in matters religious one opinion is deemed to be as good as another. In the university lecture hall, the professor of theoretical physics or biochemistry is seldom contradicted by the heady student; the distinguished scholar of classics or the teacher of Chinese rarely faces students who think they know better; but instructors in religion are repeatedly confronted by untutored sophomores who demand equal time and disproportionate attention for their ill-conceived certitudes. They do so usually on the basis of something they have learned from crusaders on campus sponsored by fundamentalist promoters. Knowledge appears to make no contribution to the credentials of an authority; opinions firmly held, expressed loudly, and buttressed by ignorance are quite adequate.
POPULAR IMAGES OF JESUS
Popular piety in the United States rests on what may be called a primal "childhood package" of Christian convictions. This package, based on surveys and polls, consists of six assertions:
- There is a God in heaven.
- God loves me.
- Jesus is God's son.
- Jesus died for my sins.
- God speaks to us through the Bible.
- I must believe these teachings; if I don't believe them, I won't go to heaven when I die.
The childhood version is later replaced by what is regarded as a more sophisticated package of the type often advocated by televangelists. The adult edition consists of a five-pronged creed:
- Jesus is the son of God.
- Jesus was born of a virgin.
- Jesus died on the cross as a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of the world.
- Jesus rose bodily from the tomb.
- Jesus will come again to sit in judgment.
Many Americans, with and without church affiliation, will affirm these doctrines. They have apparently become societal norms to be accepted without question and without understanding. While many factors and forces have produced this state of affairs, a poorly understood gospel of Paul and a creed with an empty center are the chief culprits.
On the basis of one or the other of those tenets, the marginally informed like to mount their own inquisitions. In public forums, on radio talk shows, in television interviews, there are always those who want to know what axes scholars of the Bible have to grind, as though the inquisitors themselves were innocent believers without bias. To find out about axes they want to know what one believes. If the scholar does not immediately subscribe to the basic litany of affirmations, he or she is presumed to have an agenda, undoubtedly hidden. So the inquisition is intended to smoke out the unbeliever, perhaps even the heretic.
In my fifty years of public appearances, I have only rarely been asked about my academic credentials. Inquisitors seem not to be interested in whether I can read Greek, the original language of the gospels, whether I have had firsthand experience in Palestinian archaeology, whether I have submitted my work to peer review in journals and books, whether I am quoted in the scholarly literature, or what my fields of specialization have been. The acquisition of skills and information seem to be irrelevant to the subject of religion in the eyes of Americans who belong to the anti-intellectual, know-nothing party. What counts is whether one can assent to orthodox propositions. Any hesitation on the scholar's part brings on sudden hearing loss in the inquisitor.
THE GOSPELS AS INERRANT AND INFALLIBLE
The simple expedient that thousands use to impede the way hack to Nazareth is to declare the Bible, and hence the gospels, inerrant. The Roman Catholic counterpart is to declare the magisterium of the church to be infallible-or, if not infallible, unimpeachable. The two forms of absolute authority are actually two faces of the same coin. This exceedingly effective strategy instantly puts the gospels out of reach and thus beyond critical review. But it does more than that. It opens the gospels to naive harmonizing (discrepancies are piously ironed out) and to proof texting (the scriptures are mined for words, phrases, and sentences that reinforce doctrinaire positions). Moreover, this strategy puts up "no trespassing" signs at three levels: At the first, personal level it insists that the understanding of the person or community of belief is beyond question because it rests on the canonical gospels. At the second level, this view claims that the gospels are completely reliable and historically accurate. At a third level, this position insists that the Jesus pictured by the canonical gospels, and exclusively by them, is the true, the real, Jesus. The progression from a private preserve of understanding to the canonical gospels and finally to the only true Jesus is taken to be self-evident. Jesus lies entombed at the bottom of this three-tiered defense.
The proponents of this point of view Protestant and Catholic alike are rarely completely content with the view that their creedal formulations are beyond question for believers. This is merely the outer line of defense. The inner wall of defense, the second level indicated in the previous paragraph, is the insistence that the reports of the canonical gospels are based on the evidence of eyewitnesses and confirmed by unequivocal archaeological and textual data and by common sense. The question the representatives of this view regularly pose in inquisitional tests is this: How can modern scholars know more about what happened than the eyewitnesses who penned the gospels? We will return to that question later when we show that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. Meanwhile, the need for that second defensive trench is occasioned by the fact that the inerrancy creed falls not only with the close and detailed analysis of the gospels but even on superficial observation. The defenders of the sacred text and the teaching magisterium are kept busy plugging the gaping holes in the doctrine with contrived harmonizing constructs allegedly assembled by impartial historians.
It is possible to understand the call to affirm that the New Testament gospels are all that is needed for faith, but it appears to be a contradiction in terms to ask us to accept the argument that they are historically reliable on the same basis. If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?
Inerrancy, infallibility, and special pleading inspired by prior theological commitments are strategies that are shattered on the shoals of the most reliable data we can assemble and their accompanying critical analysis.
MONOLITHIC LITERALISMS AND THE DEATH OF THE IMAGINATION
Inerrancy and infallibility are the offspring of literalism. Literalism takes theological affirmations to be objectively descriptive. If it didn't happen literally, we are told by the literalists, it didn't happen. Thus when Paul announces that Jesus died for the sins of humankind, the literalist takes that to mean that Jesus either made some kind of atoning sacrifice to appease an angry God, or that Jesus takes on the guilt of human beings and suffers in their place because suffering is the price God exacts for disobedience. This redemptive act on the part of Jesus is understood to be something that happened in the past, once and for all, and so cannot be repeated.
The crucifixion of Jesus is an event of the past, to be sure. In its literal descriptive sense it cannot be repeated. However, the redemptive function of that event is something that can be repeated, or at ]east newly appropriated, if it is to make a difference to us. As an event of the past, Jesus' death is said to have taken place for us; as something to be appropriated on later occasions, it can be understood as something that happens to us. In the first sense, the death of Jesus is literally true; in the second sense, it may be said to be true nonliterally.
The redemptive function of Jesus' death is usually expressed in mythological language. It is termed mythological because it refers to an act that was performed by God, or by God's son, on behalf of humankind. Such an act can be neither verified (nor falsified) on the basis of empirical data, by facts established by historical investigation. His death as redemptive event was not an act visible to the disinterested observer. All such mythological acts lie outside the purview of the empirical sciences and hence of the historian.
When, on the other hand, literalists claim that certain biblical stories are descriptively true, they are making claims that are an affront to common sense. Such stories include accounts of Mary's conception while still a virgin, Jesus' exorcisms of demons, references to seven heavens in the vault above the earth and to Sheol or hell below the earth, and Jesus' resurrection as the resuscitation of a corpse. If this form of misunderstanding were not so deeply entrenched in the literalistic mind, it would make us snicker. In the wake of the Enlightenment, when scriptural and ecclesiastical authority were abandoned by scholars, natural explanations were sought for all such phenomena. That strategy was born of the desire to be rid of the mythical parading as the historical.
Now we presumably know better. But our better knowledge has not been disseminated much beyond the university classroom, so we go on confusing the two categories. We either reject the mythical as pure unadulterated fancy or conflate the mythical and the historical as though they were one. Both positions are in error because they have fallen under the spell of literalism.
Literalism has created what Northrop Frye has termed the "imaginative illiterate." This product of the ascendancy of the empirical sciences, who can understand things only literally, dominates both high and naive levels of culture. It doesn't seem to matter that the literalist understands the term literal in different senses on different occasions. At times, the literalist takes "literal" to mean the descriptive, true-to-fact assertion; at other times, he or she understands the "literal" to mean the conventional, what everybody takes for granted. When used to mean what everybody takes for granted, the "literal" sense may thus also include the nonliteral. For example, everyone knows that there are no real oats in "sowing wild oats," and there is neither iron nor curtain in. "the iron curtain." Yet these popular expressions are understood to refer "literally" to youthful indiscretions and an impenetrable political boundary. Similarly, the literalist will claim that Jesus dying for sins quite "literally" means that he paid the price demanded by God with his sacrificial blood.
The physical sciences and preoccupation with the literal have nearly killed the imagination. That does not mean that I want to give up my refrigerator and modern medicine, both of which owe their efficacy to the sciences. But it does mean that refrigeration and surgery do not cover all the needs of the mind and spirit. There are some things that cooling and lancing will not cure. The ability to perceive the nonliteral dimensions of our world is the victim of our inclination to exchange a refreshed sense of the world for a mess of technical pottage.
SPIRITUALITY AS SELF-INDULGENCE
Another numbing strategy is to insist that the Bible is a sourcebook for private spiritual nurture. Because scripture is considered "spiritual," individuals are entitled to extract their own "spirituality" in private, without the assistance of historical or critical analysis or, for that matter, without reference to what the text meant originally. The doctrine that the state may not interfere with religious thought and practice and may not abridge freedom in that sector is taken as a guarantee that religion is a private and personal matter. Accordingly, everyone is permitted to be his or her own expert. Everyone is his or her own authority on the subject; no one has the right to tell an individual what the Bible or the gospels mean.
This conviction has considerable merit. I subscribe to it myself. However, for many it is no more than a shield for self-indulgence, a prescription for do-it-yourself brain surgery. If in private meditation we are satisfied with our own secret responses to a text that we may not, in fact, understand, then we have done no more than confirm our prejudices, invoking the text as an ally in self-deceit. In this interpretive scheme, who is to gainsay Charles Manson's assertion that the Book of Revelation presages in detail the arrival of the Beatles in America? To listen to what the gospels actually say for their own time and place, as opposed to what we would like them to say, means that individuals must acquire some knowledge of how and when that text was composed and what it meant to its original authors and readers. Bible study often means no more than mining this collection of books composed over more than a millennium for incidental sentences, phrases, images, and schemes that we can employ to indulge our own system of prejudices and preferences. All too often Bible study is a case of the blind congratulating the blind.
A SELF-SERVING CHURCH AND CLERGY
American society is woefully illiterate in matters religious. By almost any standard or poll, Christians and Jews fail to exhibit minimal knowledge of their own religious traditions, to say nothing of Islam and Buddhism. Yet those same Americans are outspoken in their endorsement of religion, conspicuous in their participation in the Easter parade and, more recently, flagrant in their fixation with public piety, to judge by the politicians who endorse public prayer and by the display in end zones by professional athletes. How are we to account for that discrepancy?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the churches have failed to educate their constituencies, that pastors have failed to inform their parishioners, and that instructors in seminaries have somehow short changed ordinands. In American society, with its preoccupation with the separation of church and state, nobody else seems to care.
The colleges and universities that dot the land owe their origins more often than not to the churches. Education was once a top priority of religious institutions of every stripe. In addition, the churches mounted their own vigorous, internal educational program through their Sunday schools and study groups. Pastors and priests were once the most highly educated professionals in the local community. Theological seminaries were the most advanced graduate institutions until faculties of medicine began to displace them late in the nineteenth century. Church members were expected to be knowledgeable in their own religious traditions, and they were expected to support an educated clergy. That has all changed. The churches no longer have a serious educational program. They no longer sponsor or support educational institutions to the extent they once did. Pastors are not as well trained. The churches have become selfserving and introspective because they are beleaguered and defensive. They no longer know what their mission is. They are content to endorse the United Way and drift.
As a consequence, the churches have ceased to be part of the solution to religious illiteracy; they have become a major contributor to the problem-which, if not reversed, will lead to their own demise.
Clergy have decided that what they learned in seminary is a secret to be kept. Under duress by crusading fundamentalisms, the mainline churches have retreated into their cloisters and dissembled. The pulpit has become the locus of the soft assurance rather than the source of hard information. Parish members wither and die on a vine that is neither pruned nor watered unless they take matters into their own hands. The least common denominator and the collection plate have taken over Christian education. Worse yet, the spiritual and intellectual leaders of Christian communities have allowed uninformed parishioners to determine the content of the gospel. In a television interview, a Lutheran pastor insisted that his parishioners would go down the street to a church that taught fundamentalism if he did not teach it. That does not strike me as a particularly prophetic response to the requirements of the gospel. I wonder what happened to his moral integrity.
There are striking exceptions to these generalizations, of course. When asked to speak at a large urban church, I asked the pastor what topics to avoid as a way of assuring him that I didn't want to cause him trouble. He told me to say anything I liked, since his parishioners had already heard it all. I took him at his word. I learned in the responses from his parishioners what a teaching pastor can achieve in thirty-seven years. "If you tell the truth," he reminded me, "you need not remember what you told them, and you need not worry about what others will tell them." I found that experience very refreshing but exceptional.
For those who prefer gargantuan detours, there is the claim, occasionally made, that the Bible is the property of the church. These property rights, .it is argued, give the church the prerogative to determine what the Bible means. If one wants to reinterpret the Bible, one must first persuade the church to change its mind. Those who make this claim often use the singular church as though there were only one, and they seem to assume that they belong to that one imaginary church.
Journalists appear to have adopted this doctrine. They frequently presuppose that there is one authority, ecclesiastical in nature, that is the final, undisputed arbiter in theological disputes. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Billy Graham are members of this exclusive club. Scholars are not included. In news stories, academics are reported briefly and then the problems they raise papered over with piety supplied by reassuring priests and pastors. The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar are usually referred to as "self-appointed," thereby suggesting that they are intruders, usurpers, without proper endorsement by those who know the "real" answers. To be an authority, one has to he "appointed" by other authorities of higher rank. It should be a great comfort to readers and listeners to know that journalists have a direct pipeline to the truth on the subject of religion and the Bible.
THE FOIBLES OF BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP
Biblical scholars went indoors about 1923 and have refused to come out. We are closet scholars. Since the controversy over Darwin and evolution (Origin of Species was published in 1869) erupted, we have been wary of public discourse. The Scopes trial taught us that it was dangerous to speak and write in plain language. (The trial was held in Tennessee in 1923 and involved a high school teacher who was convicted of teaching the doctrine of evolution against state law, a law that was not repealed until 1963 but is now being reconsidered.) As a result of this case and similar controversies, biblical scholars learned to speak to and write for each other in codes that cannot be broken by the uninitiated. Like other academicians struggling for a place in the sun, we have made a virtue out of the trivial, articulated in bloated and esoteric rlictoric., and published in Journals in which the footnote is king, in order to skirt or obscure the real issues.
In our academic ghettos, we have learned to live in a limbo between the heaven of the knowledge we possess and the hell of the ignorance we have taken oaths to dispel. We have ]earned to manage the discrcpancv in our studcnts, in our larger constituencies (college alumni and the church), and in ourselves by cultivating ambiguity, by the suspended and .therefore equivocating judgment, and by the feigned respect for opinions at all levels, We have also acquired the skill of the parry and thrust with the rapier of wit in order to wound the opponent without resolving the dispute. In short. we have become adept at the intellectual gamesman-ship played out in the classroom, in seminars, and in the annual ritual gatherings of professionals. It is loads of fun, but it leaves intellectuals impotent and sterile.
This uncertainty about roles corresponds to another pair of poles. As scholars of the Bible and religion, we cannot make up our minds whether we belong to the community of faith or to the academy. Some serious critical scholars teach in seminaries or church-related colleges and universities. They are under constant pressure from scholars in the field to adhere to scientific methods while giving lip service to the creeds in the college chapel. The conflict between what we think we know under those circumstances and what xve are willing to admit often becomes acute.
Biblical scholars who labor outside cloistered precincts are equally ambivalent; those of us who Have taught or teach in secular universities lack a significant public base: we do not appear to be working for, or in service to, a particular constituency. We are not training students for specific roles in the larger world. A major in religion, like a major in English or history, does not prepare one for a specific vocation. Like other humanists, instructors in religion are likely to be divorced from issues that matter beyond a relatively small circle of similarly situated professionals.
These extremely difficult conditions have left their mark on the scholarship of the Bible. We are fragmented; we lack common goals; we have no formal agendas or even hidden agendas, we have no major problems to solve. So we play trivial pursuit, like many other scholars in the humanistic wing of the modern university specialists in literature, philosophy, linguistics, history, the arts. We are hounded by the anxiety of influence for fear that we will not be able to establish our own identities*, we turn on our academic ancestry and disavow our didactic parentage because we believe ourselves to be intellectual orphans in need of adoption. Naturally, this syndrome produces tendencies toward fratricide among colleagues. Scholars turn on each other in the struggle for power and place, which results in the substitution of political for ideational goals. It is no wonder the ethics of biblical scholarship is in collapse. Self-esteem is low, and self-identity is weak. There is an abiding nostalgia for the European tradition where scholarship is honored and honored and honored, beyond reason where Herr Professor Dr. Dr is the unsolicited mode of address in the grocery for persons with two doctoral degrees and a lifetime appointment. It is no wonder that at the first chance and with the help of the National Endowment for the Humanities, American scholars are off to Europe to have their academic achievements recognized and their egos refurbished.
The worst enemy of all for scholars of the Bible indeed, for all scholarsis elitism. In the academic world, penalties are severe for the author who writes a book that sells well, or for sponsors of the lucid sentence, or for teachers who can teach but fail to publish. Promotion and tenure committees look askance at such successes: after all, if a work is well written and elicits a broad readership, if a sentence is understandable, if students actually learn, that scholarship cannot be very profound. The inevitable result is that academics deliberately write in convoluted jargon merely to please their elitist colleagues.
Elitism breeds hypocrisy. Scholarship without a real public without a real agenda must pretend to be significant, when, in fact, it may be entirely or mostly irrelevant. Unlike Descartes, modern-day academics no longer have private patrons who will pay them to lie abed until noon to ponder the fundamental verities. Scholars produce at the behest and in accordance with the agendas of government agencies or private founda tions that fund research. Their product is unwanted indeed, unusable by the society at large. In a democracy, that is very nearly fatal for the humanities. But it may not matter that their results are unsalable, particularly if their products are not distributed beyond a small, elite circle. Scholars are basically the recipients of patronage. They are, in fact, clients of broker deans and committees on promotion and tenure and behave much like enslaved intellectuals. They have mortgaged most of their freedom to think and act as they please or as their research dictates. Tenure for them means job security rather than independence. They pretend to exercise unfettered judgments about important matters, but do so mostly , when that exercise doesn't count for much or when it is merely a fashion statement.
Under such circumstances, how is it possible for scholars to muster the integrity to be honest to Jesus? It does not come easily. But in spite of my misgivings about myself and my colleagues, I believe that scholars and teachers, learning and scholarship are the last best hope we have to stave off the dire consequences of a waxing ignorance in matters religious and a waning tolerance on the part of the public for divergent points of view. In the next chapter I intend to award scholars a messianic assignment.
Edited by - william penwell on 5 December 2002 21:40:23