WESTAR INSTITUUT: AGENDA GEDREWE INSTITUUT (Q-BRON) It was, in fact, a carefully-contrived effort to erode classic Christian faith. Unmasking the Jesus Seminar: A Critique of Its Methods and Conclusions by Dr. Mark D. Roberts Copyright © 2005 by Mark D. Roberts Note: You may download this resource at no cost, for personal use or for use in a Christian ministry, as long as you are not publishing it for sale. All I ask is that you acknowledge the source of this material: patheos/blogs/markdroberts/. For all other uses, please contact me at mark@markdroberts. Thank you. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar Robert W. Funk made his greatest mark on the world, not through his academic efforts, but through his leadership of the Westar Institute, which he founded in 1985. This institute, though seemingly an academic think-tank, was in fact an agenda-driven effort to undermine orthodox Christianity. In saying this, I am not dishonoring the memory of Robert Funk, but in fact preserving his memory. As you’ll see later in this post, and in tomorrow’s as well, Funk was quite clear about his anti-Christian agenda. Funk’s most successful creation was the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars and others (including film director Paul Verhoeven, who made such religious classics as Basic Instinctand Showgirls) who took it upon themselves to decide what Jesus really said and did. They made presentations and voted by use of different colored beads. This enterprise, though apparently objective, was in fact a stacked deck from the beginning. After all, Robert Funk himself determined who was in the Seminar and who wasn’t. If you knew anything about New Testament scholarship, you could see from the configuration of Jesus Seminar fellows that they were going to end up with a very minimal Jesus at best. (In fact seven of the fellows were colleagues of mine in grad school at Harvard.) It was obvious from the beginning that Funk’s agenda for The Jesus Seminar was not consistent with classical Christianity. He said so himself in the very first meeting of the Seminar: Those of us who work with that hypothetical middle [between creation and the end of all things] —Jesus of Nazareth—are hard pressed to concoct any form of coherence that will unite beginning, middle, and end in some grand new fiction that will meet all the requirements of narrative. To put the matter bluntly, we are having as much trouble with the middle—the messiah—as we are with the terminal points. What we need is a new fiction that takes as its starting point the central event in the Judeo-Christian drama and reconciles that middle with a new story that reaches beyond old beginnings and endings. In sum, we need a new narrative of Jesus, a new gospel, if you will, that places Jesus differently in the grand scheme, the epic story. (italics mine) When somebody asks for a new gospel, implying that the classic Christian gospel is insufficient, you know you’ve left orthodoxy far beyond. In Funk’s new gospel, Jesus doesn’t fare so well. At another time Robert Funk said this about Jesus: We should give Jesus a demotion. It is no longer credible to think of Jesus as divine. Jesus’ divinity goes together with the old theistic way of thinking about God. The plot early Christians invented for a divine redeemer figure is as archaic as the mythology in which it is framed. A Jesus who drops down out of heaven, performs some magical act that frees human beings from the power of sin, rises from the dead, and returns to heaven is simply no longer credible. The notion that he will return at the end of time and sit in cosmic judgment is equally incredible. We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus. So, though the Jesus Seminar gathered a number of scholars, and though some of its methods were the stuff of critical scholarship, and though some of the fellows are fine biblical scholars, the Seminar itself was not a truly academic exercise. It was, in fact, a carefully-contrived effort to erode classic Christian faith. Lees gerus verder: patheos/blogs/markdroberts/series/unmasking-the-jesus-seminar/
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:48:25 +0000
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