Someone I love dearly asked me a question about the Jesus Seminar and my answer became long enough to become a blog post.A lot of what is here I owe to Dr. Tom Wright who has helped me hone my thinking. I welcome your comments and ask for thoughtfulness and consideration when responding.
I have done some long and hard thinking and praying in order to answer your question about the Jesus Seminar. You can tell by the length of this answer that your question struck a nerve. The work of the Jesus Seminar was where I started in becoming a practicing theologian and it took be down a long cul-de-sac before I realized I had gotten off the path.
The Seminar was all the rage when I was at Centre College and Borg, Crossan, Funk and others were the leading theologians at the time (the mid 1980’s). Scholars got really excited about the Gospel of Thomas, suggested the hypothesis of the ‘Q’ document that might stand behind the gospels and then tried to re-prioritize the Gospels.
I personally have done a lot of work researching the whole topic of whether or not we should or can look for the real historical Jesus. I believe we should and can. I think that Jesus was more than just another in a long line of wisdom teachers. He was and is, in fact, the son of God, the Messiah. That’s what makes Jesus different than Mohammed, the Buddha and other wisdom prophets. That’s the reason behind who I am and why I do what I do.
The problem with writing or thinking about theology is that you have to say everything all at once so everyone knows what you are talking about. Even using words like ‘wisdom’, ‘prophets’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘God’ beg to have definitions attached to them.
To me, the Jesus Seminar says more about Western Civilization at the end of the 20th century than it does about Christianity in the 1st. They were really, and rightly, arguing against the fundamentalist, TV-evangelist type of religion that is riddled with legalism, violence and domination. In many, many ways the church in America and in Europe has got it wrong. It has become an institution like any other, riddled with the politics of self-preservation. I think part of the motivation for the Jesus Seminar was in reaction against that. And there are some of us who are still in the pews and pulpits working for freedom in Christ, non-violent preaching and communication and risk-taking mission and ministry.
My concern with the Jesus Seminar and its legacy is:
- They really deny the divinity of Jesus as the unique son of God whose death and resurrection matter. When you deny this unique truth claim, it means that you can get out of having to do business with God and be in the vertical and horizontal relationships that give life order, meaning and purpose.
- They take the idea of being able to know God and about God and subject it to science, which has become the real religion of Western civilization. Basically they are saying that God MUST speak through science for there is no other way.
To pull together a bunch of scholars, try to use methods of statistics and science to discover who Jesus really was, what he really said and what then to do with that information is like asking a gifted car mechanic to write a symphony. There is no value judgment attached to either vocation, they are just fundamentally different. People who want to know more about God and be in relationship with God don’t have to go to scientific method in order to do that.
Members of the Jesus Seminar couldn’t agree to come down to saying that yes, Jesus was in fact the son of God, his death and resurrection did happen and that is a unique truth claim among all other religions and spiritualities. And that is what the late 20th century and early 21st look like here in the West. Modern (or really post-modern) thinking says that everyone should and can find and live by their own definition of truth for themselves. “I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul”.
The reality is that God expressed as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer is the Captain and Master. God is God and I am not.
Members of the Jesus Seminar and the folks that came after looked down a well to find Jesus, saw the reflection of their own faces, and thought they were looking at God.
To me as a pastor, the fallout of that way of thinking is that people can decide they basically don’t need each other and can treat God like a supermarket – go and get what you want when you want it and forget about it the rest of the time. One of the problems that plagues the modern church is the Western culture’s insistence on independence and individualism. “I can figure this out for myself, by myself and accomplish it by myself.”
The radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s letters and the Sermon to the Hebrews is that we, as humans, can’t make it on our own. We desperately need God and we desperately need each other.
Soul Rain 