To Tell the Truth
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
September 11th, 2005
Then they came to Capernaum,
and on the Sabbath day he went right to the synagogue and started teaching.
They were astonished at his teaching,
since he would teach them on his own authority,
unlike the scholars.
Mark 1:21-22, Matthew 7:28-29, Luke 4:32-32, Source Mark
In addition to the tragedy in the Gulf, I was personally saddened this past week by the
death of a person who I now realize had become my mentor. I didn't fully appreciate
just how much of an influence he has had on me until his death last Friday. Robert W.
Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, passed away in his home, Friday, September
3rd. http://www.westarinstitute.org/Fellows/Funk/Obituary/obituary.html
In 1985, at the seminar's inception, Robert Funk described its mission: "We are going to
inquire simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said."
http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html
The Fall gathering of Westar in October was to celebrate with Bob the 20th anniversary of Westar. Sadly, Bob will not be with us in the flesh, but he will be there in spirit. At the Fall gathering, both professional scholars and enthusiasts like me will lift our glasses in gratitude to Robert Walter Funk as we continue our quest to be "Honest to Jesus."
“Honest to Jesus” was the name of one of Bob Funk’s books. He wrote it in 1996, following the publication of the Jesus Seminar’s The Five Gospels. A church member introduced the book to me. I remember after reading it not being sure what to do with it. As a minister trained at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was familiar with the Christ of creed. The Jesus of history was not considered to be someone that would “preach.” You could preach the Christ of creed but not the Jesus of history, so we were told, and so I believed.
Even though I found myself in agreement with the core of Funk’s findings about Jesus, I resisted doing anything about it, since I didn’t know how. None of the Christ mythology fits the real person. The church has structured itself around the mythology. Since Funk’s book (and as I look back on it, the seeds had been planted many years before) I struggled with this. Princeton’s answer to this dilemma had been to follow Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann and ignore the historical Jesus. Instead preach the kerygma, the mythology of Christ crucified and risen. Thus neo-orthodoxy was born in the 1930’s.
The problem with neo-orthodoxy is that its subtleties, its ironies, were not appreciated in the congregations either by laypeople or clergy. The distinctions between legend and history became muddied and the Jesus of history and the Christ of creed morphed into a quasi-historical soup. In fact, many if not most people in mainline congregations still regard the resurrection of Jesus as an historical event—an event that a journalist could report.
That isn’t the biggest problem. Good solid teaching and preaching could help there. But the atmosphere has thickened so that even addressing the issue has become unsafe for many in the church. It isn’t enough to believe in the bodily resurrection as this journalistic view is often touted, you must believe to be a Christian. Be warned you who question or who plant seeds of doubt.
The church with notable exceptions does not reward honesty. It rewards obedience.
It rewards mediocrity. Yet this congregation, the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethton, is gratefully, one of those notable exceptions. This past year, when I began searching for a congregation, I looked at churches from Juneau, Alaska to Hollywood, Florida, and finally found a liberal church in the mountains of East Tennessee. That is irony.
When say liberal, I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word in regards to a particular ideology or political view. I mean liberal in the sense of magnanimous, generous, open-spirited. Like a liberal arts education, a liberal church explores openly a variety of religious ideas and viewpoints and urges its members to develop the tools of critical thinking. It encourages and rewards honesty.
That is not something to take for granted. It is rare and to be treasured and to be nurtured. We are in an illiberal age. The mainline church is experiencing a crackdown from our self-proclaimed protectors, the religious right. They believe that authority is power and that power is truth.
Here is an example from history what can happen when power becomes truth.
Jan Hus was burned at the stake in the year 1415 because he questioned whether or not those who were in authority in his time were speaking the truth. They understood authority as power. In a letter to friends shortly before his death, Hus wrote:
“A theologian told me that everything would be made easy and permitted to me if I would only submit myself to the Council, and he added: If the Council said you only had one eye, even though you had two, it would be your duty to admit to the Council that this was so. I answered him: Even if the whole world said so, since I have my senses—as I still have—I could not yield to them without conscientious objection.”
--quoted in Rudolf Augstein, Jesus: Son of Man (Urizen Books: New York) 1972, p. 78
When authority is understood as power, truth is sacrificed. The honest search for truth is compromised. We need courageous honest voices that challenge these authorities.
For me, Robert Funk was a breath of fresh air. In an atmosphere of increasingly authoritarian religious expression, the latest quest for the historical Jesus was born. In March of 1985 at the inception of the Jesus Seminar Funk made these opening remarks:
We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.
In this process, we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt. Everest confronts the team of climbers.
We are not embarking on this venture in a corner. We are going to carry out our work in full public view; we will not only honor the freedom of information, we will insist on the public disclosure of our work and, insofar as it lies within our power, we shall see to it that the public is informed of our judgments. We shall do so, not because our wisdom is superior, but because we are committed to public accountability.
Our basic plan is simple. We intend to examine every fragment of the traditions attached to the name of Jesus in order to determine what he really said—not his literal words, perhaps, but the substance and style of his utterances. We are in quest of his voice, insofar as it can be distinguished from many other voices also preserved in the tradition. We are prepared to bring to bear everything we know and can learn about the form and content, about the formation and transmission, of aphorisms and parables, dialogues and debates, attributed or attributable to Jesus, in order to carry out our task….
We are launching these collective investigations in the first instance in response to our students, past, present, and future. Once our students learn to discern the traditions of the New Testament and other early Christian literature—and they all do to a greater or lesser extent under our tutelage—they want to know the ultimate truth: what did Jesus really say? Who was this man to whom the tradition steadily refers itself? For a change, we will be answering a question that is really being asked.
Make no mistake: there is widespread and passionate interest in this issue,
even among those uninitiated in the higher mysteries of gospel scholarship. The
religious establishment has not allowed the intelligence of high scholarship to
pass through pastors and priests to a hungry laity, and the radio and TV
counterparts of educated clergy have traded in platitudes and pieties and played
on the ignorance of the uninformed. A rude and rancorous awakening lies ahead.
What we are about takes courage, as I said. We are probing what is most
sacred to millions, and hence we will constantly border on blasphemy. We must
be prepared to forebear the hostility we shall provoke. At the same time, our
work, if carefully and thoughtfully wrought, will spell liberty for other millions. It
is for the latter that we labor.
http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/Remarks/remarks.html
Here was a scholar who cared enough about Jesus, to be honest about him.
He cared enough about his students to address questions that were really being asked.
He cared enough about intelligent people, the “hungry laity” as he called them, to inform them of contemporary scholarship in accessible language.
In my experience, Funk embodied the definition of a teacher.
For those who engage in the teaching ministry of the church regardless of what level, from pre-school to post-retirement, we could do worse than to approach our subject matter with honesty, to address the questions our students are really asking, and to provide information in language that people can understand, and perhaps most importantly, to grant permission for people to disagree, to encourage them to think for themselves, and to reward them for honesty.
According to today’s reading, Jesus was considered unusual since he spoke on his own authority not like the scholars. I used to think that meant that since he was the Son of God, he knew everything, and spoke on the authority of God. He was the only one, however. No one else had or has that power.
Now, I see it differently.
Authority is earned by the truth it tells.
Jesus earned authority because he told what was true, not because he claimed power.
He didn’t teach the same old oppressive nonsense that the authorities taught.
Through his parables and aphorisms he invited people to discover their own authority—to see the world anew and to discover their own truths.
He said the divine domain is real.
You can see it by looking at a mustard seed.
It is open to any of us.
We all have access to that which is true.
No one speaks for God.
Those who are supposedly in authority hate that kind of talk.
They can’t control it.
That for me is the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Creed.
The Jesus of history is non-coercive.
He didn’t tell them what they had to think or believe.
There is no closed canon of accepted literature with Jesus.
The search for truth is ongoing and open-ended.
We read the wisdom of the ancestors to learn and to build upon it,
Not to simply regurgitate what we read.
When I think about the church and its teaching ministry,
I think about permission granting, critical thinking, and open-ended searching.
When I think about the church’s teaching ministry,
I am grateful for teachers like Bob Funk.
I am grateful that he insisted that the Jesus of history was worth the trouble of the search.
Because of teachers like Funk, I ventured to search on my own.
I have found that the Jesus of history is far more interesting than the Christ of Creed.
I have found that the Jesus of history does preach.
The Jesus of history spoke through parable and aphorism about a reality he called the kingdom of God, or the domain of God or the Divine Domain. This is my faith. I believe that the reality to which he pointed does exist—and that it is worth basing my life upon it. That is what I mean by faith. The something in which you have faith is the something you are willing to bet your life upon. My faith is that Jesus was talking about something that is worth building a life upon.
Through my preaching and teaching I will share that with you, not coercively, but simply and honestly what I have learned through my limited experience. My hope is that we will help each other discover what Jesus saw and what other great visionaries saw as well. Through that we can help each other find our voices and use them for justice, for joy, for a better world.
Human beings are myth makers. Someone makes such an impact upon us that is so incredible that we don’t how to process it or to communicate it. So we make a god or a saint out of the person and worship the person rather than focusing our energies on what the person was talking about. Bob Funk and the Jesus Seminar were part of that tradition of the church that strips away the myth-making so that we might rediscover the original visionary and his vision. They said, “Let us be honest to Jesus.”
The death of Bob Funk this past week on the 20th anniversary of the Jesus Seminar ended a chapter in religious scholarship. I am not sure what will happen to Westar and the Jesus Seminar. The bigger question is what will happen to critical thinking and religious literacy in the church? How will the Christian faith shape itself in the 21st century?
That is why I think this congregation is so important. We have heard the voices of authoritarian religion. We know them all too well. This congregation is a voice for a literate and a liberating faith. I believe this congregation will be an important contributor to the emerging church. I am honored and grateful to be here, to follow a courageous visionary in the person of John Martin, and I look forward to growing with you as we continue our quest to be honest to Jesus.