Searching for God # 90

 Many of the pieces in this space have been alluding to, arguing for, advocating for and trumpeting the difference between literalism and myth, imagination, and symbol, especially as the theme has to do with both psychology and theology.

In his book, Honest to Jesus (1996), Robert Funk, Founder of the Jesus Seminar, writes:

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 least 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 for 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 reefers t 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 knowledge has not been disseminated much beyond the university classroom, so we go on confusing the two categories. Se 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 termid the ‘imaginative illiterate.’ This product of the ascendancy of the empirical sciences, who can understand things only literally, dominates both high and naïve levels of culture. It doesn’t seem to matter that the literalist understand the term literal in different senses on different occasions. At times, take ‘literal’ to mean the descriptive, true-to-fact assertions; at other times, he or she understands the ‘literal’ to mean the conventional, what everybody takes for granted.  (pps. 51-52)

Professor Funk, after many years in academic, founded the Jesus Seminar and the  Westar Institute in Santa Rosa California in 1985 to promote research and education on what he called biblical literacy. Among the Jesus Seminar’s assertions was that many of the miracles attributed to Jesus never occurred, at least in a literal sense. Nor, the Jesus Seminar concluded in 1995, did Jesus rise bodily from the dead. The scholars also agreed that there probably was no tomb and that Jesus’ body was disposed of by his executioners, not his followers. But scholars- who included Burton Mack, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan (and John Kloppenberg)—also concluded that the religious significance of Jesus’ resurrection did not depend on historical fact. (Los Angeles Times, Robert Funk, 79, Scholar Questioned Miracles of Jesus, by Larry Stammer, September 7, 2005)

Much of today’s religious ‘verbiage’ spews from the mouths of literalists, fundamentalists, and the opening statement from Professor Funk that Inerrancy and infallibility are the offspring of literalism, helps to explain why there is so much heat and so little light in religious talk.

Because stories are included in scripture does not mean that they are historical or literally true; nevertheless, their significance may, and likely does, exceed that minimally ‘contained’ in the literal.

The rhetoric of Jesus, among the chosen literary devices, includes the parable. Again, today, we are not familiar or even formally introduced into the parable as a literary form. Professor Funk writes this in his introduction to the explication and exegesis of the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’:

In the beginning was the parable. The parable, for Jesus, was a window on the world; through that window Jesus looked out on familiar scenes—a harvest of grapes, dinner parties, mustard growing in a field, a woman baking bread—and saw these common realities in an entirely new light. For him the logic of life had been radically revised. Jesus’ parables and aphorisms are doors opening on to an alternate construal of reality. The vista through these doors takes one back to the dawn of time, to chaos giving way to order. Parable is genesis. Parable is creation.

Jesus names this new logic God’s imperial rule, or, in traditional language, the kingdom of God. In that realm, in God’s domain, people and things do not behave in expected ways. In Jesus’ imagined world, normal, everyday expectations are regularly frustrated. (Funk, op. cit, p.165)

The business of attempting to offer ministry to a Christian congregation, in a Christian mainline church, in the 21^st century, is replete with the confluence, and convergence and tensions that inevitably arise even with a single use of a specific word from scripture. Its literal meaning, whether or not it is a naming of an historical event, whether it is a part of an aphorism, a parable, or some other literary device, its ‘reputed author or speaker….etc…..

And yet, the general attention span, along with the individual’s experience in some far off English language class, his or her openness and curiosity as to the relevant and potential exegesis of both the word and the context…all of these factors taken together in a gestalt, generally, if not invariably, result in a glib, superficial and somewhat predictable repetition of what has been established as conventional, if reductionistic, interpretation.

A more complex and more compelling reading of the texts, however, as Funk writes, remains ‘secret’ and out of reach of the parishioner in most churches. And the predictable deferral to the literal, empirical, for so many reasons, takes over.

Funk goes even further:

Clergy have decided that what they learned in seminary is a secret to be kept. Under duress of 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.,,,(T)here 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 thought there were only one and they seem to assume that the 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. (Funk, op. cit. pps. 53-54)

My decades of seminary and ministry, some decade and a half, rarely included formal or informal discussions about the interpretation of scripture, among clergy, and only briefly and superficially among laity. Once, in an attempt to delve into this area with laity, I heard one parishioner remark, “Of course the Resurrection never happened!” She made the remark as she was departing out the door.

Today, I wonder, if I would attempt to ask her to pause, have a seat and begin to unpack the differences between an historical event, a myth, and an event to be repeated again and again in a Christian imagination. The political answer to that dilemma is different from the theological and spiritual answer to that dilemma, and it is not only the cleric’s discernment of the context, but also the lay person’s readiness and openness for exploration.