Searching for God # 104

 More of Robert Funk’s more than moderate, less than revolutionary thoughts and insights and recommendations for Christian practice.

He opens his discussion with these words that will come as a shock to many and as music to others, including this scribe:

Jesus was a social deviant. It is helpful to remember that. If Jesus was a social deviant, social deviancy may not be all bad. Recommending it is a king of imitatio christi but with a different twist. In Jesus’ company, rebels are welcome.

Jesus kept an open table. Jesus ate promiscuously with sinners toll collectors, prostitutes, lepers and other social misfits and quranantined people during his life. …We have to ask, would Jesus have condoned…..a table open only to self-authenticating believers? Should we reconceive the scope of eating together in Christian communities, as well as the function of the eucharist.?

Jesus made forgiveness reciprocal. Jesus tells the paralytic the blind, the adultress that they are forgiven, without exacting penalties or promises from then. Jesus forgives because his Father forgives and on the same terms: without penalty or promise. The only requirement is reciprocity: one is forgiven to the extent that one forgives…..By acknowledging that forgiveness is in the hands of the human agents, Jesus precludes the possibility of vesting that matter in the hands of priests or clerics or even God. The power to forgive has already been conferred upon those who themselves need and want forgiveness. Human beings can have only what they freely give away.

Jesus condemned the public practice of piety. Jesus makes sport of displays of piety. He regards religious posturing as hypocritical….He suggests that prayer is best conducted in the privacy of one’s closet…..Piety should be practiced out of earshot of one’s own voice.

Jesus advocated an unbrokered relationship with God. Jesus insisted that everyone has immediate and particular access to God….. The inauguration of a priesthood and clergy therefore appears to be inimical to Jesus’ wishes. The Jesus Seminar concluded, on the basis of the evidence, that, while Jesus enjoyed good companionship, he did not deliberately collect disciples among them…..(T)he canonical gospels endeavor to authenticate the leadership of the church then in power. The authentic words of Jesus reject the notion of privileged position among his followers: the first will be last and the last first; those who aspire to be leaders should become slaves of all.

Jesus robs his followers of Christian ‘privilege.’ As John Dominic Crossan so pointedly puts it, Jesus robs humankind of all protections and privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories. His Father is no respecter of persons…..What is the basis for one denomination to claim superiority over another? Is there are basis in Jesus’ views for one individual to think that he or she has a favored position in God’s eyes?

Jesus makes clear that all rewards and punishments are intrinsic. According to Jesus, reward is integral to the activity for which it is a reward. The reward for loving one’s neighbor is an unqualified relation to that neighbor. However,  the church developed a doctrine of extrinsic rewards and sanctions to undergird its power and authority. If love is its own reward, why should human beings be rewarded for loving? Do not the pagans---those who have no such special incentive to love—do as much?...According to popular orthodoxy, we are promised eternal life following bodily resurrection for believing the right things, for being theologically correct. How can that promise be anything other than self-serving? A version of Christianity that takes its cues from Jesus cannot be preoccupied with rewards and punishments.

We will have to abandon the doctrine of the blood atonement.  The atonement in popular piety I based on a mythology that is no longer credible—that God is appeased by blood sacrifices. Jesus never expressed the view that God was holding humanity hostage until someone paid the bill. Nor did Amos, Hosea, or other prophets of Israel. In addition it is the linchpin that holds the divinity of Jesus, his virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and a sinless life together in a unified but naïve package: God required a perfect sacrifice, so only a divine victim would do.

We will need to interpret the reports of the resurrection for what they are: our glimpse of what Jesus glimpsed. The reports of Jesus’ appearances to certain followers function in the gospels and letters as commissioning stories. They endow certain leaders with authority and position—authority to proclaim the gospel as they understood it and the position of reliable dan exclusive witnesses to the resurrection. These circular credentials exclude subsequent and independent claims to the same or similar vision and to authority. The appearance stories, consequently, are fundamentally self-serving….The reports of appearances of the risen Jesus to his followers, however, are a belated and oblique recognition of the vision Jesus had of God’s dominion over creation. They are a diluted and not altogether satisfactory glimpse of what Jesus glimpsed.

Redeem sex and Mary, Jesus mother, by restoring to Jesus a biological if not actual father. Virginity is not necessarily godly, except in an ascetic, pleasure-denying, dualistic world. And Jesus is not necessarily a more effective savior for having been born without a father. Celebrate all aspects of life by giving Mary her rights as a woman, even if it means acknowledging that Jesus may have been a bastard. A bastard messiah is a more evocative redeemer figure that an unblemished lamb of God. The virgin birth, in the light of other miraculous birth stories in the ancient world, is a mythical way to account for an unusual life…..Augustine’s notion that the consequences of Adam’s sin is transmitted through male sperm is one of the great tragedies of theological history. He should be labeled as misguided and Manichean for his views. Furthermore, we should blow the whistle on the Roman curia for its ascetic proclivities—the self-justifying inclination to condemn sex for all purposes other than conception. Mary’s plight is thereby linked to a celibate priesthood on the grounds that abstinence is godly and that sex is dirty, aside from necessary multiplication of the race, especially in Catholic countries. In Genesis, the Lord did not order human beings to multiply and destroy the earth.

The anti-abortion movement, sponsored by both Catholic and Protestants pretends that it is solely concerned with the sacredness of life, a concern contradicted by its parallel endorsement of capital punishment. In fact, the so-called prolife people are driven by a fundamental disdain for the sex act if its intent is not to produce children. In the absence of such intent, sinners who indulge and conceive accidentally should be forced to pay the price of parenting unwanted progeny. Criminalizing abortion is a way of enforcing Puritanical sexual codes. We must divorce the abortion issue from the concept of sex as sin. We should endorse responsible, protected, recreational sex between consenting adults.

Exorcise the apocalyptic elements from Christianity. Apocalypticism is world-denying and vindictive. The apocalypse is a protest against injustice in this life, which is what makes it appealing. But it is ethically crippling because the apocalyptic mind looks for rectification in another world, rather than seeking justice in this one. In addition, the apocalyptic vision anticipates that those of us who have suffered in this life will be freed from pain in some future existence. That seems unobjectionable. But apocalypse adds that those who have prospered here, and especially those who have harmed us, will suffer in the hereafter. Those who advocate the apocalyptic solution are seeking vindication for their mistreatment in this life and punishment for someone else’s unmerited favor. The desire to reward and punish in the next world is self-serving in its most crass, pathetic form. It is unworthy of the Galilean who asked nothing gor himself, beyond the simplest needs.

Declare the New Testament a highly uneven and biased record of various early attempts to invent Christianity. Reopen the question of what documents belong among the founding witnesses….Eliminate the less deserving parts.

These are my twenty-one theses. If I had a church, I would scotch tape them to the door. (Funk, Honest To Jesus, pps.310-314)

Editor’s note:

If I too were engaged in active ecclesial ministry, I too would duck-tape these theses to the front door, to the door of the church hall, to the door of the choir loft, and to the back of each and every Bible resting in the pews. And I would publish then at least quarterly, and hold at least semi-annual workshops on their significance, and the degree to which we (together) were embodying their spirit…and also seeking new visions that are congruous with these theses.