Searching for God # 114

 Continuing with the Robert Funk/Jesus Seminar revision of some of the foundational precepts and dogmas that have undergirded what has become known and practiced for two centuries, (after a need for an internal, and not an external redeemer/savior)…..

Only this time, let’s explore an ever more penetrating and potentially insurmountable couple of doctrines/beliefs of what Funk considers to be intimately linked propositions:

The doctrine of the blood atonement and the immaculate conception.

Funk:

We need to abandon the doctrine of the blood atonement. The atonement in appeased by blood sacrifices. Jesus never expressed the view that God was bolding humanity hostage until someone paid the bill. Nor did Amos, Hosea, or other prophets of Israel. In addition, it is the lynchpin that holds the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and the sinless life, together in a unified but naïve package: God required a perfect sacrifice, so only a divine victim would do.

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 than 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. The gods frequently consorted with human beings in Greek and Roman mythology and gave birth to heroes and heroines. Within the limits of romantic folklore, the virgin birth of Jesus is an intriguing tale- not particularly well suited to adolescent Mary and baby Jesus, perhaps, but delightful: as a piece of literalized theology, it is contemptible. In any case, the virgin birth becomes an extraneous doctrine once the need for an unblemished sacrifice, for a blood atonement, is abandoned.

Augustine’s notion that the consequences of Adam’s sin is transmuted through male sperm is one of the great tragedies of theological history. He should be labelled 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 implication 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. (Robert Funk: Honest to Jesus, pps. 312-313, 314)

The audacity and the frankness and the sheer unambiguous clarity and conviction with which Funk details his challenges to the traditional theology that has both embraced and gripped the Christian church for centuries is unmistakable. How, when and where does one attempt to introduce Funk’s ‘revisioning’ theses in a world in which the Christian church is documenting a tsunami of departures, save and except the Roman Catholic church in North America and in Europe and the conservative, fundamental churches in Africa.

Nevertheless, from a personal, lay perspective, it has always seemed both absurd and inconceivable that God would need, even desire and certainly not depend upon a kind of perfectionism, an adherence to some behaviour code that, as we all knew, had to be the product of some human mind or minds. The grasp and propagation of a strict moral code, as evidence of the “purity” that God expects, for me was shattered at sixteen in that proverbial homily condemning all Roman Catholics to Hell, along with any who drank wine, used make-up, attended movies and dances, and prepared meals on Sunday. I dubbed that ‘bull-shit’ in grade twelve, and refused to ever attend another of that clergy’s services again.

Introducing the concept of ‘myth’ as a lens through which to view the Garden of Eden story, to a rural parish in Ontario brought forth venom and hatred and contempt as even the word ‘myth’ used to describe the narrative was heresy. A common-sense question, ‘Who was there to document the story?’ seemed sufficient to warrant a ‘myth’ attribution. And of course, that is only one of the many ‘myths’ on which the Christian faith has been constructed. Nevertheless, it is not merely a language ‘deficit’ that provokes anger and contempt when the word ‘myth’ is linked to a biblical story. The fact that ‘myth’ is not historical fact, but rather something that occurs repeatedly, irrespective of its literal, empirical context, ought not to be considered apostasy to a biblical story, rather than an enhancement of the story. Mystery, after all, is far more complex, nuanced, subtle and mysteriously evocative of wonder, than any literal, factual, empirical account of an event. And any words deployed to talk about God have to be mined in and through the imagination, and not tied exclusively to a rational, scientific and empirical data point.

Indeed, that basic point, that from a linguistic as well as a theological perspective, myth has an honoured status, may play a significant role in the misunderstanding of many, when such ‘theses’ as those proposed by Professor Funk are highlighted. Blood atonement sacrifices, too, another inheritance from a very primal world, seem to have served and passed their theological ‘past due date’. And as for a God, who purportedly and as generally accepted, has created humans in his own image, (image dei) to be tied to an exclusively ‘ascetic, and puritanical and perfectionistic’ attitude to human sexuality, exclusively for the purpose of procreation, is a reductionism beyond comprehension, even for a lay and unschooled mind such as this scribe’s. Augustine’s paranoia is writ large in indelible ink all over that puritanism.

The virgin birth, linked from Funk’s perspective to the blood atonement and the perfect and pure and divine life that God expects, also qualifies as a highly constricting, even life-supressing and spirit-demoralizing militarized expectation that arrives, at least in part, as congruent with an institutional need for control.

Indeed, as we continue to probe Funk’s analysis of the ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ we learn more and more that his (Jesus’) perceptions, attitudes, parables and sayings are far more ambivalent, paradoxical and open-ended, than the institutional church has held them to be for centuries.

Funk is clear about these more general observations:

In articulating the vision of Jesus, we should take care to express our interpretations in the same register as he employed in his parables and aphorisms. Jesus quite deliberately articulated an open-ended, nonexplicit vision in his parables and aphorisms. He did not prescribe behavior or endorse specific religious practices. He was never programmatic in his pronouncements. His followers had and have the obligation to transmit his tradition in the same key. It is perfectly acceptable to specify what his pronouncements may mean for our time and place, but it is not commensurate with his vision to chisel the in stone. Our interpretation of parables should be more parables- polyvalent, enigmatic, humorous, and non-prescriptive. Yet we are invited by his example to be equally bold and innovative…..To accept Jesus’ sense of the real naively is also a potential mistake. Just as Jesus challenged the immense solidity of his everyday world, we, too, must discover for ourselves in what respects our habituated sense of reality is illusory. In considering Jesus’ glimpse of God’s domain, we must test his perceptions of the real by our own extended and controlled observations on the world. We need not and should not place blind faith in what Jesus trusted. Our tenet of the new creed for the post-Christian age is that nothing is protected, nothing is off limits.

Funk’s challenge to each of us, whomever chooses to open his Honest to Jesus, or who seeks to probe the writings of the Jesus Seminar, provides ample opportunity to reflect on how ‘illusory’ and unsubstantial is our glimpse of our own reality and how our theology may have been (or perhaps truly has been) captured in and by tenets that neither pay homage to God nor even reflect what God might expect of the wonder of his creation….the human species!

The dynamic of our evolving perceptions, truths, beliefs and convictions may itself readily not only tolerate but actually embrace the challenge of our unleashing our imagination, perhaps in the tradition of one such as William Blake and his ‘separation of the genders’ as his interpretation of the Fall.