Searching for God # 120

 After portraying Jesus of Nazareth as a human sage, joining the general, and somewhat controversial skepticism about his ‘divinity’ that was shared by his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk then proceeds to offer an explication under the subtitle to a chapter entitled ‘The Divine Child,’ this section entitled, ‘How Jesus Became God’. 

The important inference here is that the Jesus of Nazareth, while special, wise beyond his years, never proclaimed to be divine, the Son of God. Indeed, the work of the ‘Seminar’ holds to the proposition that the Christianity we have been taught and have participated in propagating (as clergy, parents, teachers and parishioners) begins to form its founding tenets only after the death and resurrection. 

While many have and will continue to question that premise, the process Funk details under the rubric ‘reverse Christology,’* is both arresting and challenging. (*Christology is the study of how the person and work of Jesus as the messiah, as the Christ, is to be interpreted.) 

Under the guide, Stage One, Funk writes: 

Since Jesus had not acted as the expected messiah during his life, they (his followers) came to believe that he had been designated son of Adam at his death and would return soon to fulfil his promise. This view, perhaps the earliest Christian affirmation, has been described as an ‘exhalation christology’--as an evaluation of Jeus that assigns him the role of son of Adam at his death and resurrection. Some scholars have isolated an early formulation of this view in the opening of Paul’s letter to the Romans, written in the sixties C.E. 

Christ Jesus, God’s son, descended form David, appointed son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead. 

In this view, Jesus became, or was elevated to, son of God by virtue of his resurrection. 

Reverse Christology: Stage Two 

(His followers) had already collected some of his teachings into a preliminary gospel, the Sayings Gospel Q, which they had framed with the dire warnings of John at one end and with the forecast of a final judgement, with themselves in the role of judges, at the other end. Now they started to fashion another version of his story in which he was designated son of God, not at his resurrection but at his baptism (this is known as ‘adoptionist christology)....This version has survived as the Gospel of Mark. In the opening scene, Mark depicts Jesus coming up out of the water on John’s baptism: 

He saw skies torn open and the spirit coming down toward him like a dove. There was also a voice from the skies: ‘You are my favored son—I fully approve of you. 

Reverse Christology: Stage Three 

The next step in this reverse enhancement of the role of Jesus was to come with the gospel of Matthew and Luke (following the gospel of Mark in the decade of the seventies C.E.) By the end of the century, they had moved the messianic status of Jesus back to his birth. This step was taken in conjunction with the outline of conventional hellenistic biographies of famous people. It was the merger of two interests that led to the creation of infancy narratives. One interest was the desire to push Jesus messianic status back farther and farther into the past to make it all the more credible. A second interest was to account for his unusual life and his noble death in terms that enhanced his comparison with other famous people. Each of their noble lives, according to reports, had been preceded by an unusual birth and infancy, so Jesus birth and life must also have been portentous. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, pps.280-281) 

Funk continues to elaborate this ‘theme’ of reverse christology. 

Christ as Icon 

Reverse Christology: Stage Four 

The fourth stage in the chronology of christology is presented in the New Testament by the prologue to the Gospel of John and by the christ hymn in Philippians.....In the Christ hymn quote by Pauolin Philippians, Jesus is said to be divine by nature. However, he did not cling to his status as a divinity but took the role of servant, assumed the appearance of a mortal, and even succumbed to death. As vindication, God raised Jesus up and gave him the title Lord, a title that was later modulated into Pantocrator, ruler of all. It is understandable that the bishops gathered at Nicea in 325 c.e. insisted on the full equality of Christ with the Father: anything less would have put him on a par with other royal figures who boast of one divine parent. Jesus the Christ had to be made coequal with God for political if not for theological reasons. In that process, the iconoclast was transformed into the icon. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.294-295) 

*Christology is the study of how the person and work of Jesus as the messiah, as the Christ, is to be interpreted. 

Another religious scholar and prolific writer, Karen Armstrong, in his tome entitled, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, writes this about the process of reverse Christology outlined by Funk: 

It seems that after the crucifixion, Jesus followers experienced visions in which they saw him standing, like Enoch, beside God’s Throne. These visions inspired an ekstasis which they felt to be an outpouring of the Spirit of God. From a very early date, Christians turned to a cluster of texts that seemed to predict Jesus’ extraordinary exaltation Two came from psalms originally performed during the coronation of a new king: ‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ The other proclaimed the new kingdom’s adoption by Yahweh: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father. His disciples remembered that Jesus had often described himself as the ‘son of man,’ which recalled Psalm 8, in which the wonders of creation inspired the psalmist to ask why God should have raised a ‘son of man’--a mere human being—to the eminence that, as they had seen with their own eyes, Jesus now enjoyed: 

          ....you have made hum little less than a god, 

         you crowned him with glory and splendour, 

         made him lord over the work of tour hands 

         set all things under his feet. (Psalm 8:5-6) ... 

The first Chrsitians believed they were living in the last days before Jesus returned to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, and that the ekstasis they experienced had been foretold by the prophet Joel: 

        I (Yahweh) will pour out my spirit on all mankind. You sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old mn dream dreams, and your young men see visions. Even on your slaves, men and women, I will pour out my spirit in these days. (Joel 2:28-29)           (Armstrong, p. 218-219) 

For many this portrayal of the evolution of the divinity of Jesus into the icon of Christ will be considered heretical. It will be a total denial and rebellion against the traditional theology which the Christian church as taught, indoctrinated and effectively ‘believed’ and practiced. The divinity of Jesus has been the debated, rejected, mythologized and as one who grew up on the traditional, Sunday School stories of the birth, life, death and resurrection, to find so many different sources, interpretations and shifts in perceptions, (example the transformation of Jesus into the messiah above) evokes a question: Does this evidence, exegesis, interpretation and its implications foreshadow a termination of the Christian faith? 

One of the cogent arguments, a very new and first-time exposure to its potential for this scribe, is that Jesus was delivering his ‘parables, sayings, aphorisms’ as he was hearing them, rather than as the pontificator or originator of those images. Here is Funk on that point: 

Jesus’ functions as the Christ were assigned to him by his admirers in the first few centuries. But the real vocation of Jesus was assigned to him by his vision. Jesus told his parables as though he were hearing them. He was not so much calling on God as God was calling on him. He was not making claims; he was being claimed. We know what it means to invoke something, or to revoke it, or to convoke a group. But we lack the simple form: voke. It is available in Latin: vocare, to call, which is translated as vox, voice. Jesus was ‘voked,’ called. To be called means to receive a vocation, a calling. Vocation is the noun that goes with the verb voke. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 309) 

To begin to re-think, to re-imagine a faith based not on the adulation and ‘marketing’ that would come naturally to his post-resurrection followers, even if the documents that provide evidence of their thoughts, perceptions and recollections are decades later, is for many a rejection of what they have believed throughout their whole lives. And they are simply not prepared even to entertain the proposition. For others, a faith that encapsulates the life, teachings, and rebellious social deviance of Jesus, as the fellows of the Jesus Seminar found him to be is, in a word, refreshing. Rather than a faith based on the judgements of moralizers and moralizing, ostensible for the purpose of securing and maintaining ecclesial control of and for the institution, we might actually find an authentic model of a pure-spirited, humble, prophetic, authentic distributor of a vision that was received from God. And while the man Jesus never wished or aspired to be worshipped, and focused on God as the object of our intention and loyalty, the model of his life on earth, not exclusively dependent and reconstructed on the ekstasis following the death and resurrection, might enable and guide and even inspire a very different way of being a Christian. 

As Funk repeats, nothing is even beyond question, review, and re-visioning and reinvention, including what has been taken as ‘holy writ’ for centuries.