In March I attended the Westar Institute’s annual spring scholar’s conference in Santa Rosa. Since I’ve been back several people have asked me what it was about. Westar is the continuation of the Jesus Seminars, a colloquium of theologians and Biblical scholars envisioned by Bob Funk and several other historians and scholars involved in the demythologizing higher criticism movements of the mid 20th century. It was institutionalized in the late 1970’s as the Westar Institute, and has gone beyond applying higher criticism to the words of and narratives about Jesus to consider large and small issues that arise from our lack of coherent historical sources for the times of Jesus, before and after he was made into the Christ, and the first millennium Christian movement.
This spring we heard papers and had discussions about different conceptions of early centuries’ views of sovereignty, attempts to describe accurately the extent and interpretation of martyrdom during the time of Jesus and for a few centuries after his death, a consideration of the social uses of gladiators and martyrs as icons in the arenas, as well as the continuation of the seminar on God and the Human Future. In the latter we heard Jack Caputo on the weakness of God and the Insistence of God, and the newer theology that is developing from the consideration of the changes in theological and philosophical conceptions about meaning and language after Tillich and the recent European works of Christian and Jewish thinkers, often represented by Jacques Derrida. Jack, after a couple glasses of wine, is delightful.
I look forward to the intellectual and, dare I say, spiritual stimulation of these discussions. The papers on the extent and effect of martyrdom raised my awareness of how much we Christians have disparaged our sources in Hebrew and Jewish culture, painting ourselves as white as Greek sculpture. That led to wondering about our ethnocentrism and its relation to the paranoia and fears that underlie our racist self-elevations, enabling us to, without much conscience, to decry all the Christian churches that are bombed (even the Black ones burned down for white Christianity) while overlooking all the bombing we do under the guise of anti- ISISism. And how can we get away with any vestige of moral honor by believing in a god who is all-powerful but who allows evil to continue to plague the earth? The idea of a weak god, one who ‘perhaps’ does not exist, as if our belief one way or the other mattered to any god worthy of my worship. Caputo suggests that maybe god does not exist, maybe god insists, and therefore it is up to us to work for our own group salvation, not leaving it up to an all-powerful being. We are in the image of such a god, maybe not so much a heroic warrior as a homeless whore strung out on the lack of social and medical supports that our for profit health care system imposes. With whom shall I commune?
It saddens me that such intellectual discussion does not often happen. Most often , when I say that I have attended discussions of the Jesus Seminar, the response is a disheartening and ignorant dismissal. “Oh, those are the people who vote on what Jesus said!” The response ignores any honest and sensible awareness of what actually happens. The participants, after several years of research and scholarly discussions of the issues, distill several questions to consider and ask of some three hundred academics and laity their opinions, ranked on a four point scale: Red = it is definitely that way; pink = it could be that way and probably (historically, linguistically, and scientifically) was so; gray = it is possible but not probable; and black = no way! This ranking is not a vote, but a way to judge the cogency of the discussion and ideas: is there wide variance of opinion, and to what extent do informed people think something is so?
What better way is there? Do we let a select and limited group of special interests decide? Or maybe our rulers and their minions? Are we generating ideas and arguments to bolster understanding or to increase our orthodox investment in the institution and our salaries? Should we all participate in the discussion of values or should we leave it up to a chosen few?
Finally, has a belief, or dogma, about an omnipotent, all-good god so compacted our thinking that we have to have something held up as ‘The Truth’, so that we can affix our imprimatur to it (Do you believe?) with no bother, or shall we continue in the stirring of our dis-belief looking for the pragmatic manifestation of a loving and neighborly, hospitable program that leads all of us, organic or inorganic, to an outcome consistent with God’s perhaps insistence, adding our power to submit and act to those who are also responding to God’s perhaps call, no matter how weak or discordantly melodic?
