[Dialogue] Spong A eulogy, and a statement of hope

[KroegerD@aol.com]

September 14, 2005 
Robert Walter Funk  1926–2005 
By the force of his will and personality, this man brought biblical  
scholarship out of the ivy-covered walls of academia and placed it on the front  pages 
of the newspapers of America. He forced the articulators of yesterday's  
biblical ignorance to recognize that the empires they were erecting on  
foundations of sand would not survive if the world took seriously his public  activity. 
Radio and television preachers resorted to ridicule. Others tried to  defend 
themselves and their claims by resorting to character assassination,  calling 
him both the devil and the anti-Christ. Despite these storms, Funk  persevered 
in his lonely but compelling task. Established old-line religious  leaders 
such as the evangelical N. T. (Tom) Wright of England and the Roman  Catholic 
Luke Timothy Johnson of Atlanta built their careers attacking his  initiatives. 
Perfuming their irrational conclusions with the odor of  respectability, Wright 
defended the literal accuracy of the details of the  biblical story and 
Johnson defended the authority of an infallible papacy. Each  reacted to Funk with 
the hysteria of a stuck and squealing pig.  
The person who wielded this power and elicited this kind of response was  
Robert Walter Funk, the founder, leader, president, and primary force behind the  
Westar Institute, and its more popularly known project "The Jesus Seminar."  
Robert Funk died early in September, and the Internet has resonated ever since 
 with expressions of appreciation and praise from colleagues and friends who  
recognized him as a giant, perhaps the giant in the Jesus movement in our 
time.  I am one of those who mourn his loss.  
My debt to Bob Funk was multifaceted. He validated my career path like few  
others. He was my colleague and my friend, a man with whom I wrestled,  
interacted, and fought, but whom I always admired. I learned from him,  appreciated 
him, and was privileged to support his powerful witness. His death  left a 
tremendous hole, as the passing of a giant always does.  
Bob Funk was born in Evansville, Indiana, where fundamentalist religion is in 
 the very air one breathes. He reflected that religion and planned a career 
in  the Christian ministry, earning his undergraduate degree from Butler 
University  in Indianapolis, and his Bachelor of Divinity degree from its seminary, 
which  was associated with the Disciples of Christ. Concentrating on New 
Testament  scholarship, he began to feel the anger that so many believers 
experience when  they discover that scholarly findings are suppressed in denominational 
training  schools in order to control the faith and allegiance of those 
churches'  adherents. Turning away from a confining pastorate, he entered academic  
pursuits, believing that in academia the search for truth would not be 
impaired  by the dictates of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. He received his Ph.D. in 
1953  from Vanderbilt University, with additional study in Bossey, Switzerland; 
 Tübingen, Germany, and Toronto. He served on the faculties of Texas 
Christian  University, 1953–56; Harvard Divinity School, 1956–57; Emory University,  
1958–59; Drew University, 1959–1966; and Vanderbilt Divinity School, 1966–69. 
He  then began what he thought would be his life's major work: building from 
the  ground up a Department of Religion at the University of Montana. That 
task  consumed his energies from 1969 to 1986, but it also produced in him a 
sense  that even the academy was not shielded from the pressure of religious  
conformity. At these various centers of higher learning, and even in the  
professional Society of Biblical Literature that he headed, he repeatedly bumped  into 
the ancient human fear that seems to demand that traditional religious  
formulas be defended even when new knowledge has rendered them inoperative. Bob  
Funk refused to live inside such boundaries or to accept such limitations. He  
seems to have agreed with my great teacher, Clifford Stanley, who was fond of  
saying, "Any God who can be killed ought to be killed." He had little patience 
 "for suffering fools," either long or gladly. These emotions finally led him 
to  spring free from all structures, ecclesiastical and academic, to found 
his own  think tank, and to pursue biblical scholarship that would be made 
available to  the general public in the marketplaces of the everyday world. First 
he founded a  publishing company, called Polebridge Press, in 1981. Next he 
gathered around  him a group of Jesus scholars from a wide variety of colleges, 
universities, and  religious traditions to join him in this new endeavor. That 
was the start of the  Jesus Seminar, which was later incorporated into an 
umbrella organization called  the Westar Institute, described as "a nonprofit 
research and educational  institute dedicated to the advancement of biblical 
literacy." None of this  received any public notice until the Jesus Seminar began 
to make waves. No one,  however, could say that he or she was not warned about 
the nature of the task to  which this group was now committed. At its 
inception, Robert Funk said, "We are  going to inquire simply, rigorously, after the 
voice of Jesus, after what he  really said." To those joining him in this quest 
he issued this clarion call:  "It is time for us scholars to quit the library 
and study and speak up!" The  Jesus Seminar, he continued, will be "for those 
who prefer facts to fantasy,  history to histrionics, science to 
superstition." Slowly but surely the findings  of this seminar began to filter into the 
public arena: Jesus never preached the  Sermon on the Mount; the story of the 
cross is the work of interpreters, not  eyewitnesses; the virgin birth, the 
physical resurrection, and the cosmic  ascension are all later additions to the 
Jesus story; Judas Iscariot, Barabbas,  Joseph the earthly father of Jesus, and 
the Joseph in whose tomb Jesus was  buried are all fictional characters. There 
were other conclusions that possessed  equal shock value for the unprepared 
public, but these will suffice to  illustrate the dynamics of this seminar. 
Biblical debate left "the academy" and  began to be part of the experience of 
laypeople. In 1993 the seminar published  all of its findings in a blockbuster of 
a book entitled The Five Gospels: The  Search for the Authentic Words of 
Jesus. While Funk was the primary editor of  this work, the Fellows of the Jesus 
Seminar were fully acknowledged. This  startling book elevated the Gospel of 
Thomas, discovered in the 1940s at an  archaeological dig in a placed called Nag 
Hammadi, into the Canon of the New  Testament and concluded that 84 percent 
of the words attributed to Jesus in the  Gospels were not actually spoken by 
him. The book further proclaimed that none  of the words of Jesus found in the 
Gospel of John were spoken by Jesus! The  uproar was predictable. Pat 
Robertson, with his perpetual smile in place, held  up a headline from a Norfolk, 
Virginia, paper that proclaimed: Jesus Had Ghost  Writers! Traditional Protestant 
and Roman Catholic theologians began to embrace  the fact that if the seminar's 
analysis of John's Gospel was sustained, then all  of the creedal development 
in the first five centuries of Christian history,  including such 
foundational Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and the  Trinity, would recede into 
unsettled waters, since it was all predicated on a  literal reading of the 
Fourth Gospel. The foundations of what came to be called  Orthodoxy were shaken, 
and that orthodoxy's inevitable collapse assured, as  these insights began 
their slow but certain journey into the wider  consciousness. Once the debate was 
engaged, other books flowed quickly from the  seminar, all bearing the Robert 
Funk imprint. Chief among them was The Acts  of Jesus: The Search for the 
Authentic Deeds of Jesus, which tested the  historicity of the things Jesus 
supposedly did.  
Then, in a burst of popular religious titles, individual members of the  
seminar, inspired both by Bob Funk and by their own feisty interaction with one  
another, began to publish such successful books that some of these authors were 
 turned into household names in the world of religion. Bob Funk's 
contributions  to that publishing boom included such titles as Honest to Jesus: Jesus for 
 the New Millennium, in 1996, and A Credible Jesus, in 2002. The  Jesus 
Seminar had clearly become part of the religious consciousness of America.   
The Westar Institute next began to supplement its national conferences, at  
which critical thinkers were introduced to the growing public, with something  
called the Jesus Seminar on the Road, which took the seminar's thinking into  
local churches across America. A body called Associates of the Jesus Seminar 
was  formed through which local clergy and active laypeople could join in the 
work of  the seminar and be supported by it when under attack by their resident 
 fundamentalists. A quarterly theological journal, The Fourth R, came  into 
being so that learned articles from seminar fellows and others could be  widely 
disseminated. The seminar also lifted out of history heroes who had  
struggled for biblical and theological relevance and honesty, and honored them  for 
both their vanguard creativity and what they suffered from the killing  
hostility that greeted their academic findings. Chief among these were David  
Friedrich Strauss, whose groundbreaking 1835 book, The Life of Jesus  Critically 
Examined, resulted in his being fired from the University of  Tübingen, and John A. 
T. Robinson, whose 1963 book, Honest to God,  effectively ended his career as 
a bishop in the Church of England.  
In a world in which people's fears are increasingly expressed through  
fundamentalist religion, and in which killing hostility in the name of God is  
regularly hurled at one's enemies, Bob Funk called Christians to a new vision of  
what this faith can mean in the twenty-first century.  
Few people have had both the ability and the energy to push the boundaries of 
 traditional religious understanding the way Bob Funk did. With the Religious 
 Right now dictating the policy of the White House and an inquisitional 
mentality  firmly established in the Vatican, the work of Robert Funk and the Jesus 
Seminar  has been a light in this new religious Dark Age. That is no small  
accomplishment. We mourn his death, but we are filled with a sense of gratitude 
 for what he accomplished. We are also resolved that the work he began will 
be  taken up by those of us that he called onto the center stage of Christian  
scholarship.  
— John Shelby Spong  
Note:
Anyone wishing to make a contribution to the work  of the Jesus Seminar in 
honor of Robert W. Funk may do so by sending it to the  Westar Institute, P.O. 
Box 7268, Santa Rosa, California 95407. All contributions  are tax deductible 
and should be marked Robert W. Funk Memorial Fund. For those  of you who might 
be giving through a charitable trust or private endowment  source, the 
tax-exempt number of the Westar Institute is 94-3181460. All  proceeds will be used 
to endow the position of the president of Westar, so that  the board might seek 
the best possible person to direct this project in the  second generation of 
its life. — JSS  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Carol Daniels from Florida writes:  
"Several years ago, I was interviewed at a pro-choice event for Republicans.  
Being well past any likelihood of pregnancy, I linked my concern about my 
right  to die with my right to decide about my fertility. Both ends of life are 
clearly  the prime battlegrounds of the "Right to Life" groups, yet they assert 
that an  embryo or a fetus and a person who cannot survive without heroic, 
indefinite  intervention are fully alive and must be saved. I said then that I 
was as  appalled at the notion that the government might decide if I should 
live or die,  just as they might decide if my daughters could have an abortion 
within the  reasonable parameters set by Roe v. Wade. People at that event 
thought I was  "stretching it."  
"Since then I have been proven tragically correct. Attorney General John  
Ashcroft has challenged Oregon on its right to death with dignity law. Abortion  
conditions continue to be eroded by the radical conservatives who seem to know 
 better than the family in question what is best. People in nursing homes 
often  have to be resuscitated at hospitals because, even with written directives 
 otherwise, the nursing home is required to send the patient to the hospital 
to  be "saved." Can you explain how it is that the Republican Party that has  
historically stood for limited government is now inserting itself into the 
most  personal of issues?"  
Dear Carol,  
Politics is always more about power than principle. You should not expect  
consistency from either party. If you go back into the 30s, the Democrats were  
in power and met the Depression with massive spending programs and rising  
deficits. Today the Republicans are in power and the Democrats are complaining  
about bigger and bigger government and massive deficits. In the days of Abraham 
 Lincoln, the Republicans were the party of civil rights and justice for 
black  Americans. Today, black Americans tend to vote about 90% Democratic. In the 
days  of Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans were the environmental champions. 
Today most  environmental groups endorse Democratic candidates. These things may 
be  ideological for some but I am convinced that they result more from the 
desire to  ride issues into political power more than anything else. That is not 
cynical so  much as it is realistic. Power is the name of the primary goal of 
politics.  
When I lived in Virginia in the fifties and sixties, the Democrats tended to  
be "States Rights, Anti-integration, Anti-Union, Conservatives." During that  
time, the best governor of that state was, in my opinion, A. Linwood Holton, 
a  Republican. As a citizen now of New Jersey, I still regard Republican 
Thomas H.  Kean as the most effective governor in the past thirty years.  
What is now going on in American politics is, I believe, a reaction to the  
fast pace of change that always creates uncertainty and fear. It has been  
building since shortly after World War II. It began with the post World War II  
massive migration of black Americans out of the south into urban America. Next  
came the morally correct, but culturally destabilizing ruling of the Supreme  
Court against segregation in 1954. This was followed by urban unrest and riots 
 in the sixties, created in part by the pressure on social systems in 
northern  cities with the arrival of black migrants who, as products of a cruel and  
dehumanizing segregation, were generally poorly trained and poorly educated.  
Next came the disillusioning war in Vietnam that we could not win, we could 
not  lose and from which we did not seem to know how to extricate ourselves. 
This was  followed by the Watergate scandal in which, for the first time in 
American  history, a sitting president was expelled from office. These forces came  
together to create great insecurity, great anxiety and great fear. It also  
caused our nation as a whole to search for leaders who reflected the values of  
our past that, by comparison, looked calm and peaceful where values were not 
in  doubt. Since it is far more difficult to articulate new values than to 
retreat  into the past, this nation turned first to 'born again' Jimmy Carter and 
later  Ronald Reagan, whose movie career projected him as the candidate of 
law and  order, American patriotism and traditional values. Gradually security 
was  restored and in 1992 America turned its presidency over to one who 
reflected the  Vietnam resistance. It was time to move on. President Bill Clinton's 
misuse of  the Oval Office for sexual escapades, however, plus the constant and 
I think  excessive investigation of him by a politically motivated Republican 
Congress  reignited the fear that values were once again under assault, 
resulting in the  narrow victory in 2000 by another voice of the past, George W. 
Bush, the son of  Reagan's vice president and successor, George W. H. Bush. The 
Bush II presidency  was then defined by the 9/11 attacks that once again cast 
the people of this  nation into a mode of fear. Fear always drives people to 
seek the security of  yesterday, a security they feel that they have lost. The 
appeal of the present  Bush administration is first to family values, which is 
code language for  anti-abortion measures and government control of sexual 
activity. The corollary  to this is the drive to protect the "sanctity of 
marriage," which is the code  language for anti-homosexual measures. So life issues 
and sexual repression  issues dominate their social agenda. They seem not to 
realize that this flies in  the face of their conservative promise to "limit 
government" or to "get the  government off the back of the people." The politics 
of fear is quite frequently  the ticket to power. The rise of a controlling 
religious mentality that seeks to  force everyone by law to abide by the 
prevailing traditional norms of behavior  is a part of that.  
What usually happens when religion becomes politically powerful and seeks to  
impose its values on the whole body politic is that, drunk with a new sense 
of  importance, it ultimately overreaches its mandate and people begin to feel  
threatened by the imposition of a narrowly defined religious power. The 
passion  that surrounded the Terri Schiavo case, the president's dramatic flight to 
 Washington to sign the emergency measure rushed through Congress at midnight 
to  "save this woman's life," Republican Majority leader Tom Delay's 
subsequent  attack on the Judiciary, the whole drama being orchestrated from Florida 
by  Governor Jeb Bush, and Republican Senate Leader Bill Frist's suggestion 
that by  not passing every judge nominated by the President, the political 
opposition  party was attacking religion, even hinting that Democratic opposition to 
these  potential judges was based on the fact that the nominees were 
"Evangelical  Christians," has all the marks of a major over-stepping of the 
boundaries of  religious power. People respond quite negatively to any attempt to 
coerce  conformity. A Democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the height of 
his  post depression popularity, tried to pack the Supreme Court and was 
rebuffed by  an aroused public. That is clearly happening once again today even 
though the  political shoe is on the other foot. The practice of politics is always 
about  power more than principle and this nation is strong enough and wise 
enough never  to let any group or any person get too much power. So, relax and 
let history  play itself out. It will.  
— John Shelby Spong  
 
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