[Dialogue] Spong A eulogy, and a statement of hope
David Rebstock
grapevin at earthlink.net
Thu Sep 15 14:20:55 EDT 2005
As this eulogy implies Jack Spong and Robert Funk were very close. Bob
once said that when he retired Jack turned much of his training material
over to Westar. Several of the EI Colleagues have attended the last five
or six Jesus Seminars in Santa Rosa, New York and in the Jesus Seminar on
the Road in Cinncinati. In the seminars as an Associate you get to hear the
Seminar here fellows (biblical scholars) discuss and evaluate sections of
the New Testament and you get to ask questions at the end of each session.
In additions there have been presentations by Jack Spong, Karen Armstrong,
Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, Lloyd Goering, Jim Carroll, Karen King (the
Gospel of Mary) and many others from accross the world. Recently, in the
last three seminars they have opened it up to presentations by leaders
from progressive churches that are incorporating the historical Jesus in
their congregations and they have formed a Pastor Leaders group that meets
at each seminar to share new ideas re Progressive Christianity. Again this
includes people from not only the US but Canada, the UK, Austrailia, New
Zealand and others.
Every spring Bob Funk held Thursday night meetings in Santa Rosa with about
20 people that live in the area. One night we discussed the Ecumenical
Institute (He was concerned with why and how EI went out of being as he was
faced with what would happen to Westar when he passed away. I assured that
EI did not go out of being but that it just took on another form). I asked
him what theologians influenced him the most in starting Westar and the
Jesus Seminar. He immediately rattled off Bultman, Tillich, Bonhoeffer,
and Neibur pretty much in that order. He also commented that he thought
that Joseph Mathews was way ahead of his time.
The Jesus Seminar will go on. The next one is October 19-22. You can see
what it includes this time on the internet at westarinstitute.org. If
anyone on the list serve is interested in coming to it let me know and we
can find you a place to stay with freinds.
Dave Rebstock
> [Original Message]
> From: <KroegerD at aol.com>
> To: <MICAH6-8 at topica.com>
> Cc: <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
> Date: 9/14/2005 6:45:11 PM
> Subject: [Dialogue] Spong A eulogy, and a statement of hope
>
>
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
____________________________________
____________________________________
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
_______________________________________________
Dialogue mailing list
Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
More information about the Dialogue
mailing list