Hundreds of millions of Christians will celebrate the
resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. And after a century
and a half of liberal Protestant attempts to redefine the
resurrection into merely a metaphor, the vast majority of
Christians still believe that Christ’s body physically arose.
Revisionist theologians still find airtime on the History Channel
or PBS, but their project never gained a mass following. Even most
secular media coverage about religion today focuses largely on
orthodox expressions of Roman Catholicism or evangelical
Protestantism. Whatever their own beliefs, most reporters and
pundits intuit that rationalist liberal theology does not command a
lot of adherents.
The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over
which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always
excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention
for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief.
“Christ’s Body Actually Eaten by Wild Dogs!” was a typical headline
from a Jesus Seminar gathering, where liberal scholars would vote
with color marbles over which biblical verses were valid.
Eventually these self-selected academics ran out of incendiary
claims, and the media mostly stopped heeding their pronouncements
after founder Robert Funk died in 2005, if not well before.
Co-founder and former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crosson,
now about 76 years old, still soldiers on. He and other kindred
academics routinely speak around the nation, gathering usually
small audiences of gray-headed, mostly retired clergy. Of course,
the Jesus Seminar skeptics insist notions about a divine Jesus
being born of a virgin or rising from the dead were self-servingly
and dogmatically imposed by the later church. They themselves
typically and dogmatically assert Christianity’s unqualified
support for a redistributive welfare state, sexual liberation, and
opposition to the American “empire.”
Another aging survivor of the Jesus Seminar is nearly 80
year old retired Episcopal Church Bishop John Shelby Spong, though
his fame preceded his induction. In the 1980s and 1990s, while
Bishop of Newark, Spong penned books speculating that the Virgin
Mary was a prostitute impregnated by a Roman soldier, and that St.
Paul was a self-hating homosexual, among other saucy assertions
that once gained headlines but now excite yawns. He earned
audiences with Phil Donahue and other breathless talk show hosts,
most of whom are now themselves faded from view. Spong always
claimed that “fundamentalist,” i.e. orthodox Christianity, was
dying, and he was its savior. That his New Jersey diocese lost 40
percent of its members while he was providing enlightened
leadership as bishop never seemed to provoke self-reflection. One
bemused observer who recently went to hear him speak at a New
Jersey college campus remarked he was able
to locate the event by following the trail of “old people.” Liberal
revisionism was always mainly the project of upper middle class,
white Mainline Protestants, with advanced degrees and a certain
disdain for the ostensibly superstitious masses who heed a more
literal version of Christianity. The evangelical mega-churches of
today’s America, not to mention the surging faith of Global South
Christianity, especially in Africa, usually befuddle and irritate
this audience, most of whom are now long retired.
Spong still runs a website for airing his revisionist
prognostications, charging $9.95 every three months for
subscribers. He tut-tuts about the “fundamentalists” who still
believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus and concludes that
“something of enormous power gripped the disciples following the
crucifixion that transformed their lives.” But it was “some fifty
years before that transforming experience was interpreted as the
resuscitation of a three days dead Jesus to the life of the world.”
About a decade ago, Spong rejected “theism,” i.e., belief in a
personal God, which was the logical outcome of his
ultra-rationalist rejection of everything supernatural. His website
makes for grim reading, especially on Easter and
Christmas.
Another Jesus Seminar scholar with a little longer
shelf-life is Marcus Borg, who, at about age 68, represents the
seminar’s virtual youth wing. In some contrast to Spong’s hyper
Enlightenment faith in reason and science, Borg is more postmodern
and mystical, open to the possibility of miracles and even an
afterlife. He describes himself as a panentheist who believes that
everything is a part of God, unlike strict pantheism, which asserts
everything is God. Despite his mostly rejection of absolute truth,
he is still adamant that Christian orthodoxy must be wrong, and
that Jesus did not literally rise from the dead. He is open to
“visions” and “numinous” experiences with Jesus. Recently Borg
wrote: “The central meaning of Easter is not about whether
something happened to the corpse of Jesus. Its central meanings are
that Jesus continues to be known and that he is Lord. The tomb
couldn’t hold him. He’s loose in the world. He’s still here. He’s
still recruiting for the kingdom of God.” An Episcopalian, Borg
often understands God’s Kingdom to be about advocacy of
left-leaning political projects.
A friendly debating partner to Borg is Church of England
Bishop and scholar N. T. Wright, who affirms the orthodox
understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. In his book The
Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright wrote: “No wonder the
Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and
modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual
resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the
real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies
(including the intellectual tyrants and bullies) try to rule by
force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash
all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their
greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all
omnipotent.”
These “intellectual tyrants” were long ascendant in
liberal Protestant academia for over a century. Despite their
decades of turgid exertions, the fully resurrected Jesus remains as
captivating as ever. Happy Easter!
