MetaCatholic

Coming back from a few days away, I note several posts that seem to me worth considering together.

First Mark Goodacre and then April DeConick comment on approaches to biblical study in an academic context. Mark talks about engaging students in an initial discussion of presuppositions, and the nature of the course. April DeConick suggests signing students up to an overt recognition of the historical study of the texts as standing free from any issues of faith. I find myself wondering whether students are able intelligently to sign up to such a declaration without something like the discussion Mark envisages.

There are some who claim the mantle of a critical approach when their views are, in fact, anything but critical, but instead a kind of liberal fundamentalism. Ben Myers offers a splendid demolition of John Shelby Spong who is a walking demonstration of Tyrell’s observation that liberal Protestants see but their own reflection when they uncover the historical Jesus. Such “critical” views in fact make it harder for students to appreciate the virtues of critical methods.

Then there is what one may call the “hard case.” Mike Bird quotes from a lecture by John Webster.

“The only historical Jesus there is is the one who has his being in union with the Son of God who is eternally begotten of the Father. Those who pore over the gospels searching for another Jesus (whether their motives be apologetic or critical) pierce their hearts with many pangs, for they study a matter which does not exist.”

I have problems with this statement even while I agree with it. Theologically, I agree with its essential confession, that the historical Jesus is the eternal  Son of God and I agree with its implication that no reconstruction of the historical Jesus can be privileged as fact. But my disagreements are theological as well, not simply historical. If the church is committed to the incarnation, then historical contingency is itself a theological datum, and that includes the thought forms, literary genres, testimonies and traditions, as well as the words and deeds remembered, testified to, recast, reframed and retold.

Reconstructions of Jesus are always just that, reconstructions and not historical facts, far less “the real Jesus.” Nonetheless, the teasing out of what was really at stake between, say, Jesus and the Pharisees, or the question of Jesus’ being mistaken over imminent eschatological expectations, or issues of how his understanding of what he was about, and how his agency of the kingdom related to the acting in history of Israel’s God — these things are not only about apologetic defences of, or critical dissections of the church’s Jesus tradition. They are also about ways of re-appropriating and exploring that tradition freshly, and (precisely because they are based on the same shared historical methods) in new and open dialogues with those of other faiths and none who are also exploring the public history of the same Jesus.

Though I hesitate to use a phrase such as “the assured results of criticism” without irony, it does seem to me that one of the largely agreed fruits of recent historical investigation into Jesus has been a reappropriation of his Jewishness, and ways in which that significance offers new readings not only of Jesus, but the church conflicts that shaped the Jesus tradition. Among other things it offers serious challenges to ways of conceiving Jesus, as church tradition has sometimes done, as an abstract God-man, without embedding his divine identity in the history of Israel’s God, and his human identity in this specific first century Palestinian Jew.