By Jeffrey Walton
The historical figure of Jesus was not intended to be the center of worship, rather a sage pointing towards a politically utopian Kingdom of God, according to two lecturers who recently spoke at a prominent United Methodist church in Washington, D.C.
Melanie Johnson-Debaufre of United Methodist Drew University Theological School and Robert J. Miller of Juniata College appeared as part of the Jesus Seminar on the Road program. The Jesus Seminar is a once-prominent body of liberal scholars and laypersons who used to gain headlines by disputing the Gospels’ historicity. The group draws from sources outside of the Biblical canon in order to produce what they assert to be a more authentic view of Jesus than the church espouses.
The talks were part of a series on “Jesus in the First and Twenty-First Centuries” held April 4-5 given to about 60 mostly retirement-age persons seated over the image of a labyrinth at the parish hall of Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church, the “national church” of United Methodism. The event was co-sponsored by St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill.
In her 2006 book “Jesus Among Her Children: Q, Eschatology, and the Construction of Christian Origins,” Johnson-Debaufre sought to understand the historical Jesus using the hypothesized early source text of Q. The Drew professor proposes alternative ways of reading Q that place the “basileia” (commonly translated as Kingdom) of God at the focus of Q’s interest rather than the identity and uniqueness of Jesus.
Read more at http://juicyecumenism.com/2014/04/10/dc-methodists-host-resurrection-denying-seminar-on-historical-jesus/
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I think it was J.B. Phillips’ book “Ring of Truth” in which the author told the story of an older man whose life-long faith was shaken by a priest’s or minister’s assertion that the stories of the New Testament were fiction, and that Christ had not risen from the dead. It was an incident that spurred Phillips to write the book, a defense of the truth of the gospels.
Here we have a story showing that the spiritual heirs of that priest from decades ago are today continuing his agenda of leading people away from the Truth. I pray that they may be brought back to Christ; but I pray even more that the sixty seniors attending the seminar will hold fast to their faith.
I am not surprised. However, the audience of sixty was small, especially compared to the audience that I’m sure attended a seminar on February 28 & March 1 this year, hosted by Village Presbyterian Church of Prairie Village, Kansas, the fifth largest congregation in the PCUSA (third largest, after the departures of Christ Presbyterian in Edina, Minnesota, and Highland Park Presbyterian in Dallas, Texas, for the ECO), that featured the Resurrection-denying Jesus Seminar “scholar” John Dominic Crossan.