The stone the builders rejected – Jesus then and now
By Craig M. Kibler, The Layman Online, October 29, 2002
INDIANAPOLIS – A scholar, reminding Confessing Christians that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the Church, challenged them to stand firm in their witness to Him.
“Are we brave enough to say here, to pray, to listen, to learn and to be shaped, even to suffer, to be a sign to others who would inhabit this building as well?” Dr. Edith Mary Humphrey said. “We are God’s poesis, God’s creative workmanship. Who can tell what shape the temple will have, and how much of God’s glory it will shed upon this world, how many strange and wonderful inhabitants it will house, as we become what we are meant to be? This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
Humphrey is an associate professor of New Testament Studies at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. An Anglican layperson, she previously served as professor of Scripture at Augustine College in Ottawa and as a lecturer at several colleges and universities in Canada. She is the author of A Solid Foundation: The Seven Pillars of the Jesus Seminary Re-examined and the co-author of Longing For God: Anglicans Talk about Revelation, Nature, Culture and Authority.
She spoke to more than 700 people Oct. 25 during the historic Confessing The Faith Conference – the first-ever gathering of renewing and confessing Christians in North America.
“If we learn anything from our family story,” Humphrey said, “we learn that Jesus is the stone ‘rejected by humankind’ but chosen by God – God turns even our human rebellion into glory by treading, in his Son, the remarkable route of incarnation, service, humiliation, cross, resurrection and ascension. The very fact of his rejection was used to make Jesus the cornerstone of God’s building!”
She then described the issues that surround Jesus “then and now,” saying that some people insist “we must carefully distinguish between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith.’ Many who talked this way in the past assumed that the original records of Jesus’ life (told in oral form by early followers) were so embroidered and embellished that we can never get back to what really happened – but we can be individually changed, they said, by response to some nebulous Christ-figure who stands for authentic life. Jesus may be lost, but the ‘gospel’ points us to this mysterious Christ. Others, closer to our own time, have been more optimistic about peeling back the layers that they perceive in the gospels. Or, to return to our initial metaphor, they have chipped away at bits of the cornerstone that they understand to be deposits or accretions and so have produced a cornerstone worthy of a new building – a building more congenial to 21st century tastes.”
Humphrey criticized such efforts, singling out the “Jesus Seminar” as a group that has erected a new building “based upon a re-envisioned Jesus, a new Jesus and a new Christianity designed not for the scholars alone, but for the public whom they are hoping to evangelize.”
These claims, she said, are presented not for what they are but, instead, “as though they were simply giving the public the fruit of their scholarly labors, letting them in on the academic conversation about Jesus and history.”
Humphrey reminded her listeners that not all of these claims are accepted by New Testament scholars outside of the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus they have built is based on the assumption that they, “the academics, are the chief builders, the new priests who must present society a picture of Jesus that is good for us.”
“Jesus shows us a different way to be. The unique one expresses his personhood in communion with his Father, with the Spirit, and comes into communion with his own. Our thinking and talking and worship of Jesus cannot take place in individualistic isolation. Rather, it takes place within the context of the Church, past and present, before the face of the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit, amidst the curiosity of the angels who have not been visited as we have, and indeed, in the public sphere of the world into which our Lord plunged.”
“Together then, and without fear, we need to do hard thinking about Jesus and history because we do not worship the gospel, nor do we worship a Christ principle, nor do we pay lip service to a subjective Christ of faith – no, we believe that God, in utter humility, became human for us at a particular place and time in first-century Palestine, to speak to his people, and to reconfigure the family of God so as to include us and to raise us up with all his people.”
“First century folks,” she concluded, “looked at Jesus’ followers and knew that they had been with Jesus. May it be so with us.”