Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.7
4.7. Re-Enter the Neo-Liberal Jesus
One of the most surprising facts of recent 'life of Jesus' research is that after
about seventy years of silence, the old Liberal Jesus has revived (or should we
say, returned from exile?). Despite having had the last rites pronounced over him
at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Liberal Jesus has risen again, apparently
hale and hearty. That this should have happened in North America makes it
more understandable, since the church-state division there has encouraged a selfconscious
and self-perpetuating liberal individualism in higher education which
tends to regard freedom from and reaction against church and theology as one of
its defining characteristics. This resurrected Jesus is not quite in the same form,
of course, but the distinctive features of the old Liberal quest are all clearly discernible:
the flight from dogma, the claim to new sources which make possible a
reconstruction of the 'historical Jesus', the focus on Jesus' teaching, and the
stripping away once again of the embarrassing apocalyptic features which Weiss
and Schweitzer had moved to centre stage. 156 In the closing decades of the twentieth
century each emphasis had its particular spokesman. But the overall outcome
is a rather familiar figure — the neo-Liberal Jesus, the challenge of whose
teaching can be summed up not so much (as before) in fundamental moral principles
as in the challenge of subversive wisdom. 157
The most outspoken in his flight from dogma and traditional authority is
Robert Funk. He has made no secret of his intention to mount 'a frontal assault
on a pervasive religious illiteracy that blinds and intimidates even those, or perhaps
especially those, in positions of authority in the church and in our society'.
158 Entirely in the spirit of the original quest, he takes the distinction between
the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith as axiomatic and sees it as the
goal of his endeavours, and those of the Jesus Seminar, which he established, to
liberate the real Jesus not only from the Christ of the creeds but also from the Je-
156. The parallel stretches further when we take into consideration the Kähler-like response
of L. T. Johnson, The Real Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), and the Schweitzer-like
ripostes of D. C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1998), and, at a more popular level, B. D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
(Oxford: Oxford University, 1999); see now also M. Reiser, 'Eschatology in the Proclamation
of Jesus', in Labahn and Schmidt, eds., Jesus, Mark and Q 216-38.
157. 'Neo-Liberal' is my own designation. Similar evaluations are made by H. Koester,
'Jesus the Victim', JBL 111 (1992) 3-15 (here 5); L. E. Keck, 'The Second Coming of the Liberal
Jesus?', Christian Century (August 24-31, 1994) 784-87. Despite his own closeness to
Liberal precedents (Jesus as social reformer), Horsley mounts a similar critique, particularly in
'The Teachings of Jesus and Liberal Individualism', in Horsley and Draper, Whoever 4-5, 15-
28. On the relation of the 'neo-Liberal' quest to the 'third quest' see below, chapter 5, n. 100.1
put no great weight on the 'labels' I use.
158. R. W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) 6-7.
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