Paul VerHoeven on Jesus

I ran across this today, and quoting from this interview with Paul Verhoeven interview I met him when I was in college. One of my Religious Studies professors was a fellow of the Jesus Seminar as was Paul Verhoeven. Interesting that he has written a book as he was speaking then of using the research from the Jesus Seminar as the basis for a film about Jesus. Not sure what else I have to say about this except that I was taken back to the days of the Jesus Seminar as they were still working on the saying of Jesus, and Verhoeven came to Long Beach State on a couple of occasions while I was there.

Walter Wink through the eyes of Shane Claiborne

Tonight Reconciler had its last Lenten Gathering at Mars Hill Tattoo in Rogers Park. One of the guys who works at the shop, has come around to Reconciler but also has another church he attends,( I think probably a more evangelical church) as we were wrapping up he asked Kate and I if we had heard of the book Jesus for President, we had though neither of us had read it. I am familiar with one of the authors Shane Clairborne, who is part of the New Monasticism movement and the Emergent Church conversation. I was also, somewhat familiar with the campaign that went along with the book during the lead up the election last year. Shane Claiborne irritates me a little though so I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. The irritation is partly out of sense that what much New Monasticism and Emergent stuff is doing at times feels to me like reinventing the wheel. I am more interested in catholicity than being evangelical, largely because I think that what evangelicals are seeking is in fact found in catholic and orthodox historic faith.

However, as the guy showed us the book, as we read through it we discovered that it was a distillation and putting in evangelical language the work of theologians and preachers we have long been familiar with and thus a theology that I have been living with for nearly 20 years. The main thinkers the book has interpreted for evangelicals, are Walter Wink, Tony Campolo, Brian Walsh, and Richard Horsley, among others. So it was a little odd to hear this guy start telling Kate and I summaries of Walter Winks, or Richard Horsleys ideas that were totally new to him and had completely turned his understanding of Christianity and Jesus on its head, and opened a new world to him. Odd because I forget that I encountered all of this in the academy, in Religious Studies courses and seminary courses. And so I found myself having to bite my tongue a bit, because I didn't want to squelch his sense of discovery and yet also wanted to affirm that I knew about this, but without giving a sense that this is old hat.

This is the relativity of the "new": for this guy Jesus for President was a new discovery and he could not quite grasp that Kate and I were very much familiar with the ideas and already mostly held them ourselves, and in my case have held to them most of my adult life. Now I also remember these things being new and radical, as I and the members of the Society in LA when we were all in college in the late 80' early 90's sat around and read an article by Walter Wink and discussed it, I think probably during the first Gulf War, under the first Bush administration. And about the same time reading Winks books on the Powers. I Read Horsley in Seminary in the mid 90's, and grew up on the thundering of Tony Campolo, at various conferences and at a college camp I attended every year during college. It was very much a liberating message for me then, and still remains one for me, though tempered by a certain catholic perspective. It seems to still be a liberating message, which is good. Though given that it is put in evangelical language it is a little odd because part of that liberation for me was freeing me from needing to be evangelical and needing to have evangelical faith language, which always fit poorly my own spirituality. So this was the other weird part to encounter these ideas couched in primarily evangelical language and definitely directed towards evangelicals, which was what I think made it make sense to this guy.

It made sense to me when I first encountered these ideas for similar reasons as our friend who was showing us the book, for these ideas present a call to a radical commitment to Jesus Christ and to the way Jesus calls us away from allegiances to the powers, because the powers ultimately answer to Jesus Christ. This itself is not necessarily new for this sort of affirmation in part was what the affirmation "Jesus is Lord" and thus not Caesar meant. This meant the Christians could not partake in the emperor cult which was one key element to the assertion of Roman sovereignty in the empire. and why it meant for Christians an inability to take part in the emperor cult. This position then was also very quickly in my mind connected to the christus victor understanding of redemption, that in the Crucifixion and resurrection that God in Christ was victorious over death and all powers of this world. What Shane Claiborne seems to have been able to do is make all of this make sense in the more individualistic each of us redeemed by the blood of Jesus ideas which is interesting since such a view is not my primary way of interpreting Jesus death and resurrection, not that I think such an interpretation is invalid just that I don't put the theological emphasis there. It is interesting to see where such ideas I encountered in college have ended up in 15 to 20 years.

Facts Interpretation and Science: or Jesus Tomb Redux

I commend to you Clifton's recent post over at This Is Life! regarding some of the possible implications of the Jesus Tomb documentary. As is not uncommon he and I may have similar opinions but we come to them differently and we also express them differently. However, his post reminded me that I was thinking of writing something about facts and interpretations. Clifton references the philosophers of suspicion Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and incidentally in the midst of my own reflection Nietzsche's famous aphorism "There are no facts only interpretations." has been on my mind.

While I am not a Marxist, Nietzschian or Freudian, I do think these thinkers have provided some important insights as well as provided us with an important hermeneutic (note I did not say the hermeneutic). Sometimes these philosophers are grouped together under the category of the "philosophers of suspicion" or are credited with developing a hermeneutic of suspicion. The suspicion is around claims about truth and objectivity and how these can or do function socially, even the way knowledge and knowledge production and claims to objectivity or absolute truth can serve to oppress. Thus the above aphorism from Nietzsche. Now this does lead to a certain abandonment of objectivity and Truth all together, and can lead what Clifton called "the will to Knowledge".

What might all this have to do with the "Jesus Tomb" documentary. As Clifton points out there is an element of this hermeneutic of suspicion or at least a playing loose with "facts" that to some degree hearkens back to Nietzsche's aphorism, in this documentary and how the archaeological evidence is being handled. There also seems to be a desire that this interpretation of the archaeological evidence in turn open up Christianity to a new interpretation. (though I have to admit the newness of their interpretation is hardly actually new, although many are unaware that it has been around for a long time). However, they have to also deny Nietzsche's aphorism, for they speak the language of facts with regard to the archaeological evidence and their interpretation of that evidence. There is in fact an inconsistent use of the hermeneutic of suspicion, since at best their claim is simply one interpretation among many and any appeal to "facts" is impossible if one embraces this philosophy of suspicion, especially as articulated by Nietzsche.

In the end though this hermeneutic undermines the claims to unseat more traditional interpretation since the argument is dependent on claims of objectivity and the apparent factuality of "hard" archaeological evidence. So when critics of the "Jesus Tomb" documentary point out the ways in which, sensationalism, money, or timing of the showing and announcement of the documentary during Lent and before Easter, are engaging in a hermeneutic of suspicion at least in part, since in some sense they are saying that the presentation is bound up with these things and should cause one to be suspicious of the claims. Now it may also be that the critics of the "Jesus Tomb" are also under suspicion when it comes to a hermeneutics of suspicion since it would be argued from this perspective that their own appeal (if they make such) to objectivity and facts is also already bound up in interpretation and subjectivity.

In this sense the hermeneutic of suspicion actually supports neither side in this issue, rather it either leaves one completely agnostic about the truth here, but with an understanding of the way various subjective factors contribute to the understanding of the "facts" on either side (a sort of epistemic limbo) or one is forced into some decision based on ones commitments. Here one is forced to understand knowledge and truth as relational and intersubjective. This arena seems to me to be very consistent with the Christian claim that Reason (the Logos) and Truth is a person, the Son, second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. " I am the Way the Truth and the Life."