Jesus Seminar to Look Constructively at Faith
Announcing the Spring Meeting – Feb. 27 – Mar. 2, 2002
 

02-004    February 11, 200

Contact:  Dennis L. Maher (707) 523-1323
                denny.maher@westarinstitute.org

Speakers are available for phone, in-person, and radio interviews.

The Westar Institute, home to "the Jesus Seminar," will gather scholars and lay participants for its annual Spring Meeting, February 27 through March 2, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Rohnert Park, California.  [Click here for schedule]

The theme is "Fashioning a Faith for the Future."  Speakers and participants will consider implications of their on-going work on early Christian texts and origins.  

"Agenda formation is our immediate and urgent task in the Jesus Seminar," says Robert W. Funk, founder and Director of the Jesus Seminar and Westar Institute.  "We must identify and exorcise residual demons of the old faith, but we also must assemble a litany of our abiding or emerging deep convictions, our strong affirmations." 

 "We must revisit our profile of Jesus for insights into our own future," Funk says.  "We must reexamine the role of the Bible in a viable faith, carefully forge the contours of the new community of faith, and go in quest of new metaphors, new symbols, a new architecture, and resilient stories to live by."

A Fulbright Senior Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, Robert W. Funk is the author of Honest to Jesus (1996).  His new book A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision, will be published in Spring 2002.  Robert Funk will speak on "Facets of a Future Faith –Forming an Agenda." 
 

In addition to Funk, Richard Holloway, retired Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Anne Primavesi , theologian and author on ecological issues from the University of London, and Elaine Pagels, author and professor of religion at Princeton University, will deliver major addresses.  [ Click here for titles of addresses and quotes.]

The Jesus Seminar was organized in 1985 to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research beyond gospel specialists. At its inception thirty scholars took up the challenge. Eventually more than two hundred professionally trained specialists, called Fellows, joined the group. The Seminar meets twice a year to debate technical papers that have been prepared and circulated in advance. At the close of debate on each agenda item, Fellows of the Seminar vote, using colored beads to indicate the degree of authenticity of Jesus' words or deeds. Dropping colored beads into a box has become a trademark of the Seminar.  [ Click here for summary of papers presented this spring.]
 

Major Presenters at the Westar Institute Spring Meeting

Richard Holloway, who retired as Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in October 2000, will speak on "The Wound of Religion."  An outspoken liberal in the Anglican Communion, he is the author of Godless Morality (2000) and Dancing on the Edge (1997). His new book, Doubts and Loves, will appear in February 2002.

"The wound of religion is humanity's struggle with its own meaning," Bishop Holloway says.  "Religion is not a kind of salvation system or bandage distribution center.  The human passion for looking in the distance is the wound of religion.  It is exhilarating to know that there is no cure for the passion.  We must live with the wound."
 

Anne Primavesi is a systematic theologian focusing on ecological issues, a Fellow of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of Sacred Gaia (2000) and From Apocalypse to Genesis (1991).  An Irish former nun, Anne's topic will be "From Copernicus to Lovelock – A Once and Future Theology."

"Copernicus raised a fundamental question about the earth and its place in the universe when he asserted that the earth rotates around the sun," Primavesi says.  "The new position of the earth implied a question about the place of humankind in the scheme of things.  Now James Lovelock's Gaia theory has posed that same question in a new and acute form.  It  focuses attention on our place within the whole community of life on earth, and by so doing, expands our theological horizons."
 

Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the bestselling author of The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Adam and Eve and the Serpent (1988).

Pagels also will speak on creation and its implications for Christian faith.  Her topic will be "Let There Be Light – Does divine light shine through Jesus alone or in everyone?"

"Who is Jesus, and what is the 'good news' about him? Elaine asks.  "I suggest that the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas articulate a first-century controversy over these questions."

"Both claim to offer teaching Jesus gave intimately to his disciples, and both interpret Jesus as the 'light of the world' that came into being before creation," Pagels explains. "According to Thomas, Jesus, who speaks as 'the light that is before all things,' invites his disciples to recognize that 'you are from the light.'  John, on the other hand, characterizes Jesus as the sole source of that light."
 

Fellows Presenting Papers

James Veitch, Professor of Religious Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, will speak on "Church as Community: The Beginnings of Christianity and the Foundation of the Church - Some Implications for Today."

Veitch explains:  "In the course of time Paul's revolutionary concept of community became more a reality and the main attraction for people living in the Roman Empire from the early third century.  In the communities that formed the church, people from all backgrounds found acceptance and security.  A loving and compassionate God experienced within the human spirit and in companionship and community with others transformed the lives of individuals and thereby transformed the Roman Empire. 

"The success of the Church at that crucial time had more to do with these human values than it did with theology or church organization.  The development and the imposition of the Nicene theology on the church came at the organizational level of church life.  For some time at least the people could enjoy the care and forgiveness that each offered the other in demonstration of the love and compassion of God."

Jim Veitch outlines a liturgy for today, which remembers Jesus' inclusive table fellowship.
 

Jack A. Hill, Assistant Professor of Religion (Social Ethics), Texas Christian University, Ft. Worth, Texas, will present a paper entitled  "Our Moorings: Moral Resources from Oceania & Asia for the Ecological Crisis."

This paper argues that the global nature of the ecological crisis and the postmodern character of contemporary life necessitate holistic, ethical analyses which are informed by perspectives from indigenous and non-western religious traditions. A view of ethics as critical reflection on notions of "practice," "self" and "other" within distinct life-worlds is illustrated with respect to archival research on Pacific Island oral narratives and analysis of recent scholarship on ecology and Chinese religious traditions. It suggests that insights gleaned from such non-western perspectives may function as catalysts for rediscovering moral resources in historical Jesus research for addressing environmental problems.
 

David Galston, President of the SnowStar Institute of Relgion in Windsor, Ontario, will speak on "The Historical Jesus and the Re-turning of Nicaea."

"What happens to Christian doctrines when the historical Jesus is taken seriously? Galston asks?  "What happens when the Christ is taken out Christianity and the essence of Christian theology is lost?"

Galston explains:  "Creation, salvation, and the church have for centuries formed the very roots of the Nicene confession and the backbone of Christian theology. They have served to explain the fallen nature of human beings and the necessity of the incarnation. What impact does the historical Jesus have on this tradition?"

Galston continues:  "Unlike the Christ, the historical Jesus is not a theme and does not supply a transcendental basis for speculative theology. The historical Jesus, who says, 'settle things among yourselves' and 'I'm not a judge' seems disinterested in the notion of a saviour.  By returning to old Nicaea for a brief reconsideration, the struggle of a new Nicaea, which the historical Jesus so easily stirs, may finally come into focus.   Here then is the challenge well suited to a new Nicaea: to transform the nature of theology from creation to creativity and, in so doing, to engage the adventure of non-realism or active recreation or the Basileia of God."
 

"Living in a Re-Imagined World" by Bernard Brandon Scott, Darbeth Distinguished Professor of NewTestament at Phillips Theological Semionary, U. of Tulsa, OK.

The paper is an excerpt from his new book Re-Imagine the World, Polebridge (2002).

Brandon Scott asks:  "Can you base your life on the re-imagined world of the parables?  Yes.  I develop a comprehensive view of Jesus' parables, sayings, and deeds around three coordinates:  God is unclean.  God is present in absence, not apocalyptic resolution."

"Cooperation, not contest, is the basis for the Empire of God.  To what was Jesus faithful?  My argument is that Jesus was faithful to the re-imagined world of the parables."

"Jesus' life bears witness to the re-imagined world of the parables," says Scott.  "It established for him and those who followed him a new consciousness, a new way of being in the world.  Such a consciousness represents for me a new foundation for Christianity.  To be more accurate, it represents for me a return to the original basis for the resurrection.  Those who had faith in the parable's re-imagined world proclaimed him still alive because of their faithfulness to that re-imagined world."
 

Spring 2002 Meeting Schedule

Travel & Accommodations
 

Individual Sessions

Tickets for individual sessions are on sale as long as seats are available.  Check the Westar website or call 1-877-523-3545 after that date to check availability and to register.