If you have been following along with my posts you will have
noted a long list of the errors of the Jesus Project. In this post I will revisit some of those and
point out some others. Certainly, the
staff of the Presbyterian Community Church of the Rockies are aware of these
problems. So, you may ask, why would
they invite the error laden Jesus Project to present the faith sapping results
of their poor scholarship to the body of Christ in Estes Park? The only explanation possible is that they
too share the same anti-Christ agenda of the Westar Institute. That brings me to the first of their
mistakes:
Agenda Drive
Scholarship. As I pointed out in my
first post, the founder of the Jesus Seminar started out with an explicit
agenda to undermine orthodox Christianity.
In fact, in 1998 Funk explained his vision for the future of the faith
in a paper entitled The Coming Radical
Reformation. Here is one of his
assertions: “The resurrection of Jesus did not involve the resuscitation of a
corpse.” Of course, in saying this he
was not affirming what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:1—11. In fact, he was denying it altogether. In this paper Funk laid out the agenda of the
Jesus seminar. He then hand-picked men
and women who agreed with His position and threw in a smattering of others to
provide a veneer of objectivity.
The current incarnation of the Jesus Seminar continues on
the same path that Funk blazed. The
council of nineteen are mere flunkies who can be counted on to continue the
agenda pioneered nearly twenty years ago.
This is not scholarship but propaganda.
Ignoring recent
scholarship. The assertion that to
get at the real Jesus or the real New Testament we have to go beyond what the
Christian faith and theology have always trusted would be laughable if it were
not so spiritually lethal. The Jesus
Seminar’s treatment of the scriptures is rooted in the rationalism of the 1800’s
not in the unbiased scholarship and research of the 2000’s. Richard Bauckham for instance published Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as
Eyewitness Testimony in 2006. As is
perfectly obvious from the title Bauckham’s thesis, which he proves in the book,
is that the Gospels are reliable records of the words and works of Jesus
written by eyewitnesses for the benefit of the church.
Similarly, attempts to water down the New Testament by
mixing in recently discovered books, songs, and prayers have been successfully
rebuffed for the last 100 years.
Nevertheless, the leadership of the Presbyterian Community Church of the
Rockies seem to think that the Christian community in Estes Park needs to be
instructed by a small group of self-aggrandizing, self-appointed “spiritual
leaders” have corrected the wrongs of the ancient church.
Xenophobia. Am I the only one who finds it odd that
the “spiritual leaders” who have taken it upon themselves to be judges over the
books of the New Testament are all north American? The church is a 2000 year old world-wide
movement under the guidance of a diversity of church leaders who have found the
scriptures to be reliable and true. It
is widely known that the leaders of the churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America have decidedly more orthodox views than the men and women who were
recruited by Hal Taussig to continue the agenda of the Jesus Seminar. Taussig’s apparent xenophobia is rooted in his
anti-Christian agenda. His predilection
for “spiritual leaders” instead of “church leaders” shows his contempt for the
church and those leaders in the church who are charged to ensure it remains, as
Paul wrote, “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15)
Hubris. Hal Taussig’s gang of nineteen are
nothing more that self-interested men and women who desperately want to be
taken seriously. They have had the
audacity to claim authority that no other group has claimed in the history of
the Church until the council of Trent in 1545.
Up to that year the New Testament books themselves were recognized to be
authoritative by the whole church. At
the council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church, desperate to find support for
some of their more outrageous doctrines, identified an authoritative list of
books. Note the difference between books
recognized to be intrinsically authoritative, and an authoritative list of
books. The gang of nineteen departs from
the protestant and eastern orthodox churches in using the Roman Catholic tactic
of adding books to achieve their agenda.
However, considering the books the gang of nineteen is adding, I doubt
even the Roman Catholics would have them.
My prayer for the body of Christ in Estes Park is that they
would reject the faith destroying work of the Presbyterian Community Church of
the Rockies and stay away from the Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar. One need only examine the decline of the
Presbyterian Church U.S.A. to see that their view of the Bible and the
resulting theology is church destroying and not edifying to men and women of
faith. What is true nationally is just
as true locally. Click HERE to see what
radical skepticism and disbelief do to a local community of faith. The plethora of errors and decline of
congregations which embrace them prove that what they sponsor and teach is
nothing less than spiritual poison.
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