An old heresy in the guise of a ‘new faith.’
By: the Rev. Dr. Dorothy Lee
Ms Lee is a former Uniting Church minister who is now the Frank Woods Distinguished Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Trinity College Theological School.
*The following article first appeared in the December 08 issue of The Melbourne Anglican.
Francis Macnab is a practising psychologist and an ordained Minister at St Michael’s Uniting Church, Melbourne. Always a controversial figure who has gone his own way on a number of issues, his latest views have caused consternation in the Uniting Church and beyond.
Macnab is arguing essentially that the ‘old faith’ of Christian teaching is no longer viable in today’s world. What we need instead, he tells us, is a ‘new faith’, one that is ecumenical across the world’s religions, that focuses on practical living rather than doctrine, and that divests itself of the old, outmoded ways.
There are several prongs to Macnab’s attack on traditional Christianity. On billboard and in the press, he has attacked the Ten Commandments as ‘the most negative document ever written.’ Macnab dismisses them, both for their negativity (eight out of the ten begin with the words, ‘Thou shalt not…’) and for the dubious status of their giver, Moses. In his view Moses was little better than a ‘mass murderer’ – hardly an ethical model for anyone to follow.
In addition, Macnab has attacked the Church’s understanding of Jesus. Far from being the divine Son of God – a title Macnab considers irrelevant for the modern age – Jesus was merely a Jewish peasant, important but not divine. Macnab has also dismissed the idea of an ‘interventionist deity’ – a God who intervenes directly in human affairs.
What lies behind all this is an attack on the Scriptures themselves. Macnab holds a cynical view of the historicity of the Bible: Abraham, for example, is a mere ‘concoction’, while Jesus was very different from the way the Gospels present him.
Though not himself a biblical scholar of any kind, Macnab (along with John Shelby Spong) is a member of the Jesus Seminar, an American organization that has worked on the question of how literal the Gospels are in their historical presentation of Jesus. The movement was begun in the mid 1980’s by two biblical scholars, John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk (the latter now deceased). It has about 150 members, some of whom are distinguished scholars of the Bible – though it’s surprising how many are not.
The Jesus Seminar makes use of the distinction between the ‘Jesus of history’ and the ‘Christ of faith’. The New Testament is not trying to present a neutral, historical picture of Jesus but rather a theological reflection on his meaning for Christian faith. To search for the ‘historical Jesus’, therefore, is to look at what we can confidently say about Jesus from a secular, historical viewpoint.
Many scholars are engaged in this quest right across the theological spectrum. However, the Jesus Seminar is distinctive in taking a negative view of the Gospels and their historicity. For them, the burden of proof lies with those who wish to make positive, historical claims for the Gospels. Everything is ‘inauthentic’ till proved ‘authentic’.
For the Jesus Seminar, the Gospels are so overlaid with the Church’s interpretation that they have lost sight of the simple Jewish peasant Jesus really was. Jesus was a reformer who challenged the system and who was crucified, not to redeem sin and suffering, but for his anti-establishment views.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the Jesus Seminar is its use of coloured pebbles for voting on whether a particular saying of Jesus is historical or not. The system is democratic – majority win every time: black pebbles for unhistorical, grey for mostly unhistorical, pink for possibly historical, and red for historical.
In their conclusions (and they use the Gospel of Thomas, as well as the four canonical Gospels), the Seminar colours its pages appropriately. The Gospel of John is seen as having little or no historical value and thus is nearly all grey and black. The Gospel of Thomas fares better.
This is the movement on which Macnab is drawing for his picture of Jesus.
So is Macnab, in all this, really putting forward a ‘new religion’ for the future: for those generations who no longer take seriously Jesus and Christian faith? After all, we’re all concerned about the mission of the Church in a rapidly changing society. Is Macnab right to say that the old understandings are obsolete and it is time for something new?
The problem is that Macnab’s proposals do not really represent a ‘new faith’ for the twenty-first century. There is nothing particularly new about his challenge that we live in a very different world from the Bible: we no longer believe in a three-tiered universe, with heaven above our heads and hell beneath our feet.
True, but theologians have been saying this for a long time now. And most of us have no difficulty these days in appreciating the biblical worldview as symbolic rather than literal. To say God is ‘up there’ is a way of saying that God is beyond us, transcendent, altogether other and holy. Even a child can grasp that.
Furthermore, the Jesus produced by generations of researchers since the nineteenth century has sometimes looked all-too-like the writers themselves. In dismissing the Jesus of the Gospels and searching instead for a Jesus behind the Gospels, the Jesus Seminar has ended up making a Jesus in their own image.
The fact is that the Gospels and the Church are inextricably linked. Yes, it’s true that the Church has given us the portrait of Jesus we find in the Gospels. That is because our access to Jesus is dependent entirely on the witness of the apostles. For Christians there is no other way but through the apostolic Church and its testimony to Jesus.
And that brings us, not just to the Bible, but also to the Creeds and Councils of the early Church. The great Creeds represent the Church’s reflection on the Gospels over several hundred years. The doctrine of the Trinity developed fully in this period, as well as belief in the two natures of Christ, divine and human.
Yet these great truths of the Church are not an alien imposition on the New Testament. They derive from biblical faith and make sense of biblical faith. They set out what is at the very least implied, if not stated, in the Scriptures themselves: about God and about Jesus.
Where does that leave someone in the position of the Revd Francis Macnab?
Essentially the views Macnab has put forward are not Christian. They follow neither the Scriptures nor the Creeds of the Church.
Of course, Macnab is not alone in his views. There are quite a number of people who support them, as seen in his popularity. And there are biblical scholars who take a similarly secular view of the text, while making no profession of Christian faith. One may disagree with them, but one can also respect their views.
The problem is that Macnab does make such a profession of faith. More than that, as an ordained Minister, he represents the Church. Yet his views conflict with fundamental Christian faith and what the Christian Church has always taught.
The ‘new faith’ Macnab proposes is not new at all. Some of his views go back to heretical movements in the second century. Other views derive from the liberalism of nineteenth century Europe, particularly Germany – views that the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, so forthrightly exposed in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Barth showed how liberal theologians had become thoroughly bourgeois in their values, completely conformed to the spirit of the world. Instead he advocated a return to biblical faith and the Creeds, calling for a ‘new orthodoxy’, a re-commitment of ourselves to the transforming grace of God in Jesus Christ. This is a God who has intervened radically in human history in the incarnation. Not a God of vague, warm, fuzzy feelings (as Macnab suggests), but an incarnate God who has become one of us, who has redeemed us on the cross and who will one day restore us and all things in the final coming of Jesus Christ.
Macnab is right to say that we need a ‘new faith’ for our times. But that ‘new faith’ is no less than the faith of the apostles: old and yet ever-new, traditional and yet radical, venerable in age and yet fresh to each generation. That is the quintessential nature of biblical faith. It is this faith – the faith of apostles, martyrs, confessors and reformers down through the ages – that Macnab, in the guise of a Christian Minister, has denied.