Don’s other instructors approached their subject as an academic discipline with little or none of the ministry references that he assumed would be an integral part of a seminary education. By the end of his second New Testament class Don’s professor seemed to take this teaching style to an extreme. His primary focus in the class, other than lecturing on the different types of writings in the New Testament, was to teach about a set of methods he called the “biblical criticisms.” The students were to use these in their exegetical assignments or papers where they interpreted designated New Testament texts. At the time Don understood these to be broken down into two categories: criticisms which concentrated on the composition and history of Scripture, and textual criticisms which focused on interpreting the meaning of Scripture. To Don, Wilson seemed to enjoy analyzing texts that had to do with the mission and deeds of Jesus in ways that questioned any possible supernatural interpretation. This also had the effect of reducing Jesus to a teacher of religious ethics who was merely human. As a matter of course, Jesus’ divine mission and incarnation were also brought into question. In lectures Wilson utilized the criticisms the way a pathologist dissects a cadaver. By the time Wilson was done analyzing a text in a lecture he had systematically undermined any traditional faith basis for it. He had peeled away the layers of the text like an onion until there was nothing left for those who clung to the essential truths of the faith.
Wilson had often referenced Rudolf Bultmann, a theologian and New Testament professor from the earlier half of the twentieth century, who heavily influenced the development of form criticism. Don came to understand form criticism as a literary or textual analysis of Scripture, used to discern its original and most essential meanings. Wilson, referencing Bultmann, had instructed that since we can’t know anything for sure about the historical Christ, all we can do is extrapolate the most essential meanings of texts, regarding his life and mission, for our current existence and lives. Don did not understand Bultmann in any depth, but the high regard with which Wilson seemed to hold him was at odds with his enthusiasm for biblical historical criticism. Although Bultmann’s biblical theology and Wilson’s overzealous scholarly use of the historical criticisms had served common cause by undermining any historical basis for supernatural occurrences in the Gospels, including Jesus’ miracles and the resurrection. They also both claimed that little of Jesus mission and ministry could claim historical validity.
The fact that Matthew, Mark, and John had based their writings or dictations on memories of, and as witnesses to, Jesus’ mission and ministry seemed to hold little weight with either camp. And while Paul had not known Jesus he was continually in direct contact with those that had. Wilson had also lectured that the diverse agendas of the New Testament writers, evident in both the Gospels and Paul’s epistles, had cast doubt on their historical validity. As for NT author agendas, Don questioned, why could each writer not have been divinely inspired to relate historical facts through a variety of lenses so as to bring the fullest understanding of Christ’s mission to the world.
Don not only found himself repulsed by Wilson’s use of biblical criticisms as the only way to study Scripture, and by implication to prepare for a sermon, he also felt an anger slowly rising within him. Don had decided to go to seminary partly to gain theological and biblical insights on which he could rebuild his faith. Instead this professor seemed intent on undermining what little faith he had left.
By his third class, in the second week of the semester, as Don listened to Wilson employ these criticisms on a variety of Gospel texts, Don began to feel an edgy restlessness. He knew it was a warning sign when he felt this way. Don knew, his anger could more easily rise to the surface, and that he was more apt to lash out impulsively. It had happened enough times before with fellow high school students, coworkers, and the occasional stranger who all had picked the wrong day and time to be critical, abrupt, or rude to him. Still Don knew he had to go to class and wanted to get off to a good start academically. To calm down he tried telling himself that he would avoid taking another class with Wilson in the future. After all, Don reasoned, there were other New Testament professors at the seminary who most likely did not hold Wilson’s narrow liberal views. He had just had the bad luck of the draw this time around. Still these self-reassurances did little to ease Don’s growing frustration with Wilson given his emotional state at the time.
By the third week of the NT class Wilson turned his scalpel to the resurrection narratives. The overall thrust of the lecture was already predictable. “There is much evidence to suggest that these narratives are a creation of the early church and so we should be careful not to regard them as historical fact,” Wilson had stated at one point. He then went on to reference a group of scholars called the “Jesus Seminar” to back his assertion.
The Jesus Seminar was composed of a group of liberal scholars and lay persons who used their own biblical critical methods, and other anthropological and historical tools, to examine the historicity of the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ. Using colored scriptural highlights, after discussion and then a vote, they determined, from the most likely to the least likely, which texts depicted Jesus’ teaching and ministry with historical authenticity. The votes were cast using beads of four colors, red, pink, grey, and black, the same colors later used to highlight Bibles utilizing their rankings. The color red was used to indicate which texts could most authentically be traced back to Jesus. Texts involving supernatural occurrences, including the resurrection, were assigned to the least likely category, the black color code. The seminar had been greatly influenced by the quest for the historical Jesus, initiated by Albert Schweitzer, who wrote a book of the same name, and was largely a product of the emerging scientific worldview. A teaching document of the early church, which is not extant, called “Q,” from the German word Quelle, for “source,” was relied on heavily by the seminar members in making their determinations. As was the “Gospel of Thomas,” an early Gnostic gospel, which contains the purported sayings of Jesus and which some scholars believe was written in a similar form, a collection of Jesus’ sayings, as that of “Q.” The disproportionate reliance by seminar members on these two resources has been hotly debated in the broader scholarly arena. Their authorship, date of origin, and agenda cannot be accurately verified—seminar members assume an earlier date for both Q and the Gospel of Thomas than that of Mark, the earliest Gospel—despite seminar assumptions.
The end result of the seminar’s determinations was that the figure of Jesus had been reduced to a one-dimensional figure that was totally a product of Jewish-Hellenistic culture and the early church. One who was seen as incapable of original thought if he had just been a product of his provincial, Galilean, Jewish culture. Don, partly in reaction to Wilson’s assertions, had read articles that reflected the growing critical reaction against the conclusions of the seminar in the greater scholarly community and included well-respected biblical scholars such as the Anglican N. T. Wright and New Testament professor Luke Timothy Johnson. Questions had been raised about the self-fulfilling selection criteria of the seminar members, and that a significant number of seminar members were scientists, and laypersons, and not Christian scholars. Don worried that a pseudoscientific mindset could be creeping into some of the more liberal seminaries, and that the generation of pastors they produced might be susceptible to unbalanced biblical perspectives. This influence, Don thought, contained a bias which assumes a foundational premise that rules out the possibility of any supernatural explanation. Don also wondered how much their biblical perspectives might in turn undermine the faith of parishioners of the church traditions they served.
While the accident had shaken Don’s faith down to its foundation, he had still clung to his belief in the resurrection. Don felt the anger within him growing, and knew it could overflow any minute. He had applied to a more liberal seminary hoping they would be more open-minded, and help him to arrive at deeper insights about suffering and injustice. He had never thought that liberal, in a seminary context, meant questioning everything about the faith, including its most essential truths like the resurrection. Hadn’t Paul in his first letter to the church at Corinth said that without the resurrection the whole faith would fall apart? Part of Don knew he was projecting his anger at Wilson onto the seminary, and other theologically liberal seminaries, and that this was unfair. Given his limited classroom experiences in biblical studies Don had seen little evidence, as yet, of the broader
