First Encounter with Walter Wink's The Human Being

As June comes to an end, I plow through the second book an independent study is doing with me: Walter Wink's, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man.

Wink teaches at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a different bird than I am usually around. Even in England I was not around his approach to Christianity. He is cut from a similar cloth to Marcus Borg in some respects, was also a member of the Jesus Seminar, although I take it his conclusions about Jesus are somewhat different from others on the seminar.

I wouldn't recommend his book for an evangelical but I would recommend it for someone thinking of throwing in the faith towel. In fact, I think I would rather someone in that situation read it before they would read Borg, although I'm not very far in yet in my speed read. One thing I want to be clear on, however, is that while neither of these men have a conventional faith, they have a very deep faith. These are two deeply religious men whose head simply isn't where most evangelical heads are. God judges the hearts, not me.

I was going to wait till tomorrow to blog on Wink, but he had some fascinating comments in his first chapter that I wanted to quote this morning. You will all judge them according to your theological/ideological perspective, but I reproduce them here for your reaction.

The "driving force behind this scholarly exertion [the quest for the historical Jesus] was a modern longing to be encountered by the divine... most scholars study the past in order to be change its effect on the present" (italics his, 9).

"No scholar can construct a picture of Jesus beyond the level of spiritual awareness that they have attained. No reconstruction outstrips its reconstructor. We cannot explain truths we have not yet understood" (11).

"The idea of history is our modern myth" (12).

"I privilege Jesus' critique of domination over all other viewpoints because, after a lifetime of study, I have found it to be the most radical and comprehensive framework for understanding what he was about" (14).

"I am concerned not so much with whether Jesus actually said something, but with whether it is true, regardless of who said it. If truth is our goal rather than historicity, then revelation is a far more appropriate category than facticity, for weighing the impact of Jesus" (15).

We "should not assume that something is true because Jesus said it... The church did courageously retain passages that were clearly disconfirmed, such as the second coming, Mark 9:1 par" (15).

"The myth of the human Jesus requires that Jesus must have made mistakes, have had flaws in his personality, sinned, and otherwise exhibited imperfect (that is, human) behavior" (italics his, 15).

But the statements that prompted me to post this morning were these, which I thought give a very interesting definition of objectivity in a postmodern age:

"The presence of a particular critical perspective does not spell the end of objectivity; we are still required to give warrants for our claims. Once one abandons the chimera of disinterestedness, however, objectivity is free to become what it should have been all along: just another name for simple honesty and the willingness, as Schweitzer demonstrated, to be changed by what we discover.

"I listen intently to the Book. But I do not acquiesce in it. I rail at it. I make accusations. I censure it for endorsing patriarchalism, violence, anti-Judaism, homophobia, and slavery. It rails back at me, accusing me of greed, presumption, narcissism, and cowardice. We wrestle. We roll on the ground, neither of us capitulating, until it wounds my thigh with "new-ancient" words. And the Holy Spirit is there the whole time, strengthening us both" (15-16).

Of course the definition of the Holy Spirit in his glossary is not exactly orthodox: "the power of transformation... That impulse of the psyche...

:-)