Word: scholarshipped
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Those warnings bear remembering in these days before Easter, when Christians are invited to dwell on the deepest mysteries of faith. Far from being resolved by centuries of scholarship and devotion, the paradox of miracles seems only to deepen. Certainly they occupy a strange place on the spiritual map of America. When Time asked in a poll last week whether people believe in miracles, 69% said yes; and the fastest-growing churches in America are the Charismatic and Pentecostal congregations whose worship revolves around "signs and wonders." Tens of thousands of people gather in a pasture in Georgia...
...rebel scholars of the self-appointed Bible tribunal called the Jesus Seminar gathered once again, this time to vote on the most explosive question of Christian faith: Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? That such a vote would even take place says a lot about current Bible scholarship; that the result, by an overwhelming majority, was to announce, No, he did not, shows clearly the chasm that has opened between some professors of Scripture and the true-believing flock...
...then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain," Paul wrote to the Corinthians. But it was St. Augustine who observed that "on no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body." And indeed no assertion of modern biblical scholarship can match, in its capacity to horrify and gall, the statement that Christ never actually rose from the dead...
Distressing as it is to a conservative Christian, that kind of reading is mild compared with the pronouncements from the left fringes of contemporary scholarship. The efforts of moderate theologians to find new meanings in Scripture are burdened by the decrees of such groups as the Jesus Seminar, which seem determined to offend at all costs. The seminar is the invention of onetime Protestant clergyman Robert W. Funk, who now runs a Bible think tank, the Westar Institute. Since the mainstream press rarely covers the esoterica of New Testament criticism, he set an irresistible trap: he would gather "eminent" scholars...
Both parties to this debate make grave errors in their ideological intransigence. The anti-Robertson left makes a faulty jump from Robertson's pseudo-scholarship, which is genuinely dangerous, to what they falsely take to be the peril of the entire Christian Right. They threaten to compromise the validity of their legitimate critique of Robertson's book by smuggling into that critique a liberal political agenda that smacks of political partisanship, not a general concern for confronting the evil of anti-Semitism...