Long before he became better known for his work with the Jesus Seminar, Funk was acknowledged as one of the foremost language and biblical scholars in his generation. Anyone who has studied New Testament Greek or followed the issues of serious academic scholarship over the years (and this is admittedly a small group of people) has encountered his work as a translator of German scholarship and then his own textbooks and scholarship on Greek grammar.
I have some of those works on my bookshelf. But I am grateful to Funk for a different reason. In 1985 he founded the Jesus Seminar and invited John Dominic Crossan to be his co-chair. As Crossan says in an article in The Fourth R, Funk founded the Jesus Seminar for two reasons: one, he believed biblical scholars have an ethical responsibility to speak publicly and clearly about what they are learning; second, he believed there was a constituency of non-academics, including clergy, lay people in churches, and non-church people, who would relish the opportunity to learn and be part of the conversation. Crossan says he agreed wholeheartedly with the first point and doubted the second, but was most happy to be proved wrong on point two. In the last 20 years, the Jesus Seminar has educated, inspired, angered, and engaged a significant audience of non-academics in conversation about Jesus and Bible scholarship. I am one of those who has appreciated the opportunity to be part of the conversation. And I have tried to carry the spirit of Funk into my work as a pastor. I believe there is no reason people in the church should not know the truth about what scholars are learning and writing about Jesus and the Bible, and I believe this truth can be a source of re-invigorated faith and intellectual integrity. Thinking encouraged, Diversity (of beliefs about Jesus) Welcomed.
In another article about Funk, Stephen J. Patterson comments on the fact that Funk left the conservative church of his youth and never came back to any church as a member. But his work as a public scholar and the first face of the Jesus Seminar brought him back into churches on a routine basis and back into conversation with the institutional church about the place of Jesus in the church. Patterson says that Funk came back to the church not to be welcomed back "in" but "to draw the church out into the great wide, secular world, where it will have no special place, no privileged claim to Truth, but where it can rediscover the power of the sage it worships, and the transcendent reality to which he pointed."
Here is my own interpretation of Patterson's comment: Jesus never spent a day of his life inside a church. Of course, there was no church and no Christianity in his day. But Jesus also spent very little time inside the religious institution he grew up in: the temple. And what stories we have about him in the temple tell us that when he was there he usually found himself in conflict with its leadership. Why? Because their God was too small, their membership rules were too restrictive, and their club was too exclusive. For Jesus, the real work and the real world was outside the temple in the homes, markets, and public forums where people lived their everyday lives. It was there that he spent his time. It was there that he showed people how to see God in the everyday; it was there that he "comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable."
Funk reminds us that this is where our real work and ministry happens too. Our spiritual calling isn't to come to church and receive a weekly dose of the "Truth." The Truth is found and served wherever we are when we see the presence of God in our midst and act to make the realm of God a present-day reality. We make the Truth real by the manner of our living. This is the "street" Wisdom of Jesus, and the task of the church is to give us the skills to see God everywhere and the courage to be God's people in our daily lives.
I am grateful for the part that Robert Funk has played in helping me see this about Jesus. It may not have brought him back into the church, but it is a large reason I am still in the church doing what I am doing.
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