(8 of 9)
Roman Catholicism has just begun to grapple with the awareness that liberal scholarship may pose a threat to dogma. "Sometimes I ask my Catholic counterparts why they must make all the same mistakes in 20 years when we Protestant theologians needed over 200 years," jests Tubingen's Hengel. Conservative Catholics hope Ratzinger will strike at this threat, but the Cardinal is said to oppose a return to Rome's earlier proclamations on the Bible's complete historical reliability. He seems to prefer intellectual counteroffensives to decrees and crackdowns.
Church struggles aside, what does the work of liberal biblical scholars mean to the ordinary believer, the average person in the pew? So far, not much. Most of the discussions have taken place within the confines of the academic world. And when New Testament experts publish their theories, they tend to turn out highly technical tomes that only fellow specialists could, or would want to, read.
Unfortunately, the implicit assumption of many higher critics is that the Gospels are too complex for the average reader to understand properly, since they mingle fact with myth and imaginative editing. The critics spin out "secret interpretations that no one knows without a Ph.D.," snaps Paul Mickey, a conservative at Duke University. Says Father John Navone of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome: "A kind of intellectualist bias has grown up; unless you are aware of the very latest academic theory about the Bible, you might as well not read it." The result is a dangerous gap between the thinking at elite universities and the beliefs of thriving congregations.
The workaday Christian who does make the effort to delve into the findings of the critics will probably be frustrated. After more than a century of immense effort, surprisingly little has been settled concerning the Gospels. A riot of discord persists over which passages might be trustworthy and over the criteria for deciding so, not to mention over the fundamental issue of who Jesus was. One eminent theologian, Yale University's George Lindbeck, finds the specialists' theories "mutually unintelligible" and not particularly helpful. The theories are also unstable. Funk admits that the "data base" of sayings being developed by his Jesus Seminar will no doubt have to be reworked by the next generation. At conservative Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston, David Wells complains, "The machinery has ground its material -- the biblical text -- so fine that it yields nothing."
In the end, does the search for the Jesus of history have any relevance for believers? Some thinkers, like Bultmann before them, are content to distinguish between a Christ of faith, who is knowable, and a historical Jesus, who is not. Other liberals, however, are searching fervently for a real-life Jesus, whether sage or prophet, to fill what they see as an urgent need for spiritual nourishment and a renewed impetus for social reform. "Jesus may be one of the finest persons who ever lived, but the average person doesn't have any access to him," says Robinson of Claremont. He believes that Christianity would be greatly enriched "if somehow the positive aspects of Jesus' life could be conveyed to the person in the pew."