When Faith Meets Reason
Preface

Robert W. Funk

The exchange among the Westar Leaders in April 2005 about Easter and the resurrection burrows into the heart of our problem: at what point does the discrepancy between what I know, or think I know (I like to add that important qualification) and what I am willing to say publicly become so acute that my personal integrity is at stake? The breaking point came fairly early for me. I decided for the academic world because I thought I could maintain my integrity longer there than in the parish ministry. Then the seminary became a threat to that integrity and again I sought relief by moving to a secular university. But there is no escape if you wish to be true to yourself.

I finally realized that Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar lay in my future because only in that context could I hope to recover any modicum of personal integrity. I worried initially because I feared I was the only one who had secretly been on this pilgrimage to discover the historical truth. How surprised I was to learn that many other scholars were on the very same trek. At the same time, I began to realize that the historical truth is not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is the nature of faith itself. So I longed to embark on the second big phase of the seminar and take up what has been called a “Second Nicea.”

I have often asked myself how I got to the first stage—the desire to determine and articulate the historical truth. And the answer I always get is this: I was learning things about my own tradition that undermined the original affirmations I had inherited from my predecessors. Why had I not thought to share those things, one at a time, with people in my church? Instead I do what many clergy do and that is dissemble. And I dissembled as much by what I didn’t say as by what I did say.

And now we have Associates in Westar who are convinced that we should stop with the historical Jesus, and perhaps the historical Paul, and rest our oars. There is of course wisdom in the suggestion that we should pass on the fragments of truth we gained from our intense studies to those who haven’t been let in on the secret as yet. And that would be sufficient. In other words, go back into the education business and simply transmit what we now know, or think we know, about the gospels, and the Bible, and let it go at that.

But that won’t do. And the reason is that personal integrity is still at stake—for me at least. If it is the case that we live by faith—by trust—I want to know what that means for me. So exploration of the future of the faith is inevitable—for me.

In the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar I have come to think that our collective or group integrity is now at stake (it has been all along, in fact), if we break off now and be satisfied with what we have done.

Or so it seems to me.

—Robert W. Funk
April 2005

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