Robert Funk's 21 Theses

This list appears at the end of Funk's 'Honest to Jesus'. The opening sentence is verbatim, but the following explanation is condensed

• The aim of the quest is to set Jesus free. Its purpose is to liberate Jesus from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him.
• The renewed quest prompts us to revamp our understanding of the origins of the Christian faith itself. We will have to start all over again with only the parables, aphorisms, parabolic acts, and deeds of Jesus as the basis on which to formulate a new version of the faith.
• The renewed quest also has serious ramifications for how we understand the Christian life. Christianity at its heart is not moralistic. In its finest hours it is ethical. At its worst it is creedal.
• The renewed quest points to a secular sage who may have more relevance to the spiritual dimensions of society at large than to institutionalized religion.
• We can no longer rest our faith on the faith of Peter or the faith of Paul. True faith must be related in some way directly to Jesus.
• Jesus himself is not the proper object of faith. Making Jesus the object of faith would be to repeat the idolatry of the first believers.
• In articulating the vision of Jesus, we should take care to express our interpretations in the same register as he employed in his parables and aphorisms. Jesus quite deliberately articulated an open-ended, non-explicit vision; he did not prescribe behaviour or endorse specific religious practices.
• Give Jesus a demotion. We might begin by turning the icon back into an iconoclast.
• We need to cast Jesus in a new drama, assign him a role in a story with a different plot. The creedal plot in which Jesus has been cast is the myth of the external redeemer. Myths in this category tend to tranquillize, to function as escapist fare.
• We need to reconceive the vocation of Jesus as the Christ. Jesus' functions as the Christ were assigned to him by his admirers in the first century. But the real vocation of Jesus was assigned to him by his vision.
• Jesus kept an open table. Jesus ate promiscuously with sinners, toll collectors and prostitutes. Should we reconceive the scope of eating together?
• Jesus made forgiveness reciprocal. One is forgiven to the extent that one forgives. Human beings can only have what they freely give away.
• Jesus condemned the public practice of piety. He regards religious posturing as hypocritical.
• Jesus advocated an unbrokered relationship with God. He insisted that everyone has immediate and particular access to God.
• Jesus robs his followers of Christian 'privilege.' He robs humankind of all privileges, entitlements and ethnicities that segregate human beings into categories.
• Jesus makes it clear that all rewards and punishments are intrinsic. A version of Christianity that takes its cues from Jesus cannot be preoccupied with rewards and punishments.
• We must abandon the doctrine of the blood atonement. Jesus never expressed the view that God was holding humanity hostage until someone paid the bill.
• We need to interpret the reports of the resurrection for what they are: our glimpse of what Jesus glimpsed. To claim that Jesus rose from the dead should be a way of confessing that Jesus revealed what the world was really like, that he caught a glimpse of eternity.
• We need to redeem sex and Mary, Jesus' mother, by restoring to Jesus a biological if not actual father. Virginity is not necessary godly, and Jesus is not necessarily a more effective saviour for having been born without a father. A bastard messiah is a more evocative figure than an unblemished lamb of God.
• We need to exorcise the apocalyptic elements from Christianity. The desire to reward and punish in the next world is self-serving. It is unworthy of the Galilean who asked nothing for himself.
• We need to declare the New Testament a highly uneven and unbiased record of various attempts to invent Christianity. Reopen the question of what documents belong among the founding witnesses. In a new New Testament, include dissenting points of view. Eliminate the less deserving parts.