Wittenberg Door

great article - mel's passion

J. Grant Swank, Jr.
MINUS REACTION TO GIBSON’S JESUS MOVIE EXPECTED
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.
Aug 14, 2003, 10:50

Jesus told His disciples, "They hate me. They will hate you."

That’s in the record. Jesus said it, if we conclude the record to be historically accurate.

Right there is the nub of the current debate regarding Gibson’s movie, THE PASSION. Can we take the accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as historically accurate? Or are they trumped up in some passages? Are they fabricated in others?

When at Harvard Divinity School, my first class in New Testament rattled my ears. The professor, a tall fellow wearing clerical collar, informed the room that we basically would dismiss the start and finish of Jesus’ bio for they were myths — the virgin birth and resurrection.

I later learned that most of what was left in between was to be dismissed as well — not historically sound, trumped up, fabricated material believed by the doofuses but scorned by the academically legitimate.

At the start I told my young conservative head ...

that it was not smart to speak up in that class, not unless I wanted to be bludgeoned by the elite on campus. So I kept my silence, as many did in Europe as Jews were led to the gas ovens. Neither they nor I should be proud of our cowardice, but I did survive the stint.

When approaching the Holy Scriptures, I was introduced to demythologizing. That was the clever technique spun particularly in European theological backrooms and transported to the Western Sphere of how one can read a biblical passage and then scissor out the whatevers. Whatever was too outlandish could see the scissors. Whatever was not scientifically posh likewise. Whatever would not be regarded as historically feasible to a second grader would be shown to the door. And so on and so on.

Frankly, when I got finished with the scissor exercise, I found out that there was not much left to the paper. A lot of it was torn, shredded at my feet on the study floor, so the Book was left pretty much in see-through sheets with gaping holes.

Thus it was that I was to begin my three-year studies toward a Masters of Divinity degree preparing me to minister to others in preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. Thus it was that I found out that if I proceeded in such mode I would be pastoring churches whereby I would have little to proclaim from the pulpit but be well equipped to run the church day care center.

So it was that I learned that if I spoke out for the simple Gospel record’s historical accuracy I would be laughed out of Cambridge. Thus when I went to the school’s bookstore I found stacked the latest bestseller authored by none other than Jerry Falwell — this was in the early 60s. The book was there, not to add to Falwell’s royalties, but to deride what a Bible thumper in Virginia was up to. In other words, it was to instruct divinity school pupils in how to shoot holes in the likes of a Falwell, dimwit that he was.

What is currently happening via debate regarding Mel Gibson’s move-to-be is old stuff. The back-n-forth has been around a long time, but mostly in seminary classrooms and lunchrooms. It’s one big secret kept intact by the theologically liberal. If the truth got out to all the pews, the churches would find another purpose for being — like day care centers — and the clergy would turn their salary checks into chads.

But when a Gibson movie comes up that is religiously aligned with the actual biblical record — sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase — then the demythologizing must begin. And so it is going on as I type.

They are warning Gibson that he is not reading the account correctly. He is too infantile and shamefully innocent in his faith in the record. He must grow up, spread his soul, and thus come into the actual truth of the fabricated beginnings of the Christian trump card.

If I had left Harvard Divinity School believing what was taught me, I would have chucked the virgin birth and literal resurrection along with the feeding of the four thousand, the raising of Lazarus, the changing of water into wine, the healing of the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda. I would have become the arch disciple of superboy theologian hero-of-that-time Bultmann but the failure to Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

That is exactly what the theological liberals of any religion are attempting to do right now to Gibson, devote biblical Christian that he is. They want to blame him, shame him and chuck him before the movie has a ghost of a resurrection of landing in the public lap.

If it gets to the public lap, the liberals say insurrections will rise up against the Jews. And so there will be civil war in the nation. Synagogues will be set aflame.

The opposition says that if Gibson is civil he must prove that he’s not anti-Semitic by exorcising the Gospel records of their Jewish content. Of course, Gibson cannot do that unless he wants to turn THE PASSION into squash. Hopefully, Gibson knows the nub of the debate. And so Gibson will not relent.

Therefore, Gibson is literally hated by some. They will not put it like that; they will dance around verbiage, but what the enemy is up to is to hate Gibson, if not Gibson, then his product.

So it is that Gibson must realize that that comes with the territory.

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Posted by bran at August 15, 2003 03:47 PM | TrackBack