Walter Wink among the Pentecostals and the Jesus Seminar

This snippet of Walter Wink's autobiography is fascinating, tongues-speaking and healing are there. Brilliant to see how this all fits into a scholarly vocation. I really liked this piece of theological reflection on his own journey.

no scholar can construct a picture of Jesus beyond the level of spiritual awareness that she or he has attained. No reconstruction outstrips its reconstructor. We cannot explain truths we have not yet understood. We cannot present insights that we have not yet fathomed. Our picture of Jesus reflects, not only Jesus, but the person portraying Jesus, and if we are spiritual infants or adolescents, there are whole realms of human reality that will simply escape us.

And a bit later these paragraphs, which is not a new perspective, I suspect for my more regular readers, but is again well stated.

My greatest hesitation about the Jesus Seminar is the idea that it is possible to build, from the bottom up, a perspective-free, objective database. Such a neutral, "pictureless" standpoint is impossible. Every analysis is value-laden. We cannot help projecting onto the texts our own unconscious needs and desires for transformation or confirmation, to say nothing of our socio-political location and biases. We need to take seriously the implications of the Heisenberg principle: that the observer is always a part of the field being observed, and disturbs that field by the very act of observation. In terms of the interpretive task, this means that there can be no question of an objective view of Jesus "as he really was." "Objective view" is itself an oxymoron; every view is subjective, from a particular angle of vision. We always encounter the biblical text with interests. We always have a stake in our reading of it. We always have angles of vision, which can be helpful or harmful in interpreting texts. Every description of Jesus is a form of advocacy, whether positive or negative. All lives of Jesus are a kind of apologetics. ... Scholars who believe Jesus was like a cynic philosopher will tend to reject as non-historical any data that suggests otherwise. When the cynic school prevailed, for example, in the voting at the Jesus Seminar, the apocalypticists quit coming; this further skewed the vote. The Seminar is denied the fresh perspective that liberationists and feminists might bring since there are almost no women or non-Caucasians in the group. So the picture that is emerging of Jesus is remarkably like that of a tweedy professor interested in studying Scripture.

That's gotta hurt, but he has a point. It's the old but largely valid criticism of the first quest for the historical Jesus.
Walter Wink Autobiography:
Filed in: Walter_Wink, autobiography, scholarship, Jesus, spirituality, Pentecostal, tongues