When Is It No Longer the Christian Faith?

Presbyterian pastor John Shuck writes thoughtful and controversial comments in his blog, Shuck and Jive. Yesterday's post listed some suggestions by Robert Funk on "Radical Reformation." Funk is one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar, one of the greatest fraudulent academic exercises in the history of biblical scholarhip.

So Funk has ideas to radically reform the church, with which Pastor Shuck agrees, I take it. One of Funk's proposals to radically reform the church is this:

We should give Jesus a demotion. It is no longer credible to think of Jesus as divine. Jesus' divinity goes together with the old theistic way of thinking about God.

Well, isn't that wonderful? It would certainly fit the spirit of the age we are living in. After all, if modern people can't understand or do not like the concept of "divinity", why bother with it?

Funk's suggestions for radically reforming the church are stunning in their gutting the church of anything meaningful, other than human-centered wishful thinking, grounded not in experience nor history, but in some scholar's cherished ideas about the way things ought to be.

If the church followed even a handful of Funk's suggestions, it would cease being the church. If Funk, and Shuck, wish for the church to not be the church, that's their right, I suppose. But how do these suggestions actually help the church? One could have lots of fun thinking of ways to "radically reform" Dr. Funk, and Pastor Shuck, but then they would cease to exist.