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He finished his Ph.D. at Yale and taught, from 1976 to 1982, at the Yale Divinity School. Although he was part of the "famous Yale revolving door for junior faculty"--meaning Yale rarely grants tenure--Johnson enjoyed his time there. And as an ex-priest, he says, he was frozen out of his natural environment, Catholic seminaries. "I was in a situation where ex-priests were not welcome even in Catholic universities, and that continues today," he says. He was a bit late in the "leaving game," Johnson adds, and the great heyday of Catholic liberalism had passed. Breaking your vows was not as easily forgiven in the 1980s and '90s, under the current pope, as it had been in the freewheeling 1960s. "There was a tremendous conservative reaction, especially in seminaries," he says.

As a result, when he realized he would not be offered tenure at Yale, Johnson went to Indiana University and taught there for ten years, from 1982 to 1992, in the Department of Religious Studies. He loved the "hard-boiled intellectual life" of a state university, but felt strangely "divided" there. "Being outside the context of the community of faith was not good for me, for my heart," he says. But in 1992, he was asked to come to Emory University to be the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, a Methodist seminary.

Johnson sees his greatest contribution as a teacher in helping believing Christian students understand that they don't have to choose between what he sees as the narrow literalism of some brands of fundamentalism and the equally narrow skepticism of historical-critical scholarship. Both of these approaches, Johnson says, miss the point of what the New Testament is trying to accomplish--which is to proclaim the risen Christ as a powerful reality in the lives of believers here and now.

Johnson values the contributions that historical-critical scholarship has made to the study of the New Testament, and he is certainly more in that camp, intellectually, than he is in the fundamentalist camp. Johnson says his objection to the members of the Jesus Seminar is not that they use the tools of "critical" scholarship, but only that they use them badly.

"I'm giving a lecture on this stuff at Ministers Week here" at Emory University, he explains. "And I use the analogy of my relationship with my wife. It's as though I were to spend days and nights closed up in my study, analyzing the historical records of my first date with my wife, trying to figure out if she really was who she said she was. And all the while she's outside my study crying or calling to me, trying to get my attention. That's what so much of New Testament scholarship strikes me as being like."

In the end, though, what really disturbs Johnson about the new "quests for the historical Jesus" is that they all want to focus on a Jesus other than the one portrayed in the Gospels--a proto-feminist, social revolutionary, Cynic sage, or whatever--because the Jesus found in the actual Gospels is so disturbing.

"I think what really causes me chagrin is that people parade this kind of piety about how concerned they are about what Jesus really did and how it shakes the foundation of faith," he says. "No one wants to deal with the image of Jesus in the classical Christian tradition--the image of Jesus that inspired, for example, Saint Francis of Assisi, the image of giving one's life in suffering for others. "This is so much more countercultural and provocative and threatening than any image these skeptical New Questers have come up with. And certainly more challenging and threatening than that of normal, comfortable Christian piety. In other words, if we uncover and confront the Jesus in the Gospels, then we really have something kind of scary to deal with--because that's the image of Jesus that Christian discipleship is supposed to follow. And that's frightening to many people."

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Robert J. Hutchinson is a freelance writer based in Orange County, California.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./CHRISTIANITY TODAY Magazine

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April 29 1996, Vol. 40, No. 5