Another great post from Daniel Kirk on differences between the Church’s Jesus and the Academy’s Jesus:
so long our Jesus is circumscribed by the academy we will not be able to say the most important things there are to say about Jesus: (1) that God was at work in this man, testifying to him by signs and wonders (Acts 2); (2) that this crucified claimant to Israel’s throne is, in fact, resurrected and bodily standing in the presence of God the Father; and (3) that this crucified one is now the Lord over all things.
That Jesus–one in whom God is at work, one who rules the world, can never be the academy’s Jesus. The Jesus who is worth studying can never be the object of academic affirmation as such.
For all my celebration of the ways that academic study of the Bible has made us better readers of scripture and shed light on the text that reading and responding in faith on its own could never do, it is in fact the reading and responding in faith that makes one a faithful reader of the texts that we actually have.