A New Kind of Jesus

Having trouble viewing this email? Please click here	Forward to a Friend
To ensure delivery, please add announcements@tollelegepress.com to your address book.	SmartUnsubscribesm

here is the Daily Update for Thursday Apr 1, 2010 A New Kind of Jesus by Eric Rauch The fourth question that is "transforming the faith," according to author and speaker Brian McLaren, is the question of who Jesus is. This may seem to be something of an odd question because Christianity itself is dependent on the Person of Jesus. If we don't know who Jesus is then we probably don't know what Christianity is either. In fact, this is precisely the point McLaren is trying to make in this section of his book. He writes, "just saying the name 'Jesus' doesn't mean much until we make clear which Jesus we are talking about. We must face the fact that many different saviors can be smuggled in under the name 'Jesus,' just as many different deities can be disguised under the term 'God' and vastly different ways of living can be promoted under the name 'Christianity'" (p. 119). He is, of course, absolutely right about this, but simply making the observation that many different interpretations exist of who Jesus is doesn't automatically make your interpretation the right one. We must now take a closer look at what McLaren claims the "real" Jesus is like. I found it interesting that McLaren chose this section to respond to two of his critics. I would venture to guess that he thought this was necessary due to the fact that most of what he writes in this section is, for the most part, orthodox Christianity. Since he doesn't seem to have much to reinvent about Christianity when it comes to Jesus, he decided to let his critics create a controversy for him. The first critic that he quotes is none other than Seattle pastor and verbal machine-gunner Mark Driscoll. While McLaren doesn't reference the fact that Driscoll is the one saying it or where he says it (as best I can tell it comes from an article in a 2007 issue of Relevant Magazine), he spends a considerable amount of space addressing Driscoll's comment about Jesus, which is as follows: In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. It should be patently obvious after an initial reading of this quotation that Driscoll is taking just a little bit of dramatic license to make a serious point. Although McLaren responds to Driscoll throughout the remainder of the chapter as if this is the only thing that Driscoll believes about Jesus, I have read enough of Driscoll in other places to be confident that Driscoll is well aware of the kind, compassionate, and forgiving Jesus to which McLaren desires to point his readers. Driscoll is reacting to what he believes is a "sissified" caricature of Jesus, just as McLaren is reacting to Driscoll's over-bearing "prize-fighter" caricature of Jesus... CONTINUE READING THIS ARTICLE Click here to subscribe to the daily Christian Reader email updates © 2010 Christian Reader — A Division of Tolle Lege Press, LLC 46 Mountain Park Drive • White Hall, WV • 26554

Forward to a Friend
SmartUnsubscribesm
This email was sent to ignoble.experiment@arconati.us by announcements@tollelegepress.com
Update Profile/Email Address | SmartUnsubscribesm from this list | Privacy Policy