Unity House will be releasing my newest book late this summer. The work is entitled And He Walks with Me: Jesus 2.1 - Interactive Edition. It's a study in Christology written for ministers, students/teachers of religion, and interested laypeople. Prelimary responses have been pretty good. We have positive comments from Bart Ehrman and John Shelby Spong, and two of my illustrious Unity Institute colleages--the Rev.'s Tom Thorpe and E.J. Niles--like it, too!
Anyway, I thought it was appropriate to share my delight that the final editing process is done by offering a short excerpt from the book for your perusal.
And He Walks with Me: Jesus 2.1 - Interactive Edition
Why add to the towering pile of books about Jesus of Nazareth? One might reasonably argue that too much has already been written about him. What possible good can another volume of Jesus-talk do in today’s postmodern, post-911, post-Christian world? Surely, all the great ideas about the man from Galilee have already fought their way into print. What fair wind of change could another discourse on Christology—by yet another self-appointed theologian—add to the hurricane of words blowing through Christendom for the past 2,000 years? People have continued to eat, drink, marry and give in marriage, and they have muddled through quite nicely without the current volume to guide them. Isn’t it obvious that, while making their lives and raising their families, people have successfully managed to make and re-make Jesus Christ based on the needs of each successive era?
Yet, it is just that observation—the successive re-making of Jesus, vertically through history and horizontally through contemporary cultures—which distinguishes this book from other works of Christology. And He Walks With Me: Jesus 2.1 – Interactive Edition differs takes seriously the creative process by which people have shaped their Jesuses. In fact, I will argue that creative interaction with inherited images and ideas about Jesus constitutes a healthy, positive course of intellectual and spiritual growth, an essential component in any understanding of Jesus Christ and the faith bearing his name.
There is nothing particularly innovative about the observation that thought-pictures of Jesus have been repainted through time. Authors like Albert Schweitzer and Jaroslav Pelikan have detailed the history of Christological metamorphosis. Schweitzer said the process was unavoidable; Christology must be progressive.
Each successive epoch found its own thoughts in Jesus, which was, indeed, the only way in which it could make him live…one created him in accordance with one’s own character.
Rather than lament the lack of a clear-cut, authentic, historical Jesus from whom to receive perfect guidance, this volume celebrates the ongoing process of Jesus-building, choosing instead to see the culturally influenced images of the Christ as an attempt to get a better look at the imago Dei, the image of God inscribed within each individual. The central point this book attempts to make is that the flexibility of a progressive Christology allows each new generation to discover more about their true nature by discovering themselves in Jesus the Christ.
Furthermore, the discussion proceeds from a postmodern premise, i.e., not only are there multiple paths to the same truth, there are also multiple truths accessible along a dizzying diversity of paths. Not just the blind men and a lone elephant; other creatures, great and small, stand unidentified in the fuzzy dawn of a new, quantum universe. Reputable scientists now suspect that human thought has the power to shape reality in a way that probably would have scared Sir Isaac Newton out of his powdered wig.
Taking the multiplicity of truth as a given, the long history of Christological interpretation and re-interpretation becomes much easier to understand. Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great preachers of the 20th century, advocated openness to new thoughts as a survival tactic for any religious system. He wrote:
"If the day ever comes when men care so little for the basic Christian experiences and revelations of truth that they cease trying to rethink them in more adequate terms, see them in the light of freshly acquired knowledge, and interpret them anew for new days, then Christianity will be finished."
To be fair to Fosdick’s vision, he was a modernist, not a postmodernist, in that he believed there was only one truth and the goal was to refine one’s thinking to grow ever closer to this singular view of reality. He also lived in a time before women rightly raised awareness about the need for inclusive language when speaking of humanity at large. Postmodernists, as mentioned above, postulate an amazing array of “truths” which individuals can comprehend, none of which may be singularly correct for all persons at all times. It is precisely this kind of open-ended discussion which can inform the search for new understandings of Jesus Christ for today and into the future.
Humanity has consistently and creatively re-created the son of Joseph and Mary to meet the needs of each new age. Most recent books written about the changing images of Jesus through time have attempted to recover the original person buried under all the modifications. Some have felt the historical Jesus enjoys special authority, or at the very least a unique and authoritative voice. Consequently, the closer we come to what he actually said and did, the closer we moved to The Truth. This book sets off in a different direction.
Acknowledging that people re-make Jesus in each generation, I will argue, as Schweitzer did, that without a progressive Christology the richness of the Jesus-event will be frozen in time, trivialized and ultimately lost. As Schweitzer also noted, it is probably impossible to reconstruct the historical Jesus from the documentary evidence, the best of which comes from biased sources who were not themselves eyewitnesses.
Now you have a thumbnail sketch of the book’s central thesis, but this work is less a systematic argument than a collection of ideas. Essentially, the current work is a series of essays to introduce a new application of an old, old story--a Jesus Christ upgraded for the 21st century. In the following chapters you will participate in the celebration of a Jesus for now, taking for granted that all Jesuses for the future and all historical Jesuses from the past are, and should be, products of different needs.
