The Once and Future Jesus

Rating:
Summary: Let your enemies love you!
Review: The Once and Future Jesus is a compendium of presentations given at one of the many Jesus Seminars. The writing is insightful, in depth, concise, and enlightening. This is must reading for anyone serious about bible study.

Each of the contributors to this book sheds new and different light on what I once thought I understood. The gems almost slip by you, such as this one from Robert Funk: "Love your enemies is probably the most radical thing Jesus ever said. Unless, of course, one considers the parable of the Samaritan. There the admonition is to let your enemies love you." Perhaps this is not a new slant for many readers, but for me, it was a fresh way to view a wonderful, familiar parable.

And it is so good to have a female point of view. Karen L. King, in Back to the Future, opens our minds to the gospel of Mary and how the "basis for leadership lay in a person's spiritual maturity, not any ephemeral physical characteristic like gender or sexuality."

And of course, the indomitable Bishop John Shelby Spong gives the reader hope for the survival of Christianity in his essay, Christ and the Body of Christ. And Lloyd Geering point out in The Legacy of Christianity that "It was the ancient Israelites who abolished the gods of nature who prevented humans from interfering with their domain. It was the ancient Israelites who declared that humans had been given dominion over the earth by its one and only Creator. It was the ancient Israelites who desacralized the sun, moon, and heavenly bodies and proclaimed that the heavens and the earth belonged to one created system." This small book, packed with new insight, was for me an excellent read.