The Jesus of Suburbia

Mike Erre

I finished this book a little while ago, but for some reason, I'm just getting around to blogging about it. The subtitle of this book asks the question, "Have we tamed the Son of God to fit our lifestyle?" I doubt a single book published on the subject has answered "no" to that question, so it's not surprising that the theme of this book is that we have taken the Jesus of the Scriptures and conformed him into the image of a nice, happy Jesus that fits into the values of suburban culture.

There's really nothing ground breaking or revolutionary about this book. The ideas contained in it have been written by others for years, and many are common critiques of evangelicalism even from its staunchest defenders. For instance, the chapter entitled "The Danger of Theology" gives the same distinction between knowing God and knowing about God that has been explained by J. I. Packer and countless others within evangelicalism.

At the same time, however, this book packages these concepts into one book for easy consumption and digestion. Clearly the highlight of the book is its first chapter, entitled simply, "Revolution." The chapter does an excellent job of reorienting the evangelical portrait of Jesus around his revolutionary intentions--even the announcement of his birth would have been read as intentionally subversive to the reign of Caesar, and people gave their lives for the claim that "Jesus is Lord" as a result.

Other chapters highlight what to me are core convictions of the Reformed tradition--the dismantling of the sacred-secular divide in the church today, a treatment of mystery and paradox and how much of evangelicalism has tried to answer questions that need not be answered, and the mission of the church to live redemptively in culture. If you already have formed deep convictions in these areas elsewhere, this book may not add much to your convictions, but if you're looking for a book that packages it all together succinctly and simply, this is a good book with which to start.

The Conversion of the Imagination

Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture
Richard B. Hays

R. B. Hays has written a book detailing the narrative substructure of Paul's letters. He argues with convincing clarity that when Paul quotes or cites Old Testament texts, he is not just prooftexting his own arguments. Rather, he is drawing them in, often quite subtly, to the narrative context of the Old Testament quotation. He may only cite one verse, but he will continue to use vocabulary from the Old Testament narrative to situate his readers within that narrative and give his audiences both identity and exhortation on the ground of their place in Israel's story.

Hays has done a remarkable job, and reading this book ought to cause us to have our own imaginations "converted" as we read both Paul and the New Testament. Hays notes that Paul does not quote the Law to command his readers, even when those laws would seem applicable. Rather, he draws them in to Israel's story, situates them in their proper place, and exhorts them on that basis--as the people of God living on this side of the cross.

The last essay is called "hermeneutics of trust." That essay is worth the whole book. He both critiques the postmodern "hermeneutics of suspicion" and also gives us a new way of looking at the Scriptures from the basis of faith. While not decidedly evangelical, and while he comes from the so called "new perspective," this is still quite an intriguing read.

Jesus' Tomb?

I woke up this morning to the Today Show telling me that they found the tomb of Jesus, his wife and son. Wow. I waited for the historian or archaeologist who made this discovery and found out it was James Cameron, the movie director who made Titanic. This "new" discovery has been around since 1980, and never was thought to amount to anything until Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici got their hands on it.

Here's my take on it: Suppose I'm looking for a guy by the name of John. I know he died a few decades ago, but I can't find his body. I know him to be a poor, unmarried man from Baltimore with no children. In my search I happen to find a family tomb in Washington D.C. where there's a casket with John's first name (I can barely make it out, but I think it's "John") and also the first name of his father. Then I find in the tomb another casket with his mother's first name on it as well as a casket with the name of one of his siblings. But then I find a couple other caskets with names on them that aren't is relatives (one of them might be that of his wife), and then I find a casket with his son's name on it. I further determine that this tomb is the tomb of a rich family, not a poor one, like the John I'm looking for. It would not be a difficult conclusion to reach to say that I have the wrong John. I'm not even sure the casket says John, and what I can tell about him is very different from the John I'm looking for.

Now it's possible that I have completely misunderstood John. He was posing as a poor, unmarried man from Baltimore with no kids. In fact, he had a whole secret identity. Yet without any evidence of that secret life, it's a really stupid conclusion to draw.

The fact is perfectly obvious, from the data that we have about this tomb of "Jesus," that this is a different Jesus from the Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels is from Galilee, not Jerusalem. He and his family were also poor. There's no conceivable way a poor family could afford a wealthy family tomb just south of Jerusalem (and if they had come into money, they would have bought one in Galilee). Furthermore, he is presented as being unmarried with no kids throughout his whole life. The "Jesus" (if that is what the scribble on the ossuary says) of the Talpiot tomb was a wealthy man from Jerusalem who was married with a kid and had other relatives we don't know to be those of Jesus of Nazareth. The tomb contains the body of a man who is a different man than the Jesus of the Gospels.

Now perhaps the Gospels got Jesus all wrong, and he was in fact a wealthy man from Jerusalem with a wife and kid, but without any evidence to suggest that, it's a pretty dumb conclusion to draw from what we've found in that Talpiot tomb. And if the Gospels got all that wrong about him, why would we trust the names of his relatives as stated in the Gospels anyway?

That's my thought on the matter. Anyway, Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar whom I respect, has this to say about it: Ben Witherington's blog.