Thursday, January 26, 2012

Finding and following an authentic Jesus

Do we need to "find" the "historical" Jesus before we can "follow" him?

I particularly like the paragraph below from Stanley Hauerwas:
Jesus and Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom (1983).

In a strange way, reading Hauerwas also resonates with reading Radical by David Platt. This morning my son and I read the first chapter and I was struck by the following:

We are molding Jesus into our own image. He is beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is whom we are most comfortable with. And the danger now is that when we gather together in our church buildings to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead we may be worshiping ourselves.

1 comment:

  1. "We are molding Jesus into our own image" is no where more starkly displayed than when we stand the typical 'American' Jesus alongside this one:
    http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Pacifism-Fruit-Narrow-ebook/dp/B005RIKH62/ref=zg_bs_12337_63

    Hauerwas' new book, War and the American Difference dishes up a lot of food for thought.

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