"Jersak’s book, A More Christlike God, is a direct challenge, a gauntlet thrown down, to the Janus-faced God of Evangelical Christianity." - Michael Hardin
A rather longish response on Peter Enns interview with Brad Jersak on his new (and most excellent) book A More Christlike God: http://www.patheos.com/…/the-need-for-a-more-christlike-go…/
I find it striking that there is such a knee jerk reaction from the Evangelical community to books like Brad Jersak's A More Christlike God. One would think that a community that calls itself after the 'evangel' , the good news, would really seek to actually have good news. If there is one thing I think can be said about the past fifty years of theology is that the Augustinian/Calvinist default position has been challenged as to its presumption, a presumption that the 'Evangelical' alone has the 'biblical viewpoint' or engages in 'biblical theology.' Jesus has thankfully returned to modern theology as the lens by which we read Scripture, tradition and experience.
One can, if one so chooses, spend an inordinate amount of time seeking to claim a heritage that traces itself back through the Reformed tradition to Augustine and if one is avant garde argue that one is in fact 'in line with the early fathers.' The question that gets begged is whether this trajectory itself has already been compromised. So for someone to say, Irenaeus is the first great biblical theologian (as Mr Shepherd does) is disingenuous for it assumes that the apostolic churches and figures were themselves not models of how to read Scripture. In other words, Jesus is our model for how to do a biblical theology and in this hermeneutic trajectory is followed in the New Testament especially by Paul (especially in his later letters), the writer of the Gospel of Luke and both the evangelist and the redactor of the Fourth Gospel, not to mention the incredibly subversive writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
I have sought to show (in my book The Jesus Driven Life to which Brad Jersak contributed the chapter of the Apocalypse of John) that early second century Christian apologists made certain critical and hermeneutical errors that have plagued Christianity now for almost 1,900 years. We are just starting to see those errors in the light of the god news of the gospel and, further, learning to read the biblical texts, not as divine downloads (as Evangelicals do) nor as religious texts (as liberals do) but rather as texts in which we see an authentic wrestling with God, So, in the Bible we do not have a book which is a book of theology (as Evangelicals aver) where we simply have to do word studies or trace themes, nor is the Bible simply a book about ancient religious beliefs which we may or may not accept depending on our current existential situation. Rather, the Bible is a book that teaches us how to wrestle with God; the Bible is a book on how to do theology(and from ancient times to the present this is how Jews, especially their rabbis, read Holy Writ). Personally, I have found great merit in the work of Rene Girard in learning how to read the Bible from an anthropological perspective, something I first learned from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a viewpoint which is sorely lacking in Evangelicalism inasmuch as it has bound itself to a 'theology of glory' or power in its view of Scripture.
Jersak’s book, A More Christlike God, is a direct challenge, a gauntlet thrown down, to the Janus-faced God of Evangelical Christianity. The fact is that Evangelical doctrines of God, of scripture, of atonement and of eschatology all imbibe of sacred violence and to deconstruct any one of these doctrines is to deconstruct them all. And the Evangelical fears this more than anything else. They will resort to ad hominem arguments often accusing those who do so as being Marcionites (even though it is apparent they know little about Marcion’s theology), or of creating a nicey-nice god in their own image; or they will proclaim themselves the ‘defenders of the true faith’ as though Paul or even Jesus was somehow an Evangelical when nothing could be further from the real historical situation.
However, we should expect these knee jerk reactions for the Evangelical is defensing their house which is on fire, only they have yet to see that they have but minutes to flee lest they get caught up in its conflagration. Somehow they fail to address the real problem of the Janus-faced god of their sermonizing and then wonder why it is that their model of being church, bound as it is to Empire and a theology of glory is hemorrhaging. They say that people won’t believe in their gospel, and fail to see that it is not a gospel at all but is a dysangellion, a report of bad news, for the god of Evangelicalism cannot substantively be differentiated from any other god created from an economy of exchange. It can be nuanced and has been nuanced from Peter and James and the Jerusalem church to Karl Barth but in every case what we are left with, even in its best possible light, even when interpreted in bonum partem, is still a god whose anger must be appeased.
This god is at the end of its journey and it is not because liberals or Marcionites have come along. No. It is the deconstructive power of the cross that is bringing about the end of this religious trajectory. Some, like Pete Enns have allowed the cross to do its work in their theology and have become the real Evangelicals, those whose message is no longer somehow embedded in an economy of exchange, whose God is ‘Christlike’, whose message is liberating. There are those like Brad Jersak who have studied at their desks and wrestled with God on their knees and come to a more fruitful and vivifying approach to the gospel. These and many others (like Sharon Baker, Tony Bartlett, James Alison, etc) have all begun to move in the same direction. And as they have led us, more and more have begun examining the Evangelical tradition, seeking to purge it from its enchantment with sacred violence, and the crowd if growing. The line of seekers of real truth, gospel truth, has become a swarm. Each day as Evangelicalism loses its longtime members (the ‘Dones’) the ranks of those seeking to follow Jesus grows. And yes, it irks them no end. They are no longer the big kid on the block who can bully everyone whose does not believe what they believe. There is just too much being exposed about their theology and it is crumbling.
I, for one, feel pity for Evangelicals who remain committed to their blindness, to their false pedigree, to their unwillingness to take Jesus seriously (even as they claim to do so at the top of their lungs). Evangelicalism, indeed Christianity, has been weighed in the balance and found lacking. Now is the time of the Gospel, the good liberating news of Jesus Christ. Gone are the days of blind adherence to doctrines of inerrancy, gone are the days where we confuse God with Molech in our doctrines of atonement, gone are the days where we have to worry about some sort of eternal Abu Ghraib. The day is dawning when books like Pete Enns The Bible Tells Me So and Brad Jersak’s A More Christlike God will be the standard go to texts as people once again seek to ask the most important question any Christian and any theologian has ever asked “Who do you say I am?”
http://www.patheos.com/…/the-need-for-a-more-christlike-go…/