4.18 Crossan (2015)
Crossan, John Dominic (2015) How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling With Divine Violence From Genesis Through Revelation. New York: Harper One.
Quick Look
Author
John Dominic Crossan is professor emeritus at De Paul University. He is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. In the last forty years he has written twenty-five books on the historical Jesus, earliest Christianity, and the historical Paul. Five of them have been national religious bestsellers for a combined total of twenty-four months. The scholarly core of his work is the trilogy from The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) through The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998), to In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2004). His work has also been translated into twelve foreign languages, including Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. He is served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2011-2012. I've also reviewed on this site Crossan's Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts (2001) (see 4.2), God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007) (see 6.3), The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer (2010) (see 6.8), The Challenge of Jesus (DVD Set and Resource Guide) (2011) (see 4.14), The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus (2012) (see 4.12). |
This Resource’s Key Interpretations and Insights Related to the Purposes of This Website
In this text, Crossan expands his lifetime study of biblical parables, the historical Jesus, the historical Paul, and Christian origins to examine the nature and meaning of the Christian Bible as a whole. The result is a new, groundbreaking progressive understanding of the Bible. It gives progressive Christians--who are often at a loss for anything positive to say about the Bible--new, concrete guidelines for recovering it as the source of a foundational experience of the life-transforming, empowering presence of God. It cannot be overestimated how important this is for our nation, which is super-saturated with the unhealthy conservative view that the whole Bible is "God's Word."
Crossan himself provides a very helpful summary and abstract of this book on his website. (Go to www.johndominiccrossan.com, click the Books tab, scroll down to this book's cover and click it.)
1. In the two chapters of Part I, Crossan first of all explains what led him at that late stage of his career to feel the need to develop a theology of the Christian Bible as a whole. Then as he begins his exploration in Chapter 1, he quickly runs into the common perception that there appears to be two images of God throughout the text--a violent God and a non-violent God. To initially picture this he comes up with the metaphor of "a Biblical Express Train" with the violent and non-violent images running beside each other down parallel tracks. So the question naturally arises: Is the God of the Bible one or the other or some combination of both?
2. In Chapter 2 he argues that his first metaphor is inadequate. The constant pattern of the violent and non-violent images are more accurately seen in a rhythm of assertion-and-subversion that he pictures in the metaphor of "the Biblical Heartbeat"--first comes a radically non-violent image which is always subverted by a violent image. However, the same question as with the first metaphor still persists--which image or what combination of both can be said to represent the biblical image of God?
3. Crossan ends Part I by prefiguring his answer to the main question of his study by claiming that unlike most books the climax is not given at the end but rather in the center. This text will show that "the meaning of the Bible's story is in its middle, the story of Jesus in the Gospels and the early writing of Paul...the sense of its non-violent center judges the (non)sense of its violent ending." (35)
4. the OT NT typologies concrete guidelines not OT as whole or Jesus or Paul as a whole
develops a very helpful typology of violence
5. As the title of the book suggests, the author is keen to convey his view of non-violent God - KT's utopian view
In this text, Crossan expands his lifetime study of biblical parables, the historical Jesus, the historical Paul, and Christian origins to examine the nature and meaning of the Christian Bible as a whole. The result is a new, groundbreaking progressive understanding of the Bible. It gives progressive Christians--who are often at a loss for anything positive to say about the Bible--new, concrete guidelines for recovering it as the source of a foundational experience of the life-transforming, empowering presence of God. It cannot be overestimated how important this is for our nation, which is super-saturated with the unhealthy conservative view that the whole Bible is "God's Word."
Crossan himself provides a very helpful summary and abstract of this book on his website. (Go to www.johndominiccrossan.com, click the Books tab, scroll down to this book's cover and click it.)
1. In the two chapters of Part I, Crossan first of all explains what led him at that late stage of his career to feel the need to develop a theology of the Christian Bible as a whole. Then as he begins his exploration in Chapter 1, he quickly runs into the common perception that there appears to be two images of God throughout the text--a violent God and a non-violent God. To initially picture this he comes up with the metaphor of "a Biblical Express Train" with the violent and non-violent images running beside each other down parallel tracks. So the question naturally arises: Is the God of the Bible one or the other or some combination of both?
2. In Chapter 2 he argues that his first metaphor is inadequate. The constant pattern of the violent and non-violent images are more accurately seen in a rhythm of assertion-and-subversion that he pictures in the metaphor of "the Biblical Heartbeat"--first comes a radically non-violent image which is always subverted by a violent image. However, the same question as with the first metaphor still persists--which image or what combination of both can be said to represent the biblical image of God?
3. Crossan ends Part I by prefiguring his answer to the main question of his study by claiming that unlike most books the climax is not given at the end but rather in the center. This text will show that "the meaning of the Bible's story is in its middle, the story of Jesus in the Gospels and the early writing of Paul...the sense of its non-violent center judges the (non)sense of its violent ending." (35)
4. the OT NT typologies concrete guidelines not OT as whole or Jesus or Paul as a whole
develops a very helpful typology of violence
5. As the title of the book suggests, the author is keen to convey his view of non-violent God - KT's utopian view
Quotes from Text
"Christianity does not count time moving forward to a climactic and apocalyptic consummation but moving down to and up from the arrival of the historical Jesus. Jesus is for us Christians imagined religiously and theologically as the hinge of our history, the center of our time, and the norm of our Bible...What is at stake here for us Christians is theologically quite evident. Whether Jesus accepted, advocated, or used nonviolent or violent resistance against the violence of oppression and injustice determines how we Christians are to imagine the very character of God. That also determines our religious, theological, and ecclesiastical processes as well as our economic, social, and political lives." (240-41)
"Succinctly put, for Christians, Incarnation trumps Apocalypse." (36)
"Christianity does not count time moving forward to a climactic and apocalyptic consummation but moving down to and up from the arrival of the historical Jesus. Jesus is for us Christians imagined religiously and theologically as the hinge of our history, the center of our time, and the norm of our Bible...What is at stake here for us Christians is theologically quite evident. Whether Jesus accepted, advocated, or used nonviolent or violent resistance against the violence of oppression and injustice determines how we Christians are to imagine the very character of God. That also determines our religious, theological, and ecclesiastical processes as well as our economic, social, and political lives." (240-41)
"Succinctly put, for Christians, Incarnation trumps Apocalypse." (36)
Endorsements
“Crossan, one of the most prolific popular writers among the scholars of the historical Jesus . . . proposes viewing the nonviolent movement of the historical Jesus--and not some apocalyptic bloodbath--as the end or center or climax of Christian time.” (Booklist starred review)
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"When studying the Bible, Christians are met with opposing versions for God: one of vengeance and one of compassion. Crossan confronts this conflict and challenges readers to engage in conversations about faith and the historical Jesus.” (U.S. Catholic)
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"Crossan’s treatment of the text is nothing short of spectacular, even when I didn’t agree with his assertions. With skill, wit, and all the finesse of the intellectual giant that he is, Crossan manages to successfully navigate those troublesome texts and…begins the redemptive process of the text.” (The Clarion Journal of Spirituality)
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