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Loading... Christ A Crisis in the Life of God (original 2001; edition 2001)by Jack Miles
Work InformationChrist: A Crisis in the Life of God by Jack Miles (2001)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. In "Christ: Crisis in the Life of Christ", author Jack Miles examines how Christ completed the transition from the God of the Old Testament to the God of the New Testament. He examines selected scriptures in the Bible, and tries to show how Jesus fulfilled those prophesies. The impression I was left with was that God changed his mind, and decided that the forgiving and loving way of Jesus was a better approach in dealing with humanity than the strict and demanding god of the Old Testament. Personally, I found the book neither engaging, moving, nor convincing, and I'd be surprised if leaders of religious groups around the world are echoing Miles' thoughts. A witty follow up to Miles's earlier "God: A Biography" which lacks the charm of the original. Here, Miles takes God from his early literary career in the Old Testament to follow him through the Gospels, and discover what sort of changes fatherhood has made in him. Although the author's conclusions are interesting, the book feels somewhat flat next to the original work. no reviews | add a review
"Five years after his book about God as portrayed in the Old Testament - God: A Biography - Jack Miles gives us his consideration of Christ. He presents Christ as a hero of literature based only in part on the historical Jesus, asking us to take the idea of Christ as God Incarnate not as a dogma of religion but as the premise of a work of art, the New Testament." "As this story begins, God has not kept his promise to end the five-hundred-year-long oppression of the Children of Israel and return them to greatness. Under Rome, their latest oppressor, the Jews face a holocaust. This is God's supreme crisis. Astonishingly, God resolves the dilemma by becoming a Jew himself, Christ, inflicting upon himself in advance the very agony his people will suffer, revising in the process the meaning of victory and defeat. By dying and rising as Christ, God not only swallows up the historical defeat of the Jews but also offers the promise of a cosmic victory that will "wipe away every tear" for all mankind."--Jacket. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)232Religions Christian doctrinal theology Christ; ChristologyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Miles presents his work as a response to a second crisis, that of modern biblical studies. It is one of two possible responses, the other being the attempt to uncover the history behind the story. Since the results of higher criticism leave the scholar with ever-less that can confidently be called historical, many universities have reconfigured their programs from "New Testament" to Christian Origins. In this way, all texts become once again relevant, since all, even those that might not reflect historical events, have what scholars call "Wirkungsgeschichte". But Miles's sympathies are not with this approach, but with the other possible response, which might be called "Bible as Literature". His image for contrasting the two is that one approach strains to see through the stained-glass window to see what's on the other side, while the other approach seeks to appreciate the glass itself. There have been several proponents of this second approach, but none before Miles to apply it not to individual books of the Bible, or even smaller units, but to read the entirety as a vast novel.
The result might offend those committed to a more traditional reading of scripture, while at the same time seeming uninteresting to those who have concluded that scripture is somehow irrelevant. But for those willing to engage the author on his own terms, the result is worthwhile. ( )