There’s a half-price shelf in the bookstore at the Liturgical Press offices that I scour anytime I’m on campus during business hours. Last week I found a slightly damaged copy of a new book by Susan Pitchford, called God in the Dark. It did not take much of a perusal to determine that I had found a treasure - sensitive, thoughtful, deep...and funny. Today I started to read it, and although I’m not very far yet, I'm enjoying it very much.
Here’s a quote from the second chapter (“The Good News, Part Two”):
- I once had a dream in which I was invited to a friend’s family party, where everyone had brought a different type of brownies - one for every theory of the atonement. The ones I tried were the "penal substitutionary atonement brownies," which were so sinful and deadly that you’d better let Jesus eat them for you.
I think using brownies to explain all the different theories of who Jesus is and why he died would be awesome! (Liberation theology brownies would use only Fair Trade chocolate, of course).
I spent two weeks this summer in a class studying the development of doctrine and exploring ideas about Jesus Christ. It’s heady stuff - and I mean that in every way you can imagine. We covered the history of the earliest Christians and how they worked through what they had just experienced. We examined the intersection of major periods in human history - the Enlightenment, Reformation, Industrial Revolution, modernism - with theology. (It is truly fascinating that the way ordinary people as well as theologians think about Jesus is deeply influenced by their context, especially scientific development.)
Ultimately, from the moment the angel announced the Incarnation to Mary, everyone who ever encountered Jesus asked the same question: “Who is this guy?”
I left the class with more questions than I had when we started - which I think (and I know our professor would agree) is a good thing. Because whatever you think of Jesus, whoever you think he is, he’s more than that.
To journey with Jesus means to keep on trying to figure him out - brownies, anyone?
