Blogthruabook: The Challenge of Jesus

Today I am launching a new feature on Rethynk and I am calling it Blogthruabook (pronouced, “blog THROUGH a book”). Over the next few weeks I will be reading a book I have been meaning to for a long time and posting on each chapter my thoughts. The first installment of this feature is N.T. Wright’s, The Challenge of Jesus. This book comes highly recommended by friends and after a season of reading secular, social-justice books, I am looking forward to some soul food. I invite you to join with me in this read.

I picked up Challenge of Jesus (CoJ from now on) a few months back and knew right away I wasn’t ready for it. I was busy, as I always am, and felt I couldn’t give this book the time and thought it needed. But today, I am ready. After reading the preface and chapter one, I can already tell CoJ comes at a great time for me. Wright declares in the initial pages that he wants to refocus Christian thought on the “quest for the historical Jesus and that by asking the questions, “Who was Jesus?” and “What did He accomplish?” we are participating in basic Christian discipleship. I can get with that.

I am not going to explain the whole chapter but I will provide a few of my favorite quotes from this chapter that I just might get tattooed on my body:

“Many Christians have been, frankly, sloppy in their thinking an talking about Jesus, and hence, sadly, in their praying and in their practice of discipleship.”

“…the dynamic of a commitment to Scripture is not, ‘we believe the Bible, so there is nothing to be learned,’ but rather ‘we believe the Bible, so we had better discover all things to which our traditions, including our protestant or evangelical traditions, which have supposed to themselves to be ‘biblical’ but are sometimes demonstrably not, have made us blind.”

“If Christianity is not rooted in things that actually happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhists, Marxists or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if He was quite different from what the Gospels and the church’s worship affirms him to have been, then we are indeed living in cuckoo land.”

“If human maturity is evidenced by delayed gratification, one sign of Christian maturity may be a readiness to hear the argument through to the end, not short-circuiting it in the interests of a quick-fix spirituality or missiology.”

My church is going through a series called, Simply Jesus, where we are spending 12 weeks in the Gospels find out who Jesus was. In student ministry, we are calling our students to fall in love with Christ in our summer series simply called, Jesus. And now I am reading this book.

I think God wants me to find out who Jesus is.