Can We Handle the Truth?

A few weeks ago I announced a Summer Reading Group though the re-church network, a collective of emerging, missional Adventist leaders that I co-founded back in 2000. The book I chose is What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church, by John D. Caputo. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University and is known for his work on Derrida and deconstruction (a quick look at his faculty page at the Syracuse website makes we want to drop everything and enroll to study with him).

What Would Jesus Deconstruct? is the winner of the ForeWord Magazine Best Philosophy Book of 2007 award.

The book discussion is taking place at the re-church blog and starts today with a post by me on the first chapter.

Here is an excerpt from the first post which went up today.

The title of the book, which we will be discussing here on the re-church blog, is a play on the title of the classic Christian novel, In His Steps, by Charles Sheldon. I distinctly remember reading this book when I was in college, over 100 years after it was originally published. It had a profound impact on me at the time. It helped me to see an important connection that I had mostly missed up that point in my life. Namely that my profession of faith in Jesus needed to have very tangible results in how I lived my life. Coming from a very conservative place at that time in my life, I was intimately familiar with the idea that my faith should make my life different. But that difference was always in the realm of personal piety and cultural taboos – “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” (Col 2:21). But what Sheldon was suggesting is that my faith in Jesus had everything to do with how I treated others and even the systems of oppression that keep people broken.

At that point in my life I knew nothing of the social gospel (as an actual movement or as an epithet). Nor had the Christian marketing machine yet gotten a hold of this slogan, “What Would Jesus Do?” and made a mint off bumper stickers, T-shirts, bracelets and Special Edition Bibles. Since that time, as Caputo rightly notes, the slogan, “What would Jesus do?” has been used as a weapon in the modern culture wars.

What Caputo is setting out to do, in this book, is to suggest that what Jesus would do – indeed, what Jesus did and does – is deconstruct the religious edifices we have built in his name, i.e. Christianity in its various expressions.

Click here to read the whole thing a get in on the conversation.

Comments

[David Murdoch]

We need works in order to be justified. Faith alone is not enough, but we need to do what it is that Jesus did too and become like Him. Luther was a false prophet. Sola fide does need to be deconstructed and rejected. Being a Christian requires us to not simply believe but to have love as well.

God bless,