A Brand New, Fancy Jesus
Posted by Eric (May 3, 2006 at 12:08 pm)
Yesterday I dropped by the Borders in Champaign, IL after a special Divine Liturgy there to pick up Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons (more on that in a future post). While roaming around the store looking for Dreher’s book I saw no fewer than three editions of The Da Vinci Code, including a thick, new “Illustrated Edition.” There were also several books on the so-called Gospel of Judas, and a number of other books purporting to tell us the “true story” of Jesus.
What all these books have in common, of course, is the consoling news that Jesus is not who the canonical gospels say he is, the Son of God who is one with God the Father, through whom the Father sends forth his Holy Spirit to transform the world. I suppose nothing so capsulizes the hubris of this age than such books, which claim to have discovered the “truth” about Jesus that was somehow hidden from his disciples and their closest friends, those who wrote the first “True Story of Jesus” books—the ones you’ll find in the New Testament.
There’s one more issue that I’ve got to address in Sam and Bethany Torode’s “Open Letter” repudiating the views articulated in their 2002 book, Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception. That isn’t to say this will be my last word on the broader issues involved, but at least for now it’s my last response to the specific points raised in the “Open Letter.”