Passionate God/Christ In a Changing World/The Jesus of Faith:

...While he slept he had a dream, and from his vision of angel-served for-bidden food he awoke to a task which shook the young Christian church to its foundations...

...So much for Raymond Brown and two decades of exegetical scholarship...

...Events conspired to prepare Dante for his encounter, to prepare in him the weak spot through which the divine energy of love might surge...

...Haughton insists on regarding the Gos-pels as poetic evocations of quite definite events - the transfiguration, for exam-ple - and for her the Fourth Gospel records an old man's perspective on the memories of his youth...

...it fosters a "christo-fascism," painfully evident on the Amer-ican scene today, which denies full per-sonhood to women, Jews, and nonbelievers...

...God's Incarnation belongs to the present and future, not just the past, and for Haughton the Incarna-tion is at last assuming a character con-sonant with the primordial femininity of divine Wisdom...

...He provides a necessary reminder of the shade v side of Christian history in its attitude toward women and non-believers, especially Jews...

...Such experiences, Haughton believes, provide our best clues to the ways of God's love for men and women...

...To reach this conclusion Haughton attempts, in her opening chapters, to jog us out of an eighteenth century corset of rationalism...

...To speak of such a universe Haughton finds a ready language in the romantic literature of courtly love...

...Christ" signifies for Driver the changing pattern of our relationship to a changing, radically immanent God, and while Jesus taught us to live in faith, the creative expectation that can overcome all crippling dualisms in sex, race, and politics, Jesus has his limits as a guide...

...Cook's opening chapter offers a clear and, I think, correct state-ment on the relationship between the two...

...All of this implies a death to old, familiar forms and structures of Christianity, and through it all Haughton perceives the Body of Christ coming into being in a new way...

...He persua-sively argues that need for a foundation for sexual morality that recognizes the social dimension of all human behavior...

...For Driver any doctrine that erects Jesus as the center, model, and norm of history and individual living is morally repugnant...

...Tom Driver shares Haughton's em-phasis on experience as the medium through which God's love encounters us, and because Driver refuses any sunder-ing of experience which would pit the spiritual against the material, he is alive to the connections among the sexual, political, and mystical dimensions of our lives...

...Rosemary Haughton addresses a single question - what difference does Jesus's resurrection make...

...From Charles Williams she adopts the image of the universe as a vast exchange of life, dynamic and ongoing, ultimately an exchange between the Triune God and all creation...

...anchored in Jesus...

...Love's gift demanded in turn a life of dedicated service...

...In an age of rel-ativity Christians must break free of their compulsive fascination with the past...

...Driver is aware that the reception of his book will determine whether he can espouse its positions and still be regarded as a Christian...

...Coming from Haughton, this answer is neither abstract nor complacent...

...I think Haughton's assumptions about the his-toricity of the gospels are wrong...

...Jesus, as Chalcedon taught, did indeed embody the perfect coinci-dence of divine and human love...

...When Dante beheld his Beatrice, passion broke through to transform him, heart, mind, and body, and a new sphere of existence opened to him...

...Rather, these sections of her book resemble in procedure the nineteenth century liberal Protestant biographies of Jesus, even if their spirit is far closer to that of the original Gospels...

...The three very different books gathered for this review agree on at least this: the church today faces a challenge no less epochal than Peter's...

...His method has been dialogic throughout, in-troducing the reader (or student) to a wide sweep of contemporary scholar-ship, and in this last chapter Cook at-tempts a synthesis of four theologians, Piet Schoonenberg on the Incarnation, Peter Hodgson on Jesus's earthly minis-try, Jiirgen Moltmann on the cross, and Wolfhart Pannenberg on the resurrec-tion...

...Driver pro-tests rightly against forms of spirituality which foster infantile dependence...

...Casting aside cherished tra-dition, boldly violating powerful taboos, Peter welcomed a Gentile household into the community...

...Finally, his methodological insight that doctrine bears a socio-ethical dimension deserves much wider implementation...

...Before one hastens to an-swer that question, the strong points of the book deserve attention...

...Hence I am not inclined to read her imaginative reconstruction of Jesus's experience as an educated guess at how things hap-pened...

...But when she seeks those ways manifest in Jesus's experience, using the romantic-structure of transforming breakthrough as a guide, she risks losing even a reader enchanted by her vision thus far...

...William P. Leewe PETER, the New Testament tells us, took a nap one afternoon on a rooftop in Joppa...

...Next, because Christian faith in Jesus and its articulation has a history, Cook devotes three chapters to the devel-opment that runs from Jesus's lifetime, through the New Testament, and up to the Council of Chalcedon...

...Theologies may and must shift with the times, but faith remains anchored in Jesus...

...For Cook, unlike Tom Driver, re-lativity has only a limited place...

...But to assert that this happened once and for all is both to limit God and to cling to an outmoded worldview...

...Like Haughton he professes strong belief in the resurrection, Trinity, and Chalcedon's dogma of the union of God and man in Jesus...

...The answer she comes to is the church, Christ's continuing embodiment in a much more than metaphorical sense...

...Michael Cook offers a sample of the state of christology in more traditional, academic circles...

...In order to collaborate with God in nurtur-ing life, the Christian community today needs both to discover a public meaning for sexuality and to challenge a distorted social world by demonstrating the sa-credness of human community...

...Ritual forms a community in which "christic expectation" comes alive...

...History did not stop when the latter formulated its doctrine of the "hypostat-ic union," and Cook's final chapter at-tempts a contemporary statement...

...Like in-dividual Christians, the church must be ever plunged anew into the Lord's death, and Haughton sees this baptismal process intensifying at present with the collapse of traditional systems of sexual behavior, shifts in ministerial roles, and spirited emergence of communities with a pas-sion for justice...

...He takes far more seri-ously than Rosemary Haughton the scholarly distinction between what we know about Jesus by historical methods and the images which express the reli-gious significance perceived in Jesus by Christian faith...

...But if, for Haughton, "The centre (and the beginning, the end, and all in between) is Jesus, the Christ," Driver spends half his book strenuously objecting to such views...