Christ A Crisis in the Life of God

9781565115408

1565115406

"The brilliance of Jack Miles's new book on Christ is that it manages to 'make strange' the best-known story in history....[A]lthough Miles calls his approach 'literary,' he might as well have called it 'theological.' His deliberate bracketing of the historical question allows him to return, with a clean scholarly conscience, to the purely internal play of meaning that fascinated the early Church fathers. The literary stance recaptures, albeit from a knowing distance, the historical innocence of the first readers of the Scriptures. The Bible has once again become a 'ponderous garden.' Miles's own attitude to the Bible hovers ambiguously between aesthetic detachment and religious commitment, yet this ambiguity is felt not as an evasion, but as an honest acknowledgement of conflicting demands. He describes his approach, in a marvelous phrase, as one of 'serious play.' Perhaps all modern theology, if it is to be intellectually honest, must be conducted in such a mood of serious play."