Yesterday I picked up N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is in preparation for my talk a the next emergent west Michigan "conversation Wednesday". The quote that caught my attention.
"We cannot assume that by saying the word Jesus," "still less the word Christ, we are automatically in touch with the real Jesus who talked in first-century Palestine." Even less are we automatically in touch with "the Jesus who … is the same yesterday, today and forever."
Then today I came across this quote on Jazz Theologian from James Cone’s (often thought of as the father of black theology) book God of the Oppressed
"If twentieth-century Christians are to speak the truth for their socio historical situation, they cannot merely repeat the story of what Jesus did and said in Palestine, as if it were self-interpreting for us today. Truth is more than the retelling of the biblical story. Truth is the divine happening that invades our contemporary situation, revealing the meaning of the past for the present so that we are made new creatures for the future."
This is exactly the kind of theological dialog that i think can happen if the emergent church will expand its theological framework to include African American and other non Anglo theologians.
Can it happen? Will it happen? Only the shadow knows….
Pingback: emerging mosaic » Blog Archive » Jesus as he was, Jesus as he is, Jesus as he will be.