Let's Start with Jesus : A New Way of Doing Theology

by Dennis F. Kinlaw

• ISBN13: 9780310262619
• ISBN10: 0310262615
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-01
• Publisher: Harpercollins Christian Pub

Summary

Jesus is the great stumbling block of faith. It is in him that Christianity finds its uniqueness among the religions of the world. He is the Incarnate Son of God, the unique revelation of the Father. Yet so often, we begin the process of theological formulation not with the person of Jesus, but rather, with philosophical arguments about God's existence and logical constructions to determine God's nature.

Author Biography

Dr. Dennis F. Kinlaw (PhD, Brandeis) is founder of the Francis Asbury Society in Wilmore, Kentucky

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	9	(2)
Preface	11	(4)
1. A New Concept of God	15	(32)
2. The Level of Intimacy God Desires: Three Metaphors Illustrate God's Purposes for Us	47	(24)
3. Personhood and the Concept of God	71	(36)
4. The Human Problem: Why Is Identification with God Impossible?	107	(20)
5. The Way of Salvation: It Is All about the Nature of God	127	(10)
6. Fulfillment of Salvation: Perfect Love	137	(18)
Notes	155	(4)
Author Index	159	(2)
Scripture Index	161

Excerpts

Let’s Start with Jesus
Copyright © 2005 by The Francis Asbury Society
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
The Francis Asbury Society, P.O. Box 7, Wilmore, KY 40390–0007
www.francisasburysociety.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kinlaw, Dennis F., 1922–
Let’s start wtih Jesus : a new way of doing theology / Dennis F. Kinlaw.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-310-26261-5 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-26261-9
1. Theology. 2. Jesus Christ—Person and offices. I. Title.
BT77.K425 2005
230—dc22
2005008718
This edition printed on acid free paper.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible:
New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International
Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of
the Bible, copyrighted 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National
Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission.
All rights reserved.
Interior design by Michelle Espinoza
Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 /?DCI/ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A NEW CONCEPT OF GOD
Ayoung chaplain at one of the colleges of Oxford University made it
his practice every year to interview each new student in his college.
He wanted to get to know each one and to explain something of the
religious program in that college. On occasion, after the chaplain had
made his case for the program, a freshman would explain a bit awkwardly
that he did not believe in God and probably would not be active
in the chaplain’s program. The chaplain would then reply, “How interesting!
And in which god do you not believe?” The student then would
try to explain his atheism. The chaplain would smile and comment on
the fact that he and the student had a great deal in common, for he did
not believe in the existence of that god either.
Scholars have called Homo sapiens the religious creature. Wherever
we find human beings, we find religious acts and religious language.
God talk and human beings seem to go together. When a person
speaks of God or of gods, what does he or she really mean? The common
occurrence of the divine word in human language would seem to
suggest that there is universal agreement as to its definition. However,
the reality is quite the contrary.
Most of the gods that so-called unbelievers reject have never had
any objective reality and are simply the goblin constructions of their
own minds. The concept in their heads and the reality behind all things
may have little relation to each other. The god before whom the sincere
believer bows likewise may be a caricature that does little justice to the
reality one believes oneself to be worshiping. The consequences for the
believer whose mental understanding of God is skewed may not be as
serious as would be the atheism of the person who denies God’s very
existence, but it is still damaging. Error for the believer, as well as for
the unbeliever, always carries its unfortunate consequences.
William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted that if
our concept of God is wrong, the more religious we get the more dangerous
we are to ourselves and others. Our concept of God must be a
true representation of the One Who Is, the God with whom all of us
ultimately will have to deal. In fact, nothing is more important for anyone
or for any society.
TWO KINDS OF GOD: POLY/PANTHEISTIC AND MONOTHEISTIC
But how can we know what God is really like? Yehezkel Kaufmann
is helpful here.1 In his signal work on the religion of Israel, he insists
that all of the religions of the world can be put into two categories.
The first category includes all of those that are basically naturalistic
and express themselves either in pantheism or polytheism. These
religions see all things as an unbroken whole and the divine as part of
that whole, or else they see the divine as a name for that whole in which
we all participate. Some of these religions speak of the divine as that
which permeates the whole and in which we all participate. This is pantheism
as seen in Hinduism and contemporary New Age thought.
The other group in this category sees nature as containing the
divine. The divine manifests itself in multiple forces, each of which has
its own particular individuality and should be worshiped for itself. Thus,
the Greeks could speak of Ouranos (the heavens), Gaia (the earth),
Oceanos (the oceans), and Chronos (time) just as the Romans considered
Sol (the sun) and Luna (the moon) primordial divine beings. The
cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world had the same basic pantheon
but used different names. Thus, the Greeks would speak of
Aphrodite and the Romans of Venus, but both were speaking of the
same factor in human life. We draw our word aphrodisiac from the
name of Aphrodite. In speaking about Aphrodite and Venus, the Greeks
and the Romans were referring to the erotic force that attracts the male
to the female and the female to the male. Such natural forces were
ascribed personhood and were worshiped as individual gods. We have
known this polytheism classically in the religions of the ancient Near
East and the Mediterranean world of Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Some
version of it is found among most of the so-called primitive peoples of
the earth. Today it is emerging in our postmodern world as New Age
thought and practice.
Kaufmann’s second group, the monotheistic religions, contains three
distinct expressions, each of which is rooted not in nature (as are polytheism
and pantheism) but in history. They are Judaism, Islam, and
Christianity. One immediately recognizes that these are the three historic
religions related to Israel and the Hebrew-Christian Bible. All three
go back to Abraham and to his world for their roots. These three religions
see nature not as divine but rather as a created expression of a
supreme God who transcends that nature. God is not a part of nature
and must not be confused with anything within it. For these three religions,
to mix nature and the divine is to be guilty of idolatry, the worship
of that which has no existence in and of itself but is the product of
one beyond itself, from which it comes and on which its very existence
depends. In other words, these monotheistic religions all make an ontological
distinction between the Creator and the creation.
The accuracy of Kaufmann’s analysis is beyond debate. This means
that we are indebted to him for simplifying our problem, especially if
we feel the need for a God who can actually make a significant difference
in the human estate, a God who can help us. Polytheism and pantheism
ultimately have no answer to the problem of evil because both
see evil as part of the divine world and of the human world. For them
what we speak of as “evil” and “divine” are not separable, for the evil
of

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Excerpted from Let's Start with Jesus: A New Way of Doing Theology by Dennis F Kinlaw
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