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Life Arts    H4'ed 12/27/10

When God's Kingdom Comes (BOOK REVIEW)

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Rob Kall should like the part about bottom-up change, eh? According to Crossan, the historical Jesus was a role model who undertook bottom-up non-violent change in the ancient world.

 

In Crossan's view then, the historical Jesus was a local do-gooder who somehow got himself crucified with the charge "King of the Jews," a revolutionary. Yes, to be sure, he can also be described as leading non-violent resistance against the Roman empire in the Jewish homeland.

 

But what had happened earlier in his life that had turned the historical Jesus into a do-gooder? We do not know for sure what had happened to him. However, for the sake of discussion, let us posit the following two-fold way of thinking about his life:

 

(1) there was evidently a time before which he had not started his public ministry to promote bottom-up change among his fellow Jews; and

 

(2) there was a later time after which he had begun his public ministry to promote bottom-up change among his fellow Jews.

 

In this two-fold scenario, we can then posit that the historical Jesus had had a life-changing experience of some kind, a transformative experience, an experience that had indeed truly transformed him. As a result of this truly transformative experience, he then set about announcing the kingdom of God, because he evidently understood his own transformative experience to be the arrival of the kingdom of God in his life.

 

If this is a fair summary of what had happened to the historical Jesus, then we can draw the conclusion that it is possible for people to experience the kingdom of God, as he did. In addition, we can also draw the conclusion that the experience of the kingdom of God will transform people into do-gooders. However, we might allow that the transformed do-gooders may vary in the good that they then undertake to do, depending on their natural talents.

 

Now, Crossan's new book is not focused directly on the historical Jesus, but on the Lord's Prayer. However, the Lord's Prayer contains the wording "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10, NRSV). But when God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, then God's kingdom has come on earth. Hollywood will probably not make a movie about God's kingdom coming on earth, because a movie about a do-gooder would probably be boring to watch. However, in real-life, a do-gooder might be a very interesting person to meet, perhaps even a magnetic person, as the historical Jesus evidently was.

 

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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