JESUS CREED- a book review and an essay

I'm reading EYE OF THE ALBATROSS and THE GOD DELUSION. Reviews to follow. Here's my latest Amazon review-

Some say religion is like a sponge that soaks up every bias, prejudice, and sentimentalism- and there is much truth to that (see my forthcoming review of A LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION). Scot McKnight has squeezed the sponge dry; his book THE JESUS CREED-LOVING GOD, LOVING OTHERS distills orthodox Christianity into the Jesus Creed which is Jesus' remarkable answer when asked "what is important." Jesus answered to love God and love others. This foundational creed is derived from the Jewish Shema, Deuteronomy 6.5-5, and from Leviticus 19:15 "Love your neighbor as yourself." McKnight writes, "It should shape everything we say about Christian spirituality. Everything."

Jesus' imperative to love God and love others was radical when Jesus taught and remains radical today or at least muffled under the cacophony of Christian credal contentiousness. McKnight, a professor and Christian biblical scholar, draws on his intimate knowledge of the Bible, holy land history and sociology to highlight, using stories from the Bible and his own life, Jesus' essential and uncompromising command to love God and others.

"What a concept," my high school students might say sardonically without knowing knowing what sardonic means! But McKnight is serious and insists that love God and love others must inform every interpretation of every Biblical verse and every understanding of Christian tradition. McKnight's teaching is gentle with fewer "rough edges" than Jesus' own, and the book is even humorous at times with stories and quotes from friends and contemporary entertainment media. Ironically, McKnight is teaching a not always well received message (MERE CHRISTIANITY by C.S. Lewis comes to mind as another distillation of Jesus' message that threatens the verse-interpretation obsessions of so many denominations). Jesus' simple command that McKnight names the "Jesus Creed" challenges contemporary (and past) Christian perspectives, caught up, as so many are, with worldly and political agendas.

McKnight combines historic settings and metaphor to beautifully bring Jesus' message to life. The table metaphor is one such Biblical setting and metaphor. The Torah required obedience to 613 laws, laws which defined "clean" and "unclean" in ways that sometimes made love of others difficult or impossible. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, for instance, required ignoring the perhaps dead- and therefore impure- Jericho man lying on the side of the road. The Samaritan, however, was willing to violate the law in order to fulfill the greater command to love God and love others. Jesus, in ways that astounded and provoked the elites of his time, welcomed all to his table (and ministry): women, who were marginalized by the ethos of his day, sinners of every sort, lepers, and all the untouchables of that society. Loving god and others meant love god and ALL others.

If the Jesus Creed, love God and love all others, is often hard to hear in the pronouncements of Christians and Christianity, it is even harder to live, witness the history of the church. This book with its simple and difficult message is recommended to all Christians who may have lost the path by following the extraneous, and it is especially recommended to all Christians and non-Christians who have been hurt and angered by those who lost the path and failed to express love and welcome. Possibly like you, my life has been touched more by the path-fallen messages than by the Jesus Creed, a message anything but mean-spirited.

McKnight also hosts a Jesus Creed blog (use your search engine to find it) where daily blogs include the tame, the topical, and the terrifying. Time and time again McKnight and his contributors wrestle with Biblical verses and Christian tradition, sharing their journeys, their doubts, their hopes and fears in ways so moving that any Christian or non-Christian would walk the extra mile with them. These blog pilgrims are sometimes as stripped naked wanderers in the wilderness searching for sustenance and meaning. And that sustenance and meaning comes not from their voluminous knowledge- these blog contributors are mostly professors, students and pastors dizzy with their book knowledge and interpretations- but from six simple words: love God and love all others. From the book and from the blog, one is constantly reminded- all interpretation must be informed by the Jesus Creed. Also, there is general blog agreement that Biblical interpretation must be informed by established scientific facts and theories, but that is another story, outside the scope of McKnight's book.

Another recommended book is A LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION by Sam Harris, an atheist who attempts "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms," and quite successfully, I might add, except for one proviso. Scot McKnight, his book, and his blog escape and are not demolished by Harris' just criticisms. I think McKnight would agree with very much of Harris' critique, and I can't help but think that Harris would find the Jesus creed among the highest expressions of religion. In fact, had Christians learned to love God and love all others there would have been very little basis for Harris' book. However, it must be admitted that, with very few exceptions, Christians and all others, share in this deficit of universal love.

McKnight teaches all to love God by following Jesus along that path of loving others, and his pilgrim bloggers are a testimony to its truth. Harris succinctly shows how Christian dogma and prejudice has continually blocked many from loving others, often creating rancor and sometimes war- another undeniable truth. Somehow, perhaps, love and truth will overcome our history's foreshadowing of tragedy: a world divided into angry factions with weapons on every side that can extinguish the human experiment. These two books, THE JESUS CREED- LOVING GOD, LOVING OTHERS and A LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION inform each other and give some hope that love and reason, indeed the human experiment, might prevail.