The classes I am teaching this week have gone really well. I wanted to share with you the foundations of what I have shared with the intention of developing all of this at a later time.
What is Christianity really all about? First of all, it is about the Man. Before Christianity can move anywhere in a person’s life they must come to know the Man, Jesus Christ the Son of the Living God.
The following is my contention about people’s understanding (generally speaking) of the Man:
(1) For many Jesus is a man who did nothing (or little) more than die on the cross. This is reflected in our art (where the cross is the symbol but the theology and discipleship that it demands are frighteningly absent), and what we tell others (Jesus died for me.) Please do not misunderstand me and think that I wish to in anyway minimize the theological importance of Jesus’ death on the cross. It is indescribably important. But for people to have a Christology that is myopically focused on the cross is to miss SO MUCH of who the Man is.
(2) The church has been guilty of an overemphasis on the book of Acts and the epistles which has created a generation (or generations) of people who have an ecclesiology that is completely disconnected from the head. They claim to be his body but cannot understand how the head acts or thinks or desires. Such is to the extreme spiritual detriment of the church. We need to be a people that is constantly immersed in the Gospels seeking to understand and imitate the Man.
These are just a few thoughts. Here is where I am headed with this. If you do not know the Man (Jesus), you cannot know the Message (the Gospel), which means that you will fail to be about the mission of God (the reconciliation of all creation through Christ and the sanctification of the reconciled), which places you into a position in which it is impossible for you to be changed because of a vibrant relationship with the Man (see 1 John 2:3-6).
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