Leeds Day 2

Day 2 of my Leeds trip. Spent a lot of time reading, watching Star Wars and visiting Christian bookshops. It's good to not have immediate deadlines or things I got to do for tomorrow.

Just discovered this interview with Stanley Hauerwas where he comments on The Passion of the Christ:

That Protestant evangelicals would leave Gibson's movie and say "gee, I didn't know he had to suffer so much for my sins"—quite frankly, that's to make yourself more important than you are ... the problem with saying "I didn't know he had to suffer that much for my sins" is it fails to do justice to the Trinitarian character of the Christian faith. What is happening in the cross is a cosmic struggle.
What did you think of the film?
[It was] an extended exercise in showing how much punishment a human body could take. It didn't help us understand why that punishment was correlative with the kind of life Jesus led. It becomes a kind of sadism that it's not wise to be exposed to.
Can't evangelicals still make an argument that we should think of Jesus as our personal savior, and think of the gospel in terms of how it affects individual people?
I really don't like the word 'personal.' It makes it sound like I have a relationship with Jesus that is unmediated by the church. They have the idea that "I have a personal relationship with Jesus that I go to church to have expressed." But the heart of the gospel is that you don't know Jesus without the witness of the church. It's always mediated.

Comments

[Brodie]

Any - I think you'd really like Hauerwas' new book "Cross-Shattered Christ" - it's a short book and I'd guess that you'd read it ina day or maybe two.

Here's a couple of quotes to wet the appitite,
"mystery names that which we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to rethink everything we think we know".

"as soon as we begin to think this is all about us, about our need for forgiveness, bathos drapes the cross, hiding from us the reality that here we first and foremost see God".

enjoy the rest of you break.

[andy goodliff]

Brodie - I've already got it. I picked up "Christian Existence Today" yesterday, another one of his books. I've read most of Hauerwas' work now.

[-ash]

this is reminiscent of that Evil programme on channel four over Easter. Tom Wright was saying a similar thing... That it was by taking the worst that evil could throw at him that Jesus ultimately conquered it. Much of our thought says that it was the ressurection which overcame evil, but Wright was saying instead that it is the crucifixion itself which destroys evil; and it is the resurrection which is the sign of this, the completion, the seal.

He said that it's not simply about "me and my jesus" but it's about everyone ever. you're right in saying that when we think of Jesus as dying "for me" we reduce the act down to one simple selfless act... of which, actually, we are capable. Instead it is much much bigger than that- cosmic is a good word for this!