Tasty Jesus: Liberating Christ from the Power of Our Predilections

By Bryan Hurlbutt and J. P. Moreland

Tasty Jesus deals with key cultural, philosophical, and theological representations of Christ that find expression in the North American church. Each of these respective cameos of Christ has colored the Christological understanding of many believers in the local assembly. We live in a society deeply embedded in a mindless individualism that is more concerned with a malleable Christ that suits their present taste than the Jesus of both the Bible and historic Christian orthodoxy. This book is at once a critique, a call, and a consideration. It is a critique of particular visions of Jesus that are embraced by specific subcultures, philosophical camps, and theological perspectives. It is a call to the local church, both its attendees and leadership, intended to awaken them to the problems with these various portraits in hope of stirring them to respond appropriately. It is a consideration of the primary ideological counterpoints to each view of Jesus, and a postulation of the best manner in which to equip believers in the local assembly to respond to each distortion of Jesus and live under the lordship of the real Christ. It is time to get Jesus out from under the tyranny of our personal tastes!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781630870546

Bryan Hurlbutt

Bryan Hurlbutt (DMin, Talbot School of Theology; ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is the Lead Pastor of Lifeline Community, a multicampus church in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. He is an author and speaker. He and is wife, Jennifer, have three daughters.

Book preview

Foreword

Jesus of Nazareth stands at the center of history and current world culture. If you take a moment to reflect on this fact, it is actually quite bizarre. Nazareth, which I have seen, and out-of-the-way Galilee were far from the centers of influence in Jesus’ day. Yet he spent thirty-some-odd years in the former and virtually his entire three-and-a-half year ministry in the latter. And, then, he was executed in Jerusalem in the same manner that a large number of other Jewish men were. Yet Jesus predicted that he would stand at the center of history, and it’s hard to understand how it happened, especially compared to Plato, Einstein, Galileo, and Darwin. Hard, that is, unless he actually did miracles and rose from the dead! Still, Jesus would not make Time magazine’s top one hundred list either of the smartest or most influential people of history. But facts are facts, in spite of what our cultural elite is willing to certify. As much as I pray for the New Atheist Richard Dawkins, unfortunately, he just doesn’t get the right to state the actual facts of Western history.

Today, our culture is overrun with a variety of portraits of Jesus tailored to suit the personal preferences of different ideological tastes. Bible-believing academics have addressed these portraits, but their efforts have largely been limited to the scholarly world. But Bryan Hurlbutt’s Tasty Jesus changes things. I have known Bryan for several years. I trust him. And I have great confidence in his insights about culture and ministry. He is an example of the scholar-pastor, having achieved solid academic degrees and a track record in pastoral ministry for sixteen years. Over my four decades of knowing Jesus, one thing had become evident to me: Academics are incredibly overrated. With rare and (thankfully) notable exceptions, as a group, they have little wisdom and almost nothing to say to the average person. If that is true, the natural question arises as to whom, exactly, can speak helpfully to us? I think the answer is obvious, even if it is not acknowledged at Harvard or on the latest version of the national news: pastors. Yes, pastors!! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that, for millennia, it has been Christian leaders—specifically, pastors—who have fulfilled this role.

That is why I am moved and strengthened by this book. To be sure, it is an excellent and timely presentation of the real Jesus against the backdrop of rival, contemporary versions. But, besides that, it is written by a pastor. Consequently, this book demands to be read not only because of its content—which is considerable—but also because of the role-modeling of its author. Read and think very carefully about the pages to follow.

J. P. Moreland

Yorba Linda, California

August 2013

Preface

This book is birthed out of my passion for Christ and his Bride. I love them both. And my hope is that reading this causes others to find a greater desire for Jesus and a greater dedication to the church. I firmly believe that the local church is the hub of God’s kingdom. So if theology is to be preserved and God is to be honored and people are to be loved, it will be the local church that leads the way. In order to do that, some culturally appealing portraits of Jesus need to be exposed and torn down. The goal of this book is to help equip the reader to do just that.

This book exists because I pastor a church of people at Lifeline Community who don’t want to rot their teeth on Tasty Jesus. It exists because my love for them stirs me to teach and disciple them to be aware of his various forms and flavors. It exists because they have loved me well as their shepherd and permitted me the opportunity to write and share these thoughts with others. I am very thankful for my Lifeline family. It is a joy serve and be served by them.

A special thanks to John Smith who, after enduring a motorcycle accident, poured hours into editing and formatting this manuscript. I thank God for you brother. Also, much thanks to Tom Stroman for taking the time to perform a conscientious proofread of the manuscript. Any remaining errors in the text are all mine. This book does not go forward without either you! Also thanks to Christian Amondson and the staff at Wipf and Stock for moving this project forward.

I want to thank my fellow elders and pastoral staff at Lifeline. Your support and prayers through this process have meant the world to me. Laboring with you in compassion for the church has been a privilege. Our camaraderie is a special grace to me. Brad, Darren, Bill, Eric, and Myke: Thanks for guarding the Bride. Also special thanks to my administrative assistant Mary Ann. Your faithfulness and competence are a real blessing.

Much thanks to J. P. Moreland for his input into my life and ministry. His model of a first-rate scholar with an irrepressible love for the local church has been a great encouragement to me. Thanks for being God’s instrument to remind me that the Spirit is alive and well.

Several close pastor friends have provided encouragement and fellowship along the way. Jeff Bucknam (a real life mega-church pastor) and Kyle the Dawdler Meeker walked with me through doctoral studies and made the journey an absolute blast. God has used you both to sharpen me. Cory Anderson, my confidant and accountability partner, your investment in my life and loyal friendship have kept my hands to the plow even when I thought they might slip. Thank you is insufficient.

Thanks to my mother who has never wavered. Her relentless pursuit of the One who purchased her has left me thirsty for the same. Thank you for showing me that the race of faith is well worth the run. Thanks to my father for staying on the anvil even when the hammer has hit rather hard. May Christ’s grace carry you.

I am blessed to be the father of three amazing girls. My life is an ocean of estrogen, and I love every minute of it! My prayer is that they grow rooted in a love for the Christ of Scripture and possess a deep affection for the local church. Brynne, may God take your passionate spirit and let it soar in his kingdom. Reghan, may God take your sensitive heart and let it yearn to know him above all else. Tierney, may your boundless energy be poured out for the One who loves you above all.

My wife literally made this book a reality. Without her commitment to create time for me to write and her dedication as a mom and ministry partner I could not have finished it. If anyone’s fire to get this written burned hotter than my own it has been hers. Jennifer, you are my best friend. Your love for me, with all of my failings, gives me hope that maybe the church can love its flawless Groom with similar virtue.

Lastly, to God who found me on a dead-end road in a sleepy, upstate-New York town, who has lifted my head more times than I can remember, whose grace has never been impotent to see me through, may your name be praised and may your character never be misrepresented by our personal predilections.

Bryan Hurlbutt

West Jordan, Utah

August, 2013

Introduction

I love the Church, O God! Her walls before Thee stand,Dear as the apple of Thine eye and graven on Thy hand.For her my tears shall fall, for her my prayers ascend;To her my cares and toils be given till toils and cares shall end.

Timothy Dwight

A friend of mine is a commercial airline pilot. I asked him to work out some aviation figures for me. I wanted to see if I started a trip on an airplane and was one degree off-course at the outset of my trip from the target point of my destination how far away from it would I land. Here is what he calculated for me. If I were going from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to John F. Kennedy International (JFK) in New York City I would miss the airport by forty-three miles. If I were going instead from LAX to London, I would miss London by ninety-five miles. If I were making a trip around the circumference of the world back to the place I started (LAX), I would miss it by five hundred miles. And if I were traveling to the moon (depending on my precise starting point) I would miss the moon by approximately 4,800 miles! Getting off course early on clearly can really screw things up, especially if you think it has little-to-no impact on your destination. My pilot friend added in his response to me the following statement: Flying without GPS is challenging. I am sure it is. While I am no aviator I can appreciate the value of staying on course. One degree makes a lot of difference and distance only multiplies error. This is true for pretty much anything, and theology is no exception. The further off-line we start, and the further away from the actual events we get, the more difficult it becomes to return to an accurate course. Before takeoff we might borrow a question from the old absurd comedy movie Airplane and ask: What’s our vector Victor?

According to the Bible, getting Jesus right is quite literally a matter of life and death. In fact, in an important Pauline text and in a text from the pen of the apostle John, the importance of an accurate Christology is emphasized well beyond its cognitive impact. For Paul and John, getting the identity of Jesus correct is the difference between heresy and orthodoxy, right and wrong, heaven and hell. Just as taking off in an aircraft one degree in the wrong direction can put you in the ocean rather than on the landing strip, so starting wrong on your identification of Jesus can land you in a spiritual abyss.

The closest thing to an ongoing conversation between the early church and apostolic leadership is found in the letters to the Corinthians. There are two extant letters from Paul to the church at Corinth in our Bible. However, through careful study, we know that these two are actually letters number two and four in an interchange that had at least four letters sent from Paul to the Corinthians.¹ In his final letter to them, Paul gets to the heart of his concern about false teachers that are attempting to infiltrate the ranks. In 2 Corinthians 11:3–4 he states:

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.

These false teachers were preaching a different Jesus. For Paul this allegiance to an aberrant view of Jesus was demonic and threatened to take them away from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. This text teaches us something important: Sincerity of worship does not make up for false content. These teachers got the person and work of Jesus wrong, and no matter how much they claimed they were teaching and preaching the real Jesus, they weren’t, because the essential attributes and the essential acts of Jesus need to be rightly understood and rightly labeled to truthfully say it is in fact the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul would not permit them to make Jesus malleable to their intentions and ideas.

The Apostle John’s concern and affection for the church and his fidelity to Jesus pour out in a short letter he wrote that has been included in the Bible as 2 John. It is a letter that is all about the local church. Just catch the phraseology of the first two verses:

The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not only I, but also all who know the truth, because the truth abides in us and will be with us forever (2 John 1–2).

There are a few vital things to note here. First, John identifies himself as a local church leader. Second, he appeals with the felt warmth of domestic metaphors. Third, he expresses his ministry motivation as rooted in two concepts: love and truth. It is this last observation that establishes the focus of John’s words in this little epistle. His ethical thrust is clear. He wants them to love one another (2 John 5), and he understands this to be accomplished by exercising a fidelity to God in keeping his ethical commands which has love at its apex. But the occasion for the letter is a threat to his readers’ fulfillment of this virtue of love, and it comes in the form of an attack on the truth. It is this intersection between disposition and doctrine, between ethos and logos that forms the crux of the issue on multiple misinterpretations of Christ. I am convinced that this problem must be practically dealt with for the church to embrace the right Jesus and exemplify that Jesus rightly.

The threat for John’s audience was an adherence to a deviant Christology that saw Jesus as not really being a man. It was a seminal or incipient gnostic idea called docetism which taught that Jesus was divine but did not really take on the trappings of human flesh. So John is warning the church against falling prey to a christological error that redefines the essence of Jesus because he is convinced that to do so—or even to welcome those who do so—would be to lose ground. That is why in 2 John 8 he says, Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for, but may win a full reward.

Watch yourselves! That is what this book is about. It is about corporate introspection. I am trying to meddle in the ideological hallways of local churches, in pastors’ studies, in elder board meetings, in youth department discussions, in children’s ministry planning meetings and in denominational leadership venues. Watch yourselves! I want us to get all of Jesus right and let the church fly its course without turning to the right or to the left. Watch yourselves! I want teachers to think twice and thrice before they describe Jesus to the church and tell the church what Jesus wants them to do.

Watch yourselves, so that you may not lose what we have worked for. John’s concern is mine. We—meaning him and his fellow apostles and today I might add countless individuals throughout the history of the church—have worked toward holding fast to an orthodox vision of Jesus, his life and doctrine, and the church as his Bride. If we, today, do not pay attention we stand to lose what we have worked for. So it is our job as Christians whether we are church leaders, vocational ministers or lay people to make sure that we abide in the teaching of Christ (2 John 9). Scholars wrestle with whether this phrase means the teachings of Jesus or the teachings about Jesus. While I am inclined, because of context, to see it as the latter, it is of relatively small importance because Jesus taught us about who he is. So whether we are thinking in terms of Jesus’ teachings or apostolic teachings about him we will arrive at the same point, which is basically: Get Jesus right.

Aberrant views of Jesus do not come down to us on storks. They emerge out of theological and philosophical confusion and are fueled by cultural reactions. In this milieu of philosophy, theology, and culture there are spiritual forces at work that accentuate and exacerbate the ideas and the tensions. All of this makes for creeds and conjectures that are what they are because a past story of information and individuals formed ideas the way they did. So the history of ideas and the preferences of varied cultures meld to produce, in this case, christological cameos that end up dictating enormous aspects of Christian faith and practice. In fact, it is safe to say the historical Jesus, while suffering no personal identity crisis, has been refabricated so much that a snapshot of western culture today could drive us into a spiritual seizure at all of the images posting at random before the mind.

This affectation for different visions of Jesus, coupled with the individualism of western intellectual history, has immersed us in a quandary of literally biblical proportions. Jesus now comes in so many shapes, styles, and flavors—and carries with him all sorts of political agendas, doctrinal creeds, and humanitarian perspectives—that it seems he (whoever he is) cannot be found. Is Jesus liberal or conservative? Is he hippie-minded? Is he hipster cool? Is he loaded with money or poor and needy? Is he communal or a maverick? Is he manly or effeminate? Is he a warrior or a peacekeeper? Is he consumed with right doctrine or right living? Is he defined by justice or mercy? Is he angered more by corporate evil or personal evil? Is he concerned with cultural relevance or historical fidelity? Is he God, providing redemption—or man, providing a role model?

On the face of it these are questions about Jesus’ identity, but the process in getting to that identification is fraught with its own queries. What type of hermeneutic is necessary? How does history unfold? What role does culture play in looking at ideas and people? Who gets to say who Jesus is? Are the differences of interpretation substantively a matter of emphasis or are they emphatically a matter of substance? What role does Christology play in theology? What role does an orthodox Christ play in replicating an orthoprax Jesus? In other words, it is simply not enough to know what is off course, but we must also be able to determine where and why we went off course.

Who Holds the Compass?

Unfortunately most Christians in the west today possess gross overconfidence in their own mental capacities and hold serious suspicion of other minds. They envision themselves as spiritual Eagle Scouts with biblical compass in hand ready to pick their way through the forest of fallen ideas and arrive at the shores of enlightenment. In this regard our present intellectual culture shows us to be the ideological children of Cartesian rationalism, filled with the personal subjectivism of Hume, possessing the prophetic cynicism of Nietzsche. We are sure of ourselves and skeptical of everyone else. We are desperate for relationship but despise accountability. We long for God but wish he would leave us alone. In truth, we are lost, and, while the reasons for it may take on a different rhyme, our disorientation has been present since the garden.

So who holds the compass that can lead us back? If we are wayfarers what has God provided to show the way? The answer to that is three-fold. First, he has given us the Scripture. However to stop there (as many do today) is to fail to account for the other resources God has distributed liberally for our direction. Additionally he has given us the Holy Spirit. We are told in John 16:13a that When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. So is it enough to say that a human who has the Spirit and the Scripture can navigate the world with precision? I think there is yet a third element to providing a holistic answer to the question of the compass for right thinking and right living and that is the church. For some, whom I would call protestant-Protestants (Protestants injected with the steroids of individualism and either modernism or postmodernism, pick your poison), this smacks of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox baggage. It elicits images of a tightly wound ecclesiastical system with top-down controls and privatized knowledge that keeps people under its corporate thumb. However, the look of pioneer Protestantism with its independent spirit and anti-authoritarian bent is a long way from the vision of the Reformers themselves who responded to the parochial machine of the late medieval period.

John Calvin, the most defining theologian of the Reformation, reflected on the Apostle Paul’s words to a young pastor about the role of the church in 1 Timothy 3:15. Calvin wrote:

It is of no small importance that it is called the pillar and ground of the truth and the house of God. By these words Paul means that the church is the faithful keeper of God’s truth in order that it may not perish in the world. For by its ministry and labor God willed to have the preaching of his Word kept pure and to show himself the Father of a family, while he feeds us with spiritual food and provides everything that makes for our salvation.²

Notice that for Calvin the church is the guardian of the purity of Scripture. It is the faithful keeper of God’s truth. And so the church serves as the institution that God chose to minister and labor on his behalf in order to guide his people to a right understanding of his word. It absolutely is the pillar and ground of the truth (KJV).

It is therefore my strong conviction that God instituted the church in general and the local church in particular to be the flag bearer of his kingdom agenda. Since Christology stands at the center of any belief system that tries to take on the moniker Christian then it is incumbent that the church gets Jesus right. If Christ is to be correctly perceived then his Bride must be prepared to propositionally and personally know him. But here is the rub: Christ is not and can never be understood in a narrative vacuum. He is always viewed from a place riddled with ideas, apparitions, folklores, customs, traditions, social structures and mores, collective attitudes, and communicative conventions. In other words, Jesus always bumps into culture.

Much has been made of how the church relates to culture. The defining work, written over sixty years ago, was Christ and Culture by H. Richard Neibuhr. Books written on the subject subsequent to it are largely geared toward interacting with Neibuhr’s five descriptive models for how culture and Christ collide. My intent is not to add to this body of literature but instead to specify five cultural Jesuses that have come to us through the sluice pipe of history, assess them, and give some thoughts as to what the local church can do to stem their tide in the marketplace of ideas. Ultimately this is a book about the fact that the church can be an agent of cultural transformation, but it will take christological and ecclesiological acumen coupled with cultural awareness to do it.

Summary of Chapters

This book breaks down into five couplets that survey five of the most significant christological malformations present in the western world. As an American pastor, I am uniquely attuned to the issues faced in the United States when it comes to our present church’s propensity for shallow pragmatism. As a theologian and student of the history of ideas I also understand that these fallacious pictures of Jesus are polyphyletic in nature. That is to say, they come to us through a line of different ideas and stories down through our western intellectual heritage. It is absolutely crucial on several fronts that we understand what these Christs look like, and how they got here. First, we won’t know how to really deal with them if we can’t pinpoint where they went wrong. Second, we won’t take the differences seriously if we don’t realize the danger that each Jesus represents. Third, we won’t take our role in the kingdom seriously if we don’t realize that it is in our hands as stewards of God’s kingdom to think and act in ways that reflect the truth about his Son. And fourth, we simply need to stop being so superficial when it comes to knowing Jesus and seek to both know and know why we know.

The first couplet looks at the Christ of theological liberalism. Chapter 1 looks at how a Jesus bereft of deity and supernatural capacity came to be the standard for many religious people. The chapter is also concerned with what forms the subtext of this perspective. The second chapter articulates what the local church needs to do about this Jesus. It is a chapter about re-deifying Jesus and not giving into the pseudo-intellectualism of largely naturalistic thinkers.

The second couplet looks at the Christ of Christian fundamentalism. I personally have some warm-hearted forbears in this community, and so I find a special interest in its assessment and a heightened awareness to its subtle but insidious dangers. In the third chapter I trace its developments and look at some of its key ambassadors. We will also note some of its problems and come to see that its doctrinal interest and zeal for truth have a way of blinding it to the real purpose of doctrine and the actual point of truth altogether. In the response chapter to this assessment of fundamentalism (Chapter 4) I chart a course for the local church to rectify the rigidity of this Jesus and suggest some practical tools for doing so.

In chapter 5 and chapter 6 a rather elusive Jesus is discussed: the Christ of postmodernism. Specifically of interest is the Jesus adopted by the emergent church movement. The inconspicuous relativism amidst the genuine and biblical concern for authentic community informs this vision of Jesus that has, over the last twenty years, been recalibrating North American and European church life. Similar to the other couplets, chapter 5 is intended to recount the influences credited with the formation of this portrait and show some of its dangerously appealing properties. Chapter 6 articulates how we can respond carefully, critically, and kindly to this vision. This chapter is especially concerned with the concept of community and provides a response to the appeals of emergent thought.

The fourth couplet feels a little odd on the face of it. In chapter 7 and chapter 8 I look at the Christ of prosperity theology. At the intellectual level this Jesus seems as though he could be dismissed. However, millions of people have thrown themselves before this Christ with little to no thought of the implications of such whimsy. In the assessment portion I show the ideological connections from modern day practitioners all the way back to seminal beliefs cropping up in the second and third centuries. How we deal with this Jesus is deeply a matter of Christian discipleship, and in chapter 8 I propose a direction for the church to take this area of discipleship.

The final Jesus is a challenging one to deal with because it feels like we have to extract him from the epicenter of our cultural motifs. He is at once so obvious that he can be clearly seen, but so entrenched that it is difficult to uproot him even when we know he is present. He is the Christ of evangelical pop-culture. His devotees go on K-Love music cruises, eat Bible Bars and Scripture Cookies, and hand out Testamints. Their kids play with Bible Man, Bibleopoly, and Bible Pictionary. They wear Jesus jewelry and Jesus junk, and their boss is a Jewish Carpenter. So what’s the problem? In chapter 9 I show that you can be so consumed with being relevant that you miss the very heart of your target. And in chapter 10 we look at how Christology can be rescued from being trite and cliché and how the church can take the reins in not accommodating a shallow and spurious Jesus.

Some readers may come to the end and wonder where the real Jesus is. They may wonder why I haven’t taken a couple of chapters to develop a fuller Christology (although I do clearly develop one). The short answer is that my intent is to form what one might call an antithetical theology of Jesus and a practical theology of his church. My hope is that by describing who Jesus is not and what his church ought and ought not be, we can get a more clear sense of both the real Christ and the real church. My desire is that in the prescriptive details of each response chapter we will see what a community with a robust Christology is supposed to look and act like. Because we are a community of Christians, Christology and ecclesiology are indelibly linked. To be the people of Christ is to live communally in the personal knowledge of him rooted in the right propositional knowledge about him. This is the end for which I write.

A Word about the Motif

There is a quote that gets variously attributed to Pascal or Mark Twain that goes something like God created man in his own image and man returned the favor. This is a favorite quote of atheists because they import it into Freud’s Projection Theory³ (that God is a projection of humans longing for a fatherly connection) even though it does not fit. The problem is not that the existence of God is a creation of man, but that the nature of the God we worship is often defined by what we would like him to be. In fact C. S. Lewis pointed out that one of the great evidences for the reality of the God of the Bible is that he is not at all the kind of deity that we would fashion for ourselves. I think this is particularly true of God the Son as well.

Jesus has taken on so many cultural facelifts that one of the great dilemmas we face is getting back to who he really is. Is he a guru Jesus who speaks in mysterious antinomies? Is he a mountain adventure Jesus that would like us all to quit our jobs, follow our passions, and come alive to what we were made for? Is he a hipster Jesus with black-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans who reads on his six-hundred-dollar tablet, drinks a five-dollar latte, and tells everyone through his blog that they should feed the homeless? Does he look like Rob Bell, Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Dallas Willard, John Shelby Spong, Cornel West, or (God forbid) Bryan Hurlbutt? The truth is no one is permitted to make him in their (or anyone’s) image because he just is. However, we subsist as people with deep proclivities, one of which is to make Jesus suit our tastes. This is true when it comes to the most trivial aspects of pop culture, and when it comes to the most treasured aspects of our personal worldview. It is out of this enormous problem that Tasty Jesus comes to life. We can now join the ‘80s electronic music group Depeche Mode and have our own Personal Jesus.

I chose Tasty Jesus because in addition to the conundrum of Christology being held hostage by our preferences, I really like food and thought it would be an apt metaphor to utilize in creatively exposing the issue. Similar to cuisine, Jesus gets sampled, like cheese and crackers from a kind old lady running a booth at Sam’s Club or Costco. He gets cut up and served out in disparate parts. As a result people make him out to be entirely like the part they tasted. Jesus then gets an overhaul and ends up looking like the people who picked him up off the shelf. This is our problem at present. Both Jesus and the church, as perceived in the West, are subjected to the individual tastes of present ideological palates.

Who Is This Book For?

I am writing for the church. I am writing for people in the body that care about the direction that their local church goes. I am writing for people who have seen that ideas indeed have consequences, and who realize that discourse at the ideological level is crucial to the formation of our attitudes and our actions. I am writing for church leadership, for those individuals whose role it is to guard the faith once entrusted to the saints (Jude 3). My hope is that out of the descriptions of these false Christs and my proposed prescriptions for dealing with them we can keep the Bride of Christ on course. Where Jesus goes his Bride will follow. So getting him right is definitive for our lives as participants in his church. As you read I hope that you take care to consider both from whence these Jesuses have come and where they are going. I hope you prayerfully process how God might want you to stand in holy love championing a correct portrait of Christ and his Bride.

1. Throughout

1

Corinthians

5

:

9

Paul refers to a previous letter of his. And in

2

Corinthians

2

:

3–4

Paul refers to a letter he wrote that was rather severe in its rebuke. The nature of this letter doesn’t fit

1

Corinthians, and so it seems apparent that there were at least four correspondences two of which (the second and the fourth we have). And they are canonized as

1

and

2

Corinthians.

2. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,

4

.

1

.

10

.

3. Freud’s theory was actually borrowed from Ludwig Feuerbach. It taught that the idea of God was a projection of individual psychological longings for an ideal father figure. Freud had no controlled data or psychoanalytic observations for his theory. Rather it served as a means for him to use his platform to advance an untested idea. Needless to say, it was decisively turned on its head in a book by NYU scholar Paul Vitz called Faith of the Fatherless.

1

Cream Puff Jesus

The Christ of Liberalism

The Bible is both inspired and covered with human fingerprints—but the Bible is not what we worship. The God to which the Bible points us is what we worship, and the claim of the first followers of Jesus was not that he was God, but rather that he revealed the fullness of God at work in a human being.

Robin Meyers

My mother-in-law is an extraordinary cook. She does with a spatula what fairy godmothers do with wands. She moves it here and waves it there, tosses in a dash of this and a dab of that and—bibbity bobbity boom!—a delicious delight springs to life and flour lies like fairy dust all about. When I am fortunate enough to be around her I like to take part in the fruits of her labor and eat my fill. (Okay, so it’s not just when I am around her, but that’s not the point.) My visits to the in-laws often mean two things for my diet: first, I will be in food-heaven for a week or so; and second, my caloric intake is going to take a serious hit. Oh, make no mistake, I’ll enjoy it all right. But, I’ll enjoy too much of it, and I’ll start seeing the margin between the two numbers on my jeans size widening. That’s never good. So I’ve got to be careful and do what I am not predisposed to do: to eat for sustenance more than I do for pleasure. I need to be a calorie counter rather than a calorie container. My problem, like most people in the western world, is that I am more driven by the taste of the food than by the truth about the food. The last thing I want to hear as I am