Why Jesus? Which Jesus?

The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:

Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for his coming was to die for us. He came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45).

To say that Jesus is “the only man who has ever chosen to be born” is faintly ridiculous even on high christological terms. The only possible New Testament support for it is the idea expressed in Philippians 2:6 that he did not grasp at a certain type of being equal to God or a god, my views on which can be found here.

3 comments | Read more...
Out of Egypt I called my son: the rabbit in the hat trick
There are a number of well known “misreadings” of prophecy in the New Testament, where the writer, in his enthusiasm to prove that Jesus is Israel’s messiah, appears to have found a meaning in the text that simply is not there—rather as a magician pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat. It’… ( | 4 comments)
Is the global church following the Western church over the edge?
Phil Wood, who writes an Anabaptist blog from the UK, made this comment yesterday in response to The Church is dead?: I was talking a little while ago with a friend who has a senior role in an American Mennonite Conference. We had a long discussion when I said that in Britain we were… ( | 8 comments)
The church is dead?
In a post on Out of Ur Skye Jethani discusses reports of the decline of the Southern Baptist Convention and of the evangelical church in North America more generally: “50 churches are closing every week, church attendance is not keeping pace with population growth, and the average age of church… ( | 1 comment)
The Gentiles are saved by the salvation of Israel
It is a basic error of modern evangelicalism that it has over-compressed the biblical narrative in order to provide a simple, user-friendly “gospel” for the practical purposes of personal evangelism, pastoral instruction, and the highly subjective forms of worship that prevail in our churches. My… ( | 16 comments)
Paul’s argument about the atonement of Israel in Romans 3-4
This is a close examination of the place of Romans 3:24-25 in Paul’s argument about the fate of the Jews in chapter 3 as a whole. It is a response to objections made to my post on atonement that when Paul speaks here of a redemption in Christ Jesus, etc., he does not discriminate… ( | 2 comments)
Atonement, without the theoretical nonsense
At the simplest level what we mean by “atonement” is that Jesus died for my sins in order to reconcile me to a holy God. But when the church attempts to explain how Jesus’ death on the cross does this, we quickly find ourselves entangled in a number of competing theories: the… ( | 17 comments)
I came to cast a fire on the earth
There is no question that Pentecost is a “wondrous and challenging feast”, which should put “to the lie a lazy, sleepy, hidden, and tepid Christian life”. I quote from a Meditation on the Feast of Pentecost by Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington. But the Monsignor then sharpens the… ( | 2 comments)