On March 30, my next book releases — Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence. I hesitated — and wrestled with — writing about Jesus. What more can be said about him than what has been said?
What resulted is a book that weaves memoir, biblical reflection, sociology of religion, church history, and theology into a vision of the “Jesus of experience,” an affirmation and celebration of the many Jesuses who show up in our lives. It isn’t exclusivist or triumphal, it is a story of struggle, learning, and listening — of openness and humility — and what Christianity might and can be in a pluralistic and questioning age.
In this age of leaving church and a politically corrupt version of Christianity, it was actually a joy to write about Jesus — the one who challenges our assumptions and escapes every box we try to put him in. And, somewhat surprisingly, the book also became a history of the last few decades of American religion, as it tells stories from the last days of the old Protestant mainline through evangelical revivals of the 1970s, the rise of the Moral Majority, and all the bad theologies that led, eventually, to the current political crisis in white churches. It starts in a Methodist Sunday School and ends at the World’s Parliament of Religions.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll share some sneak peeks of the book (usually on Fridays) with you all here at The Cottage. Of course, there will continue to be the regular essays on faith and what’s going on in the world more generally (usually on Monday or Tuesday). But I’m pleased to invite you into an early look at Freeing Jesus — a book I hope will inspire new questions about what it means to follow Jesus in these fraught days.
Hope you enjoy today’s preview on the first question of faith: Who are you?
It is just mortifying to be a Christian, except for the Jesus part.
—Anne Lamott
WHO ARE YOU?
From Freeing Jesus, pp. xxiii-xxv.
c. Diana Butler Bass, 2021
A few years after the Romans killed Jesus, a man named Saul was persecuting Jesus’s early followers, known as those who belonged to the Way. When he was traveling to Damascus, a light from heaven struck Saul to the ground as a voice thundered, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul, a zealous Jew, knew the voice of God when he heard it. “Who are you, Lord?” he asked. The voice replied, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:3–5). In a life-changing second, Saul — later known as Paul — became a believer. But not because of a creed or any idea about Jesus, because creeds did not exist yet and the ideas he held about Jesus were not particularly helpful. He believed because he experienced Jesus as a blinding light, as the risen Christ, as healer of his own broken soul. He would have gotten every question on the doctrine test wrong.
In the decades that followed, however, Paul would reflect on his experience of Jesus — and his many experiences of Jesus yet to come — sharing those reflections and insights in letters to his friends and co-workers in small Christian communities throughout the Roman Empire. Those letters, Paul’s ruminations on his Christ experience, were loved and treasured by the church; eventually they would make up about a third of the New Testament and form the theological spine of much of Christian doctrine.
Each letter struggles with Paul’s very first question — “Who are you?” — as he contends with faith, personal travails, and conflicts in the little churches he founded. Through the letters, we do not meet a single Jesus. Rather, Paul introduces many Jesuses: gift-giving Savior, egalitarian radical, Wisdom of God, Merciful One, Light of the World, Joy of All Hearts, mystical insight, deliverer from sin and guilt, cosmic vision. From his first encounter on the Damascus road, along the paths of his missionary journeys, to his own imprisonment and execution, Paul met Jesus over and over again, and Jesus was always new.
Paul’s first question intrigues me. He asked, “Who are you?” not “What are you doing?” or “Why are you talking to me?” “Who” is a relational question, a question that opens us toward companionship, friendship, and perhaps even love. It is the question we try to answer whenever we meet someone new; if we find out “who” is sitting across from us, we might know how to proceed with whatever comes next. To know “who” is an invitation into a relationship that can — if we let it — change us, often sending our lives onto a completely unexpected path.
If we think that being with Jesus means getting the right answers from a creed or remembering points of doctrine from a sermon, we probably will not manage to truly know Jesus. We will only succeed in keeping the right responses scribbled on some back page of our memory. “Who are you, Lord?” is the question of a lifetime, to be asked and experienced over and over again. That query frees Jesus to show up in our lives over and over again, and entails remembering where we first met, how we struggled with each other along the road, and what we learned in the process.
Kingdom of God thinking calls us to risk. We always see through a glass darkly, and that is what faith is about. I will live by the best I can discern today. Tomorrow I may find out I was wrong. Since I do not live by being right, I am not destroyed by being wrong. The God revealed in Jesus, whom I call the Christ, is a God whose forgiveness goes ahead of me, and whose love sustains me and the whole created world. That God bursts all the definitions of our small minds, all the limitations of our timid efforts, all the boundaries of our institutions.
― Verna Dozier
For booking events based on Freeing Jesus, please contact Chaffee Management. We’re booking virtual events through spring 2021, and blended and in-real-life events for later 2021 and into 2022.
For podcast, media, and interview availability, please email Dan Rovzar at HarperCollins publicity: Dan.Rovzar@harpercollins.com.
Albert Schweitzer in 1906: "To those who obey Him, whether they be wise of simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery , they shall learn in their own experience Who He is." - Doug Carpenter
I very much agree with your focus on Jesus and on Paul's question to Jesus "Who are you?" And, with your statement about the creeds and doctrines not being adequate to understanding who Jesus is. But, as a progressive Christian affiliated with the Episcopal Church, I am increasingly frustrated by and dissatisfied with our focus on ancient creeds and doctrine, most of which to believe in requires leaving a scientific understanding of reality behind.