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Title: Jesus' Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount by Richard Rohr, John Bookser Feister ISBN: 0-86716-203-1 Publisher: St Anthony Messenger Press Pub. Date: June, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The upside-down kingdom
Comment: I've read a lot of Rohr's books, but somehow I've only now gotten around to this one. Immersing myself in it was like jumping into an icy mountain pond: stunning, bracing, invigorating, renewing. It's a courageous book that dares to challenge "religious culture," that institutionalization of Christ's gospel that renders it meek and mild and safe, and to persuasively defend instead the original subversive character of Christ's life and teaching. Jesus, according to Rohr, was much more of a threat to the social and moral status quo than he's usually reckoned to be. In challenging the cultures of money, power, and religionism, he offered a radically counter-cultural model of right relationship that he called "God's Kingdom." This Kingdom grows not by the sword or by power (that would be to fall into the trap the prevailing cultures), but by love and powerlessness. It subverts the established order by simply ignoring it and building the shell of the new within the old. That's one of the reasons Jesus so favored the poor, the marginalized, and disenfranchised: because they fell outside the "system," they hadn't been corrupted by it and were capable of working with God to build the Kingdom.
Richard Rohr's reminder of God's great vision of justice, peace, and fulfillment, a vision preached and died for by Jesus, is a challenge to all of us who call ourselves Christians but have fallen into the habit of "loving Jesus" without acting accordingly. Highly recommended as a tonic to laypersons and clergy alike. Would that Christians would take its message to heart. Then the world might once again marvel at "how these Christians love!"
Rating: 1
Summary: Rohr's spurious "Jesus" couldn't save anyone
Comment: In Acts 16:30, the Philippian jailer asked life's most critical question: "What must I do to be saved?" Richard Rohr's work of fiction would give him an unbiblical answer. Like the Jesus Seminar, Rohr has created an untrustworthy Bible, a deity-challenged Jesus, and an unscriptural means of salvation.
In Rohr's warmed-over Gnosticism, the Bible is really more man's creation, not God's inspired, inerrant, and wholly Holy Spirit-authored Word. Rohr writes, "Almost none of John's Gospel is considered by mainstream scholars to be directly from Jesus. Most of what Jesus says in John's Gospel are words put in Jesus' mouth by this [early Church] community . It is not corroborated by other Gospels or writings, to our knowledge. . . the Gospels contradict one another. . . . Put yourself in the sandals of an apostle . . .you've got to make this Jesus fit the crowd, so you embroider the words a little" (pp. 47-48).
Predictably, the "Jesus" in Rohr's whimsical "Bible" is not the God-Man He claimed to be, but more a "lay teacher and holy man. . . a mystic philosopher" (p. 46). Jesus is recreated by Rohr to become our "mediating symbol, [who stands] between us and God. . . Jesus is in effect our Great Patron who stands between us and God. He tells us we can trust God because God is LIKE [emphasis mine] him" (p. 63).
Rohr's "gospel" is similar revisionism. Orthodox (read Biblical) Christianity had always held that salvation means that one admits he's a sinner in need of salvation, confesses and repents of his sins, believes (through Holy Spirit-given faith) that Jesus is the eternal, uncreated Son of God whose death and resurrection are the only substitutionary sacrifice for his sins, and receives Jesus as Savior and Lord. Rohr's "gospel" proclaims, "God is available as free gift and not through sacrificing another. God needs no victims and creates no victims" (p. 5).
In Rohr's revision of scripture, Jesus doesn't go voluntarily to the cross as a divine, substutionary sacrifice for sins. Rohr opines, "One of the major weaknesses of the Christian understanding of Jesus is that we really do not understand what it was that made Jesus worth killing. It was not because he walked around saying, 'I am God.' . . . His religious culture is finally what gets him killed, for he is living in a religious culture" (pp. 20, 28). That would have been news to Jesus, who said, "I lay down My [own] life--to take it back again. No one takes it away from Me. On the contrary, I lay it down voluntarily. [I put it from Myself.] I am authorized and have power to lay it down (to resign it) and I am authorized and have power to take it back again" (John 10:17-18, AMPL).
The Jesus quoted above is also the Jesus who said, ". . .if you do not believe that I am He [Whom I claim to be--if you do not adhere to, trust in, and rely on Me], you will die in your sins" (John 8:24, AMPL). People who invent their own Jesus, their own Bible, and their own means of salvation are playing with fire. Indeed, they're courting fire.
Rating: 5
Summary: What was Jesus really saying?
Comment: Fundamentalists like the last reviewer may not like the fact that Jesus was as much a social as a spiritual revolutionary, but Rohr forces the reader to confront this fact. It is truly bizarre that so many modern day conservatives proclaim Jesus as "Savior" while discounting or ignoring almost everything he ever said. The Sermon on the Mount is a political and spiritual discourse that undercuts almost everything that right wing Evangelicals and Catholics stand for; todays "conservative Christian" was yesterday's Pharisee.
Rohr is a gifted teacher who knows how to get at the heart of Christ's teaching. The last time I checked he was not a member of the Jesus Seminar, but was a member and leader of several congregations that were devoted to taking Jesus at his word and living out his truth in thought and deed. As Rohr himself has pointed out, Jesus was murdered for his teaching, and anyone who dares to take up His cross and pass that teaching on will be slandered and opposed at every turn. If you just talk about being "born again" (like the current president) people will think of you as a nice religious person; if you dare to preach what Jesus actually preached you we be attacked as a "liberal". I am a teacher and preacher and have found Rohr's work to be invaluable in putting together sermons and lessons. It is unfortunate that this sort of serious Bible teaching is not as widely available in Christian bookstores and over the airwaves as is the cultic nonsense of Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson.
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Title: Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety by Richard Rohr, John Bookser Feister ISBN: 0867164859 Publisher: St Anthony Messenger Press Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer by Richard Rohr ISBN: 0824519957 Publisher: Crossroad/Herder & Herder Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections by Richard Rohr ISBN: 0824519663 Publisher: Crossroad/Herder & Herder Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections by Richard Rohr ISBN: 0824517342 Publisher: Crossroad/Herder & Herder Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Radical Grace: Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr by Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr ISBN: 0867162570 Publisher: St Anthony Messenger Press Pub. Date: August, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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