The Truth Of God Incarnate

incarnaTe - How We Know That Jesus is God and Man/Top 10 Reasons seeks to show that Jesus of Nazareth can be understood only as the human locus of the Divine. Today not just skeptics but many theologians have rejected the traditional affirmation that Jesus is God and man. Yet neither group is aware of the infrastructure of hard facts that testifies to the truth of divine incarnation. The insight that Jesus is God incarnate imposes itself on the human mind once it considers the various phenomena explored here. Once the dots are connected, we cannot but see the picture. But we cannot see the picture if we ignore the relevant dots. You have the see the trees to see the forest! All applicable evidence - the world religions, world history, Jewish history, the experience of Christians through the centuries, the Gospel narratives, the practice of the first Christian communities, the logical coherence of saying that a certain Person is both divine and human - must be submitted and studied as one whole.

"The Myth of God Incarnate" proved to be a controversial book second only to "Honest to God" in the interest it caused. In order to take the questions discussed in it a stage further, the seven original contributors arranged an extended meeting with a group of their leading critics. This book is the result of their discussion.

Whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead is perhaps the most critical and contentious issue in the study of Christianity. Rather than depend on statements in the New Testament, Swinburne argues for a wider approach.

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation affirms that the eternal Son of God took human flesh from his human Mother and that the historical Christ is at once fully God and fully man. It was the genius of John V. Taylor to apply this profound theological truth to the realities of modern men and women - to show that the doctrine was not some theological abstraction or the result of some intellectual pirouetting. The Incarnation is a truth to be experienced - the redeeming love of God is the key to God's saving love towards human beings and their world. Here Bishop Taylor shows the reality of this paradox. He had the rare gift of interpreting extremely profound truths with clarity and simplicity. The essence of Christianity consists in its refusal to separate the seen from the unseen, the material from the spiritual. In Christianity the seen and the unseen are declared to impinge on us only in terms of the seen and the material. If you separate them from each other, you misunderstand both. And this is what Jesus is about. Jesus was not a superman who could do what ordinary mortals cannot do, nor was he a god disguised as a carpenter. 'I and the Father are one' and 'The Father is greater than I' - Taylor believes these two sentences to be true of all of us, and to a unique degree Jesus revealed to us this truth about ourselves.

Two popular authors consider not only what the Ten Commandments say about the people who observe them, but what they say about God. They are not some set of universal rules-they simply offer ways for a certain people to know a certain God-our God. What truths about God can be known through the Ten Commandments? God cares how we treat other people. God cares how we behave in marriage. God cares about the importance of being truthful. God wants people to take a day off from work each week. Readers will encounter Willimon and Hauerwas at their best as they explore the overarching question-What does it mean for people and the way they behave when they know some of these truths about God?