The Jesus you didn’t know existed (because he doesn’t!)

We took an afternoon trip to Borders today and I briefly passed through the Religion section on my way to Computers and then on to the Business section.  A couple books in Religion caught my eye and this was one of them: Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment by Deepak Chopra.

One of the first things I noticed (as intended by the publisher) was a blurb on the front cover by Eckhart Tolle (I have no idea who he is) that reads:

A gripping tale of one man’s archetypal journey through confusion, doubt, and despair to self-annihilation and the realization of his true identity as the ‘light of the world.’

If you stop and ponder that for a moment or two, and assuming you’ve read at least one of the four Gospels in the New Testament, that should strike you as mildly disturbing.  “Journey through confusion, doubt, and despair?”  I will grant that Jesus grew in his understanding and comprehension of who he was, fueled largely by much time reading Scripture and in prayer, but still, he was and is God in human form.

Is doctrine compatible with Jesus?

This has been an interesting week so far, and it’s only half over.  I can’t remember being exposed to this much discussion about the place of doctrine in the life of a Christian and/or in the life of a church since I was in Bible college.  And that was in the early ’90s. 

I do remember one particular chapel service at college where the speaker was dealing with the topic of doctrine to some extent and made a statement that has stuck with me through the years.  “Truth without love is brutality.  Love without truth is hypocrisy.”  Obviously, or it should be obvious, God is both love (1 John 4:7-8) and truth (John 14:6), and is lacking in neither.  People on the other hand, tend to lean in one direction or another; either towards love or truth.  Personally, I’m a truth guy, and a big part of my sanctification process has been in the “love” department.  By God’s grace I do believe, and Amy would back me on this, that I am making some measureable progress in this, incremental as it may be at times.

Without revealing too many details, here are brief summaries of two conversations I had earlier this week.