Quotes from Darrell L. Bock

These images may be well motivated, but they still lack the personal contact with a living God that fuels and solidifies religious expression and life.

The result of this first divorce is devastating. Life becomes defined in terms of personal freedom and autonomy, a kind of independence from God and others.

No accountability to God comes to mean no accountability to anyone other than those to whom I choose to be accountable.

So the second divorce is between God and the potential of his revelation to make us, as his creatures, accountable.

Lessing's ditch, which argues for a canyon between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith

A divorce between these texts and Jesus means we see only a shadow of the real Jesus or even a distortion of him.

between Jesus and history or between Jesus and the witness of his followers within history.

It is the divorce between Jesus' entire message and the practice of the church.

In many ways, this book is about these four crucial divorces that the discussion between Christianity and Jesusanity engenders.

Dethroning Jesus seeks to determine whether we have the right to get to that kind of a discussion or whether Lessing's ditch is so great that we should simply throw up our hands and do the best we can to muddle through.

In sum, our book is a look at the tale of two stories and a consideration of whether one or the other story places us closer to the real Jesus, closer to our Creator, and, as a result, closer to ourselves.

Finally, the Gospel of Thomas lacks what we might call an "incarnational perspective.

At the same time, we noted that a number of scholars have tried to make more out of Thomas than this document can bear.

I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly and sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?

What should not be missed is that both Mack and Sanders share a nonmessianic Jesus, one who is teacher, not messiah. This makes them both holders of Jesusanity

underscore that

When Stephen declares that he sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, he is stoned for blasphemy because, in the view of these Jews, no one has the right to be at the side of God's heavenly presence.

The first is "divide and conquer." Here related themes are split apart from each other and isolated so one is early and another is late. The second principle is that "difference equals either disagreement or a distinct theology," so we can again lift out and separate what goes back to Jesus and what the church came to say later.

What Schüssler Fiorenza and Horsley share is a strong emphasis on the prophetic elements of Jesus' teaching that cause us to view people differently. Once again Jesus as teacher is underscored, not Jesus as deliverer.

According to Borg and Crossan, the way to understand Jesus' riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey is to appreciate the story of Jerusalem. Key to this story is the role of the city as the "center of the domination system

Crossan's view of Jesus sounds very familiar as a result of our survey. Jesus was a Jewish cynic peasant with an alternative social vision.

Jesusanity is about a changed view of the world and others.

In Jesusanity, with the exception of Sanders, Jesus is more about wisdom and society than about the full political and spiritual deliverance Israel's prophets once preached.

Postmillennialism expects the proclaiming of the Spirit-blessed gospel of Jesus Christ to win the vast majority of human beings to salvation in the present age. Increasing gospel success will gradually produce a time in history prior to Christ's return in which faith, righteousness, peace, and prosperity will prevail in the affairs of people and of nations.