Christ A Crisis in the Life of God

"The brilliance of Jack Miles's new book on Christ is that it manages to 'make strange' the best-known story in history....[A]lthough Miles calls his approach 'literary,' he might as well have called it 'theological.' His deliberate bracketing of the historical question allows him to return, with a clean scholarly conscience, to the purely internal play of meaning that fascinated the early Church fathers. The literary stance recaptures, albeit from a knowing distance, the historical innocence of the first readers of the Scriptures. The Bible has once again become a 'ponderous garden.' Miles's own attitude to the Bible hovers ambiguously between aesthetic detachment and religious commitment, yet this ambiguity is felt not as an evasion, but as an honest acknowledgement of conflicting demands. He describes his approach, in a marvelous phrase, as one of 'serious play.' Perhaps all modern theology, if it is to be intellectually honest, must be conducted in such a mood of serious play."Miles, Jack is the author of 'Christ A Crisis in the Life of God', published 2002 under ISBN 9780679781608 and ISBN 0679781609.