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Horsley sketches the major problems in current discussions of the historical Jesus:  the apocalyptic Jesus and the Jesus of individual sayings (the results in a Jesus as wisdom teacher, and the separation of religion from political-economic life).  Horsley’s attempt is to show Jesus as a prophet generating a movement of renewal of Israel over against the rulers of Israel (p 5).

He presents a contextual Jesus, identifying the context of the historical figure; the particular historical situation, the situation of crisis, personal circumstances and qualities, role of leadership, leader’s interaction with the people, decisive confrontation of the leader with the dominant order.  Reading the gospels thus yields a multifactored historical situation (p 26).

Horsley sketches the renewal movements in Israel, elucidating Jesus’ mission, the roles he adapted and the movement that focused on him (p 83); he places Jesus in the role of prophet, pursuing independence from imperial rule and the renewal of Israelite society in justice under the direct rule of its G-d (p 94).  Horsley looks at the gospels, especially in Mark, to detail the contextual perspective. Jesus’ overall program was the renewal of Israel over against the rulers of Israel, and particular episodes of healing, exorcisms, controversies and confrontation were particular components of the agenda (p 103).

We need to take the gospels whole, and not isolate text fragment (e.g., the Jesus seminar, looking at Q [the hypothetical document containing material common to the first three Gospels] apart from the whole).  Jesus’ followers, who cultivated the Q speeches and the gospel of Mark, continued to understand Jesus primarily as the prophet who launched the renewal of Israel against the rulers of Israel, drawing on the memory of the Mosaic covenant.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Horsley looks closely at the gospel accounts from the perspective of Jewish covenantal life. He sees the gospel stories as being full of conflict, as portraying Jesus carrying out a renewal of Israel, and as detailing a struggle between opposing powers (Herod, Caesar, high priests, temple system, unclean spirits and demons)(p1-3). He stresses the need to read the gospels as ‘whole stories’, to see the ‘individual sayings as components of speeches or of dialogue episodes on particular issue; to see that the conflict in the gospels is political-economic-religious (between Judaean, Hellenism and priestly) and details the ‘many resistance movements among the Judean and Galilean people against the Herodian and high priestly rulers as well as against Roman rule’ (p 8).

Horsley emphasizes the crucifixion as the key event that ‘transformed the power that was to intimidate and dominate in the power that inspired commitment and solidarity in forming an alternative social order’ (p 199).  Jesus’ renewal movement regenerated the  power of local solidarity, challenged the rulers publicly in Jerusalem(political/religious capital for Israelites and the Roman power in Judea (p 209).

The movement formed in response to Jesus’ mission provided an alternative society under the direct rule of G-d (the kingdom), expanded the movement in resistance to the power that sought to determine the conditions of their lives (demons, client kings, Roman forces). Horsley’s book emphasizes that Jesus’ followers continue their opposition to the imperial order (to the powers) in imitation of Jesus, so that the Roman instrument of terror became the way to see the Jesus way against the powers.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish studies in Vanderbilt Divinity school and a self described ‘Yankee Jewish feminist’, brings a Jewish interpretation to Jesus’ parables.  The parables challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives.

Through the centuries ‘the parables have been allegorized, moralized, christologized and otherwise tamed into either platitudes such as ‘G-d loves us’ or ‘Be nice’ (p 3).  Jesus’ first followers would have understood more of them; ‘they knew that parables and the tellers of parables were there to prompt them to see the world in a different way’ (p 4).  Levine points out that just as rabbis held that parables were a means for understanding Torah (scripture), so Jesus the Jew uses parables to help his followers understand the kingdom of heaven (p 8).

She points out that  we need to see them in Jesus’ own context, flowing out of his stories and conversations, not reduced to one-line zingers (‘what would the parables have sounded like to people who have no idea that Jesus will be proclaimed Son of G-d by millions, no idea even that he will be crucified by Rome’ (p 3)).  She emphasizes the temptation to tame the parables into screeds against Jewish practice, ethics or theology (p 278).  ‘The people who first heard him did not, at first, worship him, yet they paid attention’ (282).  She details rabbinic (Jewish) perspectives on the implication of Torah (scripture) on the central perspectives of the parables.  I found her work on the prodigals (Luke 15) and Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16) the most compelling.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

This is a book that explores the troubling paradox of the United States appearing to be both imperial and Christian, living the gospel authentically while also being citizen in an imperial superpower, of being exiles in the empire.  Eighteen essays explore themes of a believers Church Conference held in September 2004.

For me, the key chapters are ‘Jesus’ Confrontation with Empire’, ‘Seek the Welfare of the Empire’, ‘A Personal Journey to Political Involvement, ‘Why Believers Might Conscientiously Abstain from Voting’, ‘Prayer by the Chaplain’.  Several chapters reflect the situation and gospel witness in Lithuania, China, South Africa and Vietnam.

For the United States to be both Christian and imperial is troubling from a missiological, ecclesiological, ethical and Christological perspective.  Metaphors express that hope, metaphors of permanence and transience, of homeland and pilgrimage (p 2-4).  Ted  Grimsrud mentions four connecting points in ‘Jesus’ Confrontation with Empire:  empire’s agents care more about coercive power than about truth (e.g., Jesus and Pilate), the empire’s violence toward any all threats, Jesus’ contrast with imperial leadership styles, the resurrection as an ultimate counter-empire statement’ (p 42). 

‘Seek the Welfare of the Empire’ looks at the implications of Jeremiah’s counsel to the Jewish exiles, exploring the tension of theologically being exiles while politically being Christians, with three implications.  (1) G-d’s primary concern is not the United States empire but the state of the United States church.  (2)  Be prepared for the long haul.  (3)  Find a way booth to love and to resist the empire (e.g., prayer, practice and prophetic witness).  ‘Embodying a new reconciled reality, not advocacy to government, is our first order in a church. . . .  Our well being is not in defeating the empire but in providing viable alternatives to it’ (p 306).  A powerfully prophetic book.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Moe-Lobeda starts her book by pointing out the connection between the exploitation of sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic and the vast profits made by corporate owners of the sugar cane industry located in the United States.  As a child, she believed that if you simply knew what was on the other end of material wealth, our economic patterns would change.  But mere knowledge is not enough to enable social change.

The chains of structural violence can, however, be resisted and dismantled.  While structural evil may be beyond the power of individuals to counter, it is composed of power arrangements that are humanly constructed and therefore may be dismantled by other human decisions.  ‘What humans have joined, let humans also put asunder.’  Her book  does not seek to instill guilt in the overcoming of claims, but attempts to identify the moral-spiritual resources in our culture, resources that are to be found in all of earth’s great spiritual traditions.

Each chapter tells a story dealing with people’s linkages, e.g., a community in India whose land is being eroded by bauxite mining, with North America the beneficiary of the bauxite in all the aluminum product.  A compelling section deals with love as transformative power, and reiterating that G-d’s love is the foundation of human love for G-d, self, others and earth.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

1948 in Palestine saw the Nakba (catastrophe) which accompanied the creation of the state of Israel and resulted in the destruction of 500 Palestinian villages and the creation of refugees, a ‘deliberate displacement’ of the Palestinians by Israel as a matter of policy (p 17).  This policy has continued with land confiscations (from Palestinians) and the construction of physical and legal barriers separating Palestinians from Palestinians, ‘resident aliens’.  This has been reflected in Israeli mapping practices.

It is in this perspective that the Nakba provides a counter memory to Israeli policies, an attempt to resist  erasure of the communities that once were home to the now displaced.  Mapping Exile is a look at the Israeli attempt to remove cartographic (mapping) reminders of villages that once stood here but have since been bulldozed by the Israeli army.  It is also a look at the concept of exile, built on the writings of Palestinian Christians.  Weaver also acknowledges his own location as a descendant of European immigrants who settled on land held by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations.

Kufr Bir’im is one of over 120 destroyed Palestinian villages over which tourism and recreation sites have been established (p 97).  Summer camps in these villages for children and youth descended from the original inhabitants map the memories across generations, emphasizing rootedness in the face of uprooting (p 106).

A powerful book using traditional concepts of exile and land, attempting to see how these can grow into possibilities of reconciliation among the sons and daughters of Abraham.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Mike Peled was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well-known Zionist family.  His father, Matti Peled, was an Israeli army officer during the 1948 Israeli war of independence, and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai.

The growing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians came into Peled’s family when his niece was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem.  Pele, who had been living in California, found the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and this began a warm relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.  Several other discussion groups were formed.  Here he heard Palestinian stories of people forced from their homes as children, and Peled and his new friends began to speak at Rotary clubs, sharing their stories of friendship and trust.

A major high point was when the two sons of a Palestinian friend slept over at the home of a Jewish Israeli home (Peled’s home).  The peace position for Peled developed as he heard more of what his father, an army office, had believed and held on to—how his father had “opposed the massive land confiscation Palestinians had to endure, helped those who had legal issues and spoke out against injustice when people were detained or deported” (p 137).

Through Rotary International, Peled and fellow Rotarians sought to bring medical supplies to Israeli and Palestinian victims, including wheel chairs.  He documents the ways in which Israeli officials, especially the army, held up the transfer of medical supplies, and even charged $7,000 in holding fees (p 133).  He shares the stories of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment (p 210) and the terror of check points, even to himself as an Israeli.  Reading his story brings back the arbitrary state terrorism of Jesus’ Galilean experience, except that it’s the Israelis who have assumed the role of the Roman occupation.  A new empire.

Vern Ratzlaff is a pastor and professor of historical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.