Reviews for The church and cultures

The average rating for The church and cultures based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-02 00:00:00 Christopher Lawler For Burton Mack, the quest for the historical Jesus is a dead end. It presupposes that the gospels were attempts to actually relate a history or biography of Jesus. Instead, Mack shows that the gospels were literay constructs that served a specific purpose for a community engaging in the making of a new religion. Mack believes that this community eventually "won out" in the theological struggles with the original Christians that were the community that wrote Q. So a community that began with a remembering of the teaching of Jesus as given in Q is forgotten and replaced with a community that mythicized Jesus as a supernatural being. Highly reccommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-29 00:00:00 Ben Rigby This was a profoundly important book in my intellectual development. It asks the critical question of our age for Christians that gets to the heart of our worldview. However, each time I read it, I realize certain things: 1. My earlier struggles to understand bits of the book were partly because of my own laziness in reading; 2. However, it is also because it is a disclocating book, meant to challenge and set apart by several decades; 3. And, thus, at times Blamires comes off as a bit of a grump--in a sort of Gadfly-loving, smart uncle kind of way; 4. So, there are few today that would take the time to bridge the distance to get the key materials while ignoring the grumpy and irrelevant bits. The book needs to be rewritten for new contexts, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the person to do it, though I would love to.