This isn’t a political manual ~ it’s a good tome that helps us remember what the fragrance sometimes smells like.
The tendency to construct a Christ in our own terms of reference and to reject any evidence that challenges our life situations and assumptions is human and universal. For many hippies in the sixties, Jesus was much like themselves - an agitator and social critic, a dropout from the rat race, a prophet of the counterculture. For many yuppies in the eighty’s, Jesus was the provider of the good life and the Lord of the spa, a driven young executive with a messianic mission, the prophet of prosperity and the chauffeured limousine. After all, didn't he promise us a hundredfold in this life?...
Blaise Pascal wrote “God made man in his own image and man returned the compliment.” Through five decades I have seen Christians shaping Jesus in their own image- in each case a dreadfully small deity. In his classic work Your God Is To Small, J.B. Phillips enumerated several of the caricatures: Resident policeman, Parental hangover, Grand Old Man, Meek and Mild, Heavenly Bosom, Managing Director, God in a hurry, God for the elite, and God without God head etc…
The same tendency persists today in Christology especially in the disciples of “Jesus Torquemada.” In the fifteenth century they persecuted and tortured anyone who dare to disagree with their limited interpretation of Scripture. Torquemada, whose Spanish name means “orthodoxy of doctrine” died an old man in 1498, responsible for two thousand burnings at the stake and the exiling of 160,000 Jews from Spain as undesirable aliens- all for the glory of God. Torquemadeans are alive and well today in every Christian denomination and non-denomination. The same mean mindedness, jealousy, ostracism, and hatred still divide the body of Christ. (The Signature of Jesus ~ Brennan Manning pgs. 152-153)
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