February 21, 2005
Crossan
Dominic Crossan’s been in town this past weekend, lecturing six or seven times in three different venues. He talked about St Paul at Christ Church, Jesus at St Paul’s, and heaven knows whom at the divinity school.
We heard his lectures on Jesus. There’s a Woody Allenness about him, size, glasses, body language, quips, only perhaps a more authentic humility. (He writes on a Mac, says PCs are not mentioned in the Bible, but that apples show up a lot. Nobody questioned What about Word Perfect.) But he is so immersed in and well-informed about the social, political, religious milieu of Jesus’ time and message, that it’s not at all hard to see in him what Paul talked about as the “mind of Christ.”
His theme is justice, not the retributive, punishing kind pervading so much of today’s societies and especially our own, but the distributive kind at the heart of the gospel and the will of God. His lack of the pretense so often seen in scholars, especially religious scholars of his stature, is altogether refreshing and restorative. One senses in his presence a nourishing brush with the firm friendliness of grace, a renewed commission to let go and let God.