Lorraine Parkinson

For some years, I’ve held lightly to the doctrine that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine. It’s not that I wish to demote the importance of Jesus, which was the purpose of the original dogma. It’s more that in the 21st Century a pre-modern conception of divinity does not do justice to the ways in which Jesus of Nazareth connects me with the sacred world.

Lorraine Parkinson’s new book Made on Earth helps me on my journey of belief by adding to the ways in which I can articulate my unease about Christology. She systematically works through the gospels in the order of their writing – Mark, Matthew, Luke and John – to show how the message of Jesus about the kingdom was deliberately transformed into a message about the identity of Jesus as the expected Messiah.

Lorraine Parkinson is a retired ordained minister in the Uniting Church based in Victoria, and is in demand as a speaker for meetings of progressive Christians around Australia.

She tells the story crisply of how the infancy narratives appear to have been added to Matthew and Luke inventing the idea of Jesus being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and thereby being God’s Son. She reveals how the life of Jesus was fitted into the typology of Moses or Elijah to further the argument for Jesus’ more than human status. The gospels were a sermon to persuade readers that Jesus had transcended Judaism and that his followers needed to distinguish themselves from the Jews.

She makes a plea for ‘progressive Christians’ to turn back to the original teachings of Jesus. Believing that Jesus is the Christ has led to a church that relies on fear (making sure you are right with God so you can enter the afterlife), that promotes anti-Semitism (the Jews are depicted as Christ-killers), and that ends up as Christendom (the Church as a new Roman Empire focused on power).

Returning to a simple reliance on the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus will invigorate individual followers of the Way of Jesus and remove the weight of having a doctrinal commitment to a divine/human Christ.

She asks us to remember that the Gospel writers were ordinary human beings who believed they were inspired by the Holy Spirit. I would have liked her to wrestle with the theology of inspiration a little more deeply. As followers of Jesus, understanding God’s truth and how we know it is an important issue.

Writing this book risks the charge of heresy. I admire Lorraine Parkinson’s honest courage. We need prophets to show the way forward for followers of Jesus of Nazareth, and Made on Earth is an important step on that path.… (mehr)