"Who do you say that I am?"
This is the question Jesus once asked his closest followers.
No question penetrates more deeply, no question cuts more closely. The answer, like the sword of truth, can unite or divide.
Before Jesus asked his disciples this question, he asked them first, "Who do people say that I am?"
The answers to this question are at least as numerous as the centuries, multiplied by each successive generation's cultural revisionists and propagandists. The Bible urges us to reckon with the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, yet so many thinkers, past and present, press us to choose one or the other.
The Church herself has not been innocent of proffering a bipolar Christology. We like him exalted to the point of intangibility or humanized to the point of inconsequence. We are guilty of marketing a Jesus fashioned in the image of our target audiences. It is no wonder that so many within the Church and without don't know Jesus, don't understand Jesus, don't get Jesus.
In The Unvarnished Jesus, Jared C. Wilson reminds readers, for the glory of God and the hope of the world, of the original message of the historical person Jesus Christ, who was, incredibly, God in the flesh. Removing the gloss of myriad modern cultural portraits of Jesus, this effort ventures beyond the hype and beneath the misconceptions to see the real historical figure of Jesus Christ in his biblical and cultural context, and in this way to know God more fully, to see what God wants us to know about the revelation of himself in his son.
Written as a pastoral approach to historical Jesus studies, The Unvarnished Jesus presents twelve biblical portraits of Jesus from the four Gospels in the context of the Old Testament and with the illuminating expansion of the New Testament epistles. With a conversational style, whimsical tone (replete with occasional tongue-in-cheek footnotes, a la Dave Eggers), and solid theological foundation, The Unvarnished Jesus fills a noticeable gap in the emerging literature, providing a devotional, inspirational survey of Jesus and his kingdom, a subject most often approached in the Christian market from either a liberal, emergent, social justice angle or from a conservative, apologetic, propositional angle.
The Unvarnished Jesus is a passage-driven example of narrative theology, ideal for a young generation of evangelicals and post-evangelicals frustrated with the Buddy Jesus of the American McChurch but eager for a fresh encounter with the original Jesus of the revolutionary kingdom. With a biblicist's intellect and a storyteller's voice, Wilson synchronizes the disparate portraits of Jesus with the great unifying presence of the gospel.
The Unvarnished Jesus is a table-turning book.