After some difficult days at Sterling College in 1994-95, I knew I would need to leave the college. In Fall 1995, I decided to take the Law School Admission Test, and early in 1996 we decided to return to Oregon so that I could go to law school. Even though I finished teaching at Sterling in May 1996 and would begin law school three months later, and I would need to prepare the house for sale, I wanted to write one more biblical book--a sort of valedictory, I thought, not only to bliblcal studies but to the remnants of my Evangelical faith.

I had been teaching classes on Jesus for almost a decade, and I felt that most of the biblical scholarship on Jesus was relatively useless to American audiences. The reason for that is that most work on Jesus is heavily influenced by German critical scholarship which, beginning just after World War I, assumed that most statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were the product of the later Christian community. Any statement that was genuine had to be proven to be so, only if it passed some rigorous tests of authenticity. My sense in the 1990s was that the assumptions of German Gospel criticism were so foreign to American audiences that the scholarship was actually harmful or discouraging for people who wanted to try to "connect with" or understand the nature of Christian discipleship through studying the life of Jesus. In addition, I thought that there was not much to be said for the scholarship. It simply combined one subjective consideration after another to come up with a portrait of Jesus that was convincing only if you accepted all the questionable steps of the critics along the way.

In addition, I saw that there was a renewed emphasis on spirituality or spiritual nurture in Protestantism in the 1990s. Informed by the great traditions of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, Protestants were trying hard to get beyond doctrinal forms of religion to a sense that the Jesus of the Gospels was a living person, a dynamic power in their lives each day. Thus, the lay of the land as I perceived it in the mid-1990s was that Christians wanted to have a renewed understanding of Jesus as well as a recharged spirituality. However, the way scholarship approached Jesus repelled any but the most earnest seekers of spiritual truth.

The purposes of the book, then, were to try to get beyond the German skeptical approach to Jesus by saying that the entire Gospels, without regard to whether we could establish the authenticity of any particular statement, were the source for spiritual nurture and that the process and nature of Jesus' own discipleship was a great starting point for us to reexamine our own spirituality. Thus the book attempted to look at Jesus' understanding of his own discipleship.

It was this last idea that made the book controversial in some circles because my assumption in writing the book was that Jesus' understanding of his role as disciple of God changed, developed and was refined as time went on. I assumed, then, that Jesus didn't have the "answers" from the beginning but that he, like us, was feeling his way toward fidelity. Evangelical reviewers in general have problems with that concept. In any case, I feel that the book is a fine, though uneven, book. The first several chapters are among my best writing, I believe, and deserve republication. A few of the later chapters show some signs of hasty drafting, as I had a July 31 deadline to get all my work done and then move to Oregon.

As with Trusting God Again, we engaged an artist and, for the first time, an English Ph. D. student, to help us supplement our chapters. Glandion secured these two associates. One took the theme of the flame, derived from the title, and drew four pictures of a Jesus who was nurturing the flame of discipleship in ever growing circles. The four parts of the book are : (1) Kindling the Fire--Studying Jesus Today [one chapter describing the method of the book]; (2) Feeding the Blaze--the Inner Life of Jesus [chapters on the Awakening of Jesus' Call, Jesus and the Mastery of Scripture, Jesus and the Life of Prayer and Jesus and the Focused Life]; (3) Warming the World--The Outer Life of Jesus [chapters on Jesus and Healing; Jesus and Social Justice; Jesus and the Formation of the New Community; Jesus and Suffering]; and (4) The Living Jesus Speaks [chapter entitled A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment]. Our grad student found appropriate language from T.S. Eliot to quote at the beginning of each chapter.

The excerpt that follows is taken from Chapter 3: Jesus and the Mastery of Scripture.

Yearning Minds and Burning Hearts: Rediscovering the Spirituality of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997), pp. 59-60.

Quotation to begin the chapter from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, "In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance....And what you do not know is the only thing you know....."

"From the beginning to the end of Jesus' ministry, Scripture was on his lips. When the devil challenged him to turn stones into bread, Jesus replied in the words of the Old Testament, "One does not live by bread alone (Luke 4:4, quoting Deut. 8:3)." On the day of his resurrection, just before he left his disciples, "he opened their minds to understand the scriptures (Luke 24:45)." Jesus found his life in the Scriptures. They not only provided guidance and strength for daily living, but also gave him a pattern for living and a structure in which to understand his entire ministry. The Scriptures governed his life, imparted values, guided his action. He found God there, and he found himself also.

Jesus mastered the scriptures. It is not unusual for devout people of the Middle East to memorize their sacred test, word for word. But even those who have learned their sacred text, whether it is the Bible or the Koran, know that memorizing is only the first step in mastery. Beyond memorization is meditation, singing the text, and incorporating insights from it into one's life, one's vocabulary and even the very marrow of one's being. The rhythms of the text become the rhythms of one's own life. The Scriptures become a living stream. They feed the soul and form the life.

The process of mastery is a rewarding one and is guided by a few simple principles. First, mastery is driven by desire. Mastery starts from the heart. As heart and mind work in conjunction, insights develop and skills are refined. Mastery requires the learning of methods and skills, and empathy with others who have also tried to master the text. In a moving passage in an early canto of Dante's Inferno, Dante is invited by some of the great bards of the past, such as Homer and Virgil, to join their company. Thus, before Dante can demonstrate the skills of his own mastery, he must become a member of the great group of poets of Western culture.

Second, in order to master something, you must first be mastered by it. In order to become a master, you must submit yourself to a master. The master, whether it is a person or a text or a skill, needs to probe you, correct you, enlighten you, and test you in order to see if you are up to the task of mastery. Mastery is not something casually offered or easily attained; the society of masters is elite indeed. You have to submit yourself to the text in order to hear the lessons of the master. Sometimes the lessons will be obvious. Other times they are communicated subtly, so that only those with ears to hear and eyes to see will understand them. Mastery has its own lessons to teach and its own rhythms to hear. It will yield rewards, but they will be won only after great struggle. We may try to impose ourselves on the text or to wrest victory from the master, but such Pyrrhic victories come only at the cost of losing ourselves in the process.

Third, the process of mastery is a process of slow building. As astonishing insights become evident, they are meant to provide incentive and encouragement--something like getting a second wind or discovering an unexpected dramatic vista on a mountain climb. The Scriptures or the skill only slowly adhere to our memories. We often forget more than we learn. But eventually it becomes united to us, merged with us, and we knew we are on the way to mastery."

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