I got hold of this book because of two things. One is when I've seen stuff by Tripp Fuller, I've found it interesting. The other is that it's about Christology. If there was a third, it's that it seems to be trying to look at the Christological issues through an open and relational lens, and I think that these can often offer helpful insights.
I've found that I have needed to read it slowly. I also found that the danger in that was to keep losing sight of it.
It's encouraged me to engage more fully with process theology by helping me to understand how thinking about divinity in dynamic terms could be more useful in this age than the static ontological terms theology has inherited. It's encouraged me to think more about my own understandings and appropriation of the ontological terms and categories. In doing so, becoming more aware of the provisional, incomplete nature of attempts to 'name' God and the things of God. That's no bad thing.
Quotables
...the task of the disciple is to understand the content of the confession and then begin the journey to inhabit that same mind that was in Christ Jesus ...the disciple's predicament is not the act of identifying Jesus as the Christ, but in coming to grips with affirming the mission of God and the character of the Christ.
This one I liked because it affirms the intellectual dimension of discipleship but holds it within the bigger frame of personal, "existential" response. And a page or two further on there is a helpful affirmation and limitation to the reach of intellectual enquiry:
One cannot put a Christology in the form of a report no more than a sonnet into a syllogism... one is not only identifying just how God was present in the person of Jesus, but is also talking about God with one's very self up for grabs.
This is not to decry intellectual endeavour -theology- but rather to limit the implicit claim of modernistic rationalism and to recognise personal commitment belongs to sense-making in community.
Links for this Review
Divine Self-Investment on Amazon
Tripp Fuller’s Website
Please tag your posts for this book as #DivineSelfInvestment
I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
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