Restoring God’s Image — Preface

Peter TeWinkle
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

I’m thinking about writing a book. It’s about the way we imagine God and how we embody that image in our lives (or not). I’ll focus particularly on the death of Jesus. I’m going to test it out on Medium. Here we go!

Trinity, Andrei Rublev

A few years ago we started a summer book club at our church. Each book we chose was short and accessible. At first, that bothered me. I thought that we were taking the easy way out; avoiding hard work and challenging thinking. I was wrong. Over those summers I learned that short doesn’t have to mean shallow and accessible doesn’t have to mean simple.

During those summers, we read books like Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom and Church: Why Bother? by Philip Yancey and Love Wins by Rob Bell (yes, all white guys). While the books were short and accessible, the conversations that they stimulated revealed deep thoughts and profound questions. Short books seem to be a spring board into a deeper conversation.

Around the time that we were having these conversations the Barna Group, a Christian resource and research organization, introduced a new resource called Frames. The Barna Group recognized that most people don’t have large chunks of time to read. They realized that many people don’t get to finish books that they have every intention of finishing. Each book in the Frames series is short, concise, and attempts to frame current issues in our culture.

Not long after Frames came out I began taking classes at Eastern Mennonite University’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute. It was there that I was introduced to “little books” as in The Little Book of Restorative Justice, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, and The Little Book of Trauma Healing. Each of these books served as an introduction to a topic that we were studying, but I found them so informative and useful. They were easy to get through the first time, but also easy to reengage if I needed a quick refresher.

This book is a springboard into a deeper conversation. We are spiritual beings and it’s important that we take that inner life seriously. It’s not always easy to talk about because faith and religion are treated as such private matters. A book like this can help you jump into that conversation because you can talk about its content (or its author) before you get personal.

This book will also serve as a frame for that conversation. There is so much information at our fingertips that it’s difficult to know where to start. Sometimes having too much information and too many choices prevents us from ever getting started. A frame helps us focus on the picture right in front of us.

Regardless of how you feel about the Christian faith at this moment, it is a vital part of our culture. That is true in obvious ways when you see Christians out in public and when Jesus’ name is used to justify different beliefs and behaviors. It is also true in more hidden ways as well as I’ll try to show in the introduction. If you hope to make any change in our culture, the Christian faith is something that you’ll want to be able to engage. I want to frame it for you in this little book.

So, please know that this book is little for a reason. It is merely an introduction, but I hope that you find it informative and useful. It will introduce you to other authors and other streams of thought. I hope that it’s easy to get through the first time you pick it up but I hope that you will pick it up more than once for an occasional refresher. This book will introduce you to a central aspect of the Christian faith: Jesus and his death.

Christ of St. John of the Cross, Salvador Dali

It may seem odd to write a book on something that seems so religious when we are living in times that are losing their religion. For many people Christianity has become irrelevant. For others it is old-fashioned superstition. For others still it holds a truth that has been spoiled by the church and has become too painful to practice.

I don’t begrudge anyone for those thoughts or feelings, but I do believe that we are in danger of losing something greater if we lose all of our religion: our ability to shape culture. Maybe that reads as overly dramatic, but ask yourself what it means to be human and how we live together. How concrete is your answer? How widely accepted is it? What will you do with people who answer those questions differently?

I’m hooked.

Each new show about the zombie apocalypse raises the question for us. That is, when everything that I’ve built my life on crumbles, who am I? In a world of scarcity and uncertainty, how am I to respond to the “other” when we come face to face? Each new terrorist attack forces us to recognize how fragile life is and how near death might be. Maybe that reads as overly tragic, but I have a sense that you feel it. At its heart, the Christian faith has resources to answer those questions and deal with that recognition.

In reading feminism is for everybody by bell hooks (not a white guy), I was reminded why I wanted to write this book even if it’s been written in other ways by other people. Allow me to paraphrase a couple of paragraphs from her introduction.

When I ask people what they know about Jesus and his death, I realize that they know very little. They can speak about growing up in church. They know that Jesus died. They’ve heard the church celebrate how he was raised from the dead. They understand that if they believe that, then they will go to heaven after they die. Beyond that, some people can say that Jesus died for the forgiveness of sins and a few can say that Jesus died to erase the debt or pay the price so that they could be forgiven. For many people this idea has been translated into an angry God who kills his Son so that that same angry God won’t kill us. Many of those same people have rejected the church and the religious faith that goes along with it.

As a pastor I get to engage in a lot of conversations about Jesus and faith and life. I realize that most people, even those who have been in church all their lives, have a surface or narrow understanding of Jesus. They haven’t had the time to engage the nuances of what the Bible says. They aren’t aware of the inconsistencies in what they believe. Very few people seem to know that there is another way to look at Jesus, his death and the God who is behind it all. They don’t know that they don’t have to believe in an angry God to be Christian.

When I get a chance to share with people the Jesus that I know, why he died, and the God who orchestrated it, I find that people are willing to listen. We discover that there is more overlap than they ever knew between Jesus and the values they hope to live out in their lives and pass on to their kids. But, then they tell me that I’m not like the “real” Christians who hate people and are angry about everything. I try to assure them that I am as real a Christian as every other and if they dare to give it a try they will see that a journey with Jesus is not how they have imagined it.

Each time I leave one of these encounters, I want to have in my hand a little book so that I can say, read this book, and it will tell you who Jesus is and what his movement is all about. I want to be holding in my hand a concise, fairly easy to read and understand book, straightforward and clear without being simplistic. From the moment that Jesus began to work on me and in me, I have wanted this book. I have wanted to give it to the people I know so that they can better understand the way of Jesus that I believe in so deeply and want to live more faithfully.

Future posts will contain portions of what I’ve written so far. Let me know what you think. Here’s Chapter 1.

)
Peter TeWinkle

Written by

Partner, Parent, Pastor & potential Placemaker pursuing God's peace and stopping occasionally to play golf.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade