Gandhi And Jesus

At a time when so many insist on countering violence with violence, this exploration of the life of Jesus and the (often misunderstood) teachings of Gandhi puts nonviolent action at the very heart of Christian salvation.

Gandhi is widely revered as one of the great moral prophets of the twentieth century. This book focuses on a less well-known area of his interest: his engagement with Jesus and Christianity. As a faithful Hindu, he was unwilling to accept Christian dogma, but in Jesus he recognized and revered one of history's great prophets of nonviolence.

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in Him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world.

Gandhi is widely revered as one of the great moral prophets of the twentieth century. This book focuses on a less well-known area of his interest: his engagement with Jesus and Christianity. As a faithful Hindu, he was unwilling to accept Christian dogma, but in Jesus he recognized and revered one of history's great prophets of nonviolence.

Jones recounts his experiences in India, where he arrived as a young and presumptuous missionary who later matured into a veteran who attempted to contextualize Jesus Christ within the Indian culture. He names the mistake many Christians make in trying to impose their culture on the existing culture where they are bringing Christ. Instead he makes the case that Christians learn from other cultures, respect the truth that can be found there, and let Christ and the existing culture do the rest.

"An anthology of Gandhi's writings that focus on his engagement with Christianity and Jesus, enhanced by thoughtful responses from Christian scholars and students of his teachings, highlighting his contributions to interreligious dialogue"--

Our book will introduce you to a troubled man who came to Jesus by night. His name: Nicodemus. After years of trying, it became evident that he could not render perfect obedience. It was as if he reached out to Jesus saying, “I'm stuck in my ways and traditions. I still harbor sin in my heart. It would be easier for me to re-enter my mother's womb a second time than for me to genuinely change.” The world shares this reality and tries to salve its wounds, too often, in very destructive ways. The Rolling Stones recorded (1997) a song entitled Saint of Me. The heartache in it is palpable. Saint Paul the persecutor Was a cruel and sinful man Jesus hit him with a blinding light Then his life began * * * And could you stand the torture And could you stand the pain Could you put your faith in Jesus When you're burning in the flames And I do believe in miracles And I want to save my soul And I know that I'm a sinner I'm gonna die here in the cold I said yes, I said yeah I said yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah; You'll never make a saint of me. Where does the power to change come from? This question — made plain by Nicodemus and lamented by the Stones — has but one answer and this book provides it. We believe that God will one day abolish the hopelessness and despair these words portray. After accomplishing this, God will prove that He is more than fair to every person. The Gospel, with its message of grace and peace, will finally be seen for what it is: God's ultimate right to restore all mankind. We give you, the reader, solid reasons for believing all of these assertions.

We live in that final time which offers humans the clearest choice in history: the kingdom or the holocaust, Jim Douglass writes. Either end is a lightning east to west: the nuclear holocaust a lightning fire, the kingdom of Reality a lightning spirit. We will choose lightning east to west today as either nuclear fire or the kingdom of God, as either despair and annihilation or transformation through nonviolence. If we look to Jesus and Gandhi, and what they point to, we can hope to choose the lightning fire of nonviolence.

In 1948, at the dawn of his country's independence, Mohandas Gandhi, father of the Indian independence movement and a beloved prophet of nonviolence, was assassinated by Hindu nationalists. In riveting detail, author James W. Douglass shows as he previously did with the story of JFK how police and security forces were complicit in the assassination and how in killing one man, they hoped to destroy his vision of peace, nonviolence, and reconciliation. Gandhi had long anticipated and prepared for this fate. In reviewing the little-known story of his early "experiments in truth" in South Africa the laboratory for Gandhi's philosophy of satyagraha, or truth force Douglass shows how early he confronted and overcame the fear of death. And, as with his account of JFK's death, he shows why this story matters: what we can learn from Gandhi's truth in the struggle for peace and reconciliation today.

In recent decades, reception history has become an increasingly important and controversial topic of discussion in biblical studies. Rather than attempting to recover the original meaning of biblical texts, reception history focuses on exploring the history of interpretation. In doing so it locates the dominant historical-critical scholarly paradigm within the history of interpretation, rather than over and above it. At the same time, the breadth of material and hermeneutical issues that reception history engages with questions any narrow understanding of the history of the Bible and its effects on faith communities. The challenge that reception history faces is to explore tradition without either reducing its meaning to what faith communities think is important, or merely offering anthologies of interesting historical interpretations. This major new handbook addresses these matters by presenting reception history as an enterprise (not a method) that questions and understands tradition afresh. The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible consciously allows for the interplay of the traditional and the new through a two-part structure. Part I comprises a set of essays surveying the outline, form, and content of twelve key biblical books that have been influential in the history of interpretation. Part II offers a series of in-depth case studies of the interpretation of particular key biblical passages or books with due regard for the specificity of their social, cultural or aesthetic context. These case studies span two millennia of interpretation by readers with widely differing perspectives. Some are at the level of a group response (from Gnostic readings of Genesis, to Post-Holocaust Jewish interpretations of Job); others examine individual approaches to texts (such as Augustine and Pelagius on Romans, or Gandhi on the Sermon on the Mount). Several chapters examine historical moments, such as the 1860 debate over Genesis and evolution, while others look to wider themes such as non-violence or millenarianism. Further chapters study in detail the works of popular figures who have used the Bible to provide inspiration for their creativity, from Dante and Handel, to Bob Dylan and Dan Brown.