1 AM, Sunday morning

Way back in November I borrowed a book from the Bettendorf Library. It was The Third Jesus by Deepak Chopra. On a Friday I took it into a coffee shop on the way to work, and I left it on the counter. That Monday I went back to the coffee shop to retrieve it - and the coffee shop had been closed.

Bats.

The coffee shop reopened last week, and I have now retrieved the book. Now I have to take it back, and I'm guessing the library fine will be more than it would have cost to replace the book.

Bats bats.

I don't even like Deepak Chopra's work. I was only reading the book to try to get a handle on whether my assessment of Chopra was fair. It was. He's way too New-Agey for me. His premise is that there was an original Jesus. Who he really was is long lost in history. That's true enough. We don't know, for example, what he looked like. Too often we see pictures of him with brown hair, white skin with just enough tan, green eyes. . .More likely he had black hair, olive skin, brown eyes. He was, after all, a Palestinian Jew. He may have had all his teeth, or maybe not. He wouldn't have been very tall by our standards. But Jesus has been such a towering figure in human history that many cultures have imagined him as resembling people from their own culture.

Chopra then posits a second Jesus, the Jesus of faith. The writers of the New Testament and the Church authorities, he claims, have passed along only the traditions of Jesus that they'd wanted passed on. Thus they robbed us of knowledge of who this Jesus was.

So Chopra wants to present to us a third Jesus, the "real" Jesus. But this all begs a question: if the historical Jesus is lost in time, and the only source of info we have is that which is screened by New Testament writers and the Church, and if the real Jesus is the "third Jesus" - how would Deepak Chopra know any more about this "third Jesus" than anyone else would? What would make him even qualified to write about it?

As I read it, Chopra's method is to cherry-pick from those very writings that he says screen us from his version of Jesus. You can't do that. It's an exegetical fallacy called "proof-texting".

Where the New Age stuff comes in: Chopra writes about Jesus as having a "God consciousness" - which is way short of identifying Jesus as God. He writes about Jesus as being "Christ conscious" - not at all the same as Jesus being Christ.

I got to the point of not being able to stomach any more. I've had a bellyful of the New Age crap. I hear a lot of folks saying that they're "spiritual but not religious." What that tells me is that you know that a decision of faith can bring great benefit, but you don't want to make such a decision. There is intellectual discipline in learning about faith, and the "spiritual but not religious" folks don't want to be that disciplined.

I also know this. God consciousness would not lead Jesus to the cross. He said "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" - that's not a prayer to an abstract "consciousness." He said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It's a prayer to a personal being, not to consciousness.

I would not claim that Jesus is easy to understand. Anyone who encounters him in a serious study of the New Testament will have to wrestle deeply with who this man was, with what he did, with what he said. If you think you will approach Jesus and find answers, I am sorry to inform you that when you approach Jesus you will find questions on questions on questions. . .But I know this:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Not "consciousness".