Review: "Life of Jesus"

Life of Jesus

Centre for Public Christianity, Sydney, 2009.

2 x DVDs (150 min total running time). Book: 200pp.

http://www.lifeofjesus.tv/

~

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a book? Is it a DVD? Is it an evangelistic course? It’s all of this and more. It’s Life of Jesus, a major new evangelistic tool from John Dickson and Greg Clarke, directors of the Centre for Public Christianity. The aim of this review is to explain what this tool is, who it’s for and how best to use it.

Life of Jesus is, at heart, a six-week evangelistic course designed to introduce someone to Jesus. It comes as an attractively designed and wonderfully produced workbook and DVD—both of which can be used separately as well as part of the course.

The first thing that struck me about the package is the quality of the material: there is no cringe factor—nothing to be embarrassed by. The DVD documentaries about the historical nature of the biblical Jesus are full of wonderful footage, and they’re shot on location everywhere from the streets of Jerusalem to the interior of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. This was clearly made for television, and Channel 7 screened it gladly in Australia. The result is that the questions and answers about the life of Jesus unfold in a way guaranteed to hold the modern viewer’s interest—from the opening scenes to the closing credits.

Over the course of the six weeks, participants come together to watch a short episode of the documentary, and then discuss the significance of what they’ve seen to increase their own understanding of Jesus and life in the modern world. Episode 1 introduces the idea that God has come to earth in the person of Jesus and that we have real information about him through the historical texts of the Bible. Episode 2 is about what it means for Jesus to be the Christ. Episode 3 is about Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom. Episode 4 explains that Jesus preached judgement. Episode 5 is about the cross. And episode 6 is about the resurrection.

The key to grasping Life of Jesus is to understand its audience and how the package has been crafted to reach that audience. The target for the course is the average Sydney Morning Herald reading or 702-listening Sydneysider. To put that into context for the rest of the world, I’m talking about your run-of-the-mill sceptical secular humanist—someone who is probably tertiary educated, and who thinks that science has disproved Christianity and that rationality is the hope for the future of our planet (and no, they don’t need to drink lattes or hug trees!). The last point is more important than it might first seem: while many of your friends probably aren’t avid Richard Dawkins readers, they don’t need to match the stereotype in order to have imbibed the anti-God, Christianity-is-stupid vibe of our age.

In creating the course, Dickson and Clarke have wrestled with how you get someone who won’t give Christianity the time of day to stop and think about Jesus for themselves. Their answer is to stand beside them and invite them to take a few steps closer to Jesus. That is why the course is designed with three distinct but integrated parts.

Firstly, there’s a six-part historical documentary that investigates the historical claims about Jesus. The documentary has aired on national television in Australia, which helps to give the course some street cred.

Secondly, there are a series of video snippets called ‘Behind the Life of Jesus’ that show Dickson and Clarke in conversation about some of the big philosophical questions that underpin our thinking about God, Christianity and the world we live in. These clips have been specifically designed with Tim Keller’s ideas about defeater beliefs in mind. They attempt to remove some of the knee-jerk reasons that people have for ignoring Christianity by exploring questions like “Is it rational to believe in God’s existence?”, “Why would a loving God judge us?” and “Are we just a product of our parents’ beliefs?”.

Finally (and this is really the guts of the course), people are encouraged to read through Luke’s Gospel in its entirety over six weeks. Each week, after watching the next episode of the documentary and perhaps considering some of the points raised by some of the ‘Behind the Life of Jesus’ clips, participants are invited to consider and discuss the importance of what they’ve been reading in Luke during the preceding week.

Part of the genius of the course is its scalability. The documentary is able to stand on its own as a separate product: someone could just take the DVDs home and watch them in the privacy of their lounge room. Likewise the participants’ manual: it contains the scripts for the entire Life of Jesus documentary, plus the scripts for all the Behind the Life of Jesus clips and the text of Luke’s Gospel. You could give someone the book, and they could go away and dip into it for themselves.

But all of that said, the course will work best if you persuade people to sit down with you and talk about what they’re hearing and reading. This isn’t just because human interaction is a good thing, but because of the nature of the course. In order to gain a hearing with the secular world and an airing on national TV, the documentary adopts an intentionally objective voice and historical stance. It argues that there are all sorts of religious, and thus subjective, views about Jesus, but that historians can get to the heart of the matter and tell us about the Jesus who truly lived.

It’s a good way to get non-religious types to think, but it does lead to the two small quibbles I have with the course. Firstly, it buys a little too uncritically into the secular worldview that claims it is possible to conduct an objective, scientific (or, in this case, historical) investigation into things—an investigation that is not theological or biased. I understand that gaining a hearing with the secular world involves a real attempt to speak to them from within their worldview, but I would have appreciated this point of view being challenged somewhere by pointing out that historians and scientists are just as theological and biased as everyone else.

My second little frustration is the feeling that the documentary results in a slightly arms-length portrait of Jesus. As you listen to the documentary, you hear that Jesus preached judgement to the religious leaders back then, that his death fitted into the first-century Jewish understanding of sacrifice, and that something big happened in history that could be explained by the resurrection. These are all good things to hear; it’s just that they don’t go far enough. But maybe that’s being unfair, because it’s not really appreciating what the documentary was designed to do. It’s part 1 of a three-stage process that invites people to investigate Jesus personally for themselves. How amazing it is, then, that a biblically faithful portrait of Jesus was aired on national television!

The main point is to keep the big picture of the whole course in mind as you use bits of it to evangelize your friends and family. Keep aiming for the ultimate goal, which is to get people to contemplate their own state before God and their need for salvation. That’s why, wherever possible, I’d want to get people to do the whole course. While the documentary is fantastic, having them read Luke’s Gospel for themselves and getting them to reflect personally on the implications of what Jesus says and does is the best possible outcome.

Of course, if all you can get your friends to do is watch the DVDs, then make the most of the opportunity; they will walk away having heard more truth about Jesus than they’ve probably ever been exposed to before. And seek the chance to talk with them about what they’ve seen.

Just before I finish, there’s one other excellent thing about Life of Jesus: the supporting website is brilliant (www.lifeofjesus.tv). There’s lots of information there for people who want to run the course, plus promotional videos and flyers. In fact, it’s got just about everything you’d need to make it as easy as possible to get people to come and think about Jesus.

Dickson, Clarke and their team have done us a great service in putting together Life of Jesus. It is brilliantly produced, clear, engaging and very possibly the easiest evangelistic invite you could find—for sceptics and the curious alike. It won’t suit everyone (I’m not aware of any course that does), but it will suit your secular friends. They might be embarrassed to admit that they’ve been to church to investigate Jesus, but they wouldn’t be ashamed to tell someone they’ve been sitting in someone’s lounge room, arguing about the historical Jesus. And given the power of God’s word to change the hearts and minds of sinful people, you never know what might happen.