Author: Bryan M. Christman
Located in: USA
Submitted: September 06, 2021
Tell us a little about yourself. Bryan Christman is a life-long landscaper with an avid interest in the biblical gospel and it's communication, especially as it has been contextualized in the lives and writings of his favorite authors, listed here in basically the order in which he encountered them: C. S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O'Connor, Lesslie Newbigin, Soren Kierkegaard, T. F. Torrance, and Simone Weil. He has undergraduate degrees from SUNY Alfred and Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, Northeast Branch.
What was your motivation behind this project? My motivation was the growing recognition that just as C. S. Lewis said that modern man has placed "God in the Dock," so also the modern church has placed "the gospel in the dock," not so much in theory, but in practice, because of falling to humankind's default position which rejects the gospel's way of faith. For from the beginning, as exemplified by Adam and Eve, humankind has generally rejected living by faith in the Creator-God and instead pursued "the will to power," the antithesis of faith. Therefore, the church often proclaims "faith" but seeks to live by "the will to power." This "witness" further justifies those rejecting the proclaimed "gospel of faith" for the sake of humankind's, and all too often the church's, "real" gospel of "the will to power."
What do you hope folks will gain from this project? My hope is that professing Christians will truly live in the gospel of faith, that deconstructing Christians will consider whether or not the "gospel" they have rejected was the true gospel or not, and that non-Christians in "Christianized" America and other countries will hear the true gospel anew or even for the first time. I hope that my book's comparison of the gospel of faith to the "gospel of the will to power" will result in readers seeing the way of death in the latter, and "the better way" of faith, hope, and love in the gospel of Jesus Christ which is good for the church, humanity, and the wider world of the entire creation.
How were you personally impacted by working on this project? The basic outline of the book never changed from the beginning conception. But in the course of writing I discovered some of the thought of Simone Weil on what she called "the way of force" and the "way of grace." I began to see how that brought a much needed focus to the proclamation and practice of the gospel. Thus, that juxtaposition of "the two ways" became part and parcel of what I was really trying to express. The thought of T. F. Torrance on the unconditional gospel also changed the book in a similar fashion, by requiring my grappling with the gospel anew as the purely good news of Christ's incarnation and atonement for all of humankind, and thus filling my original unchanged outline with an unforeseen focus.
Who are your influences, sources of inspiration or favorite authors / artists? As already mentioned, my first and greatest influence has been C. S. Lewis. And my latest were Simone Weil and T. F. Torrance. I have also spent a great deal of time with several other fascinating and influential thinkers including: Blaise Pascal, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O'Connor, Lesslie Newbigin, and Soren Kierkegaard. Of course there are many others that have influenced my thought, as the block-quotes, footnotes, bibliography and index to the book will attest. Thus there is substantial interaction with the likes of N. T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, James K. A. Smith, Peter Leithart, Diogenes Allen, Eric Springsted, Merold Westphal, and many others.
Anything else you'd like readers / listeners to know: An important theme in the book is "wrestling with God." This serves as a corrective to the false idea that the way of faith vs. the way of the will to power requires "quietism" or the complete negation of "will." This theme is exemplified in several "main characters" that "the gospel in the dock" encounters along its way, including Jacob (of course), Cain and Abel, and especially Jonah. The book attempts to present "gospel" truth pictorially through its graphic human embodiment, rather than through the abstractions of systematic theology. In this way, I hope that reading "the gospel in the dock" encourages "wrestling with God" for the costly blessing of life.
