Jesus and the Reign of God: 0002 (The Cross in the Lotus World V. 2)

Jesus and the Reign of God is a powerful and compelling evocation of the vision and reality of Gods reign and its possibilities for the transfiguration of life in faith.Songs search for a vision of life in God inaugurated in his previous volume Jesus the Crucified People takes him from ancient Egypt and China to modern Singapore from Gethsemane to Tiananmen Square and always pulls him back to the Gospel stories.In its earnest and intense quest for religious integrity in a world no longer dominated or defined by Christianity Songs theology is a startling rebuke to Christologies centered either in historical-critical searches or church doctrines. For him theology is the biography of God and Jesus message of Gods reign is evident in the densely packed histories of strangers and outcasts: in an Egyptian Muslim who composed a Christmas carol in a Korean woman in Japan in an old musician in a ruined church in China.Engaged by these stories the reader is pulled ineluctably into the reality they evince. As Song says the reign of God in Jesus becomes manifest through movements of people to be free from the shackles of the past to change the status quo of the present and to have a role to play in the arrival of the future.