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Jesus' teaching has changed the world. Yet his sayings can often seem cryptic and hard to understand.
In Love Is His Meaning, Keith Ward explores the various figures of speech and images that Jesus used, and finds they are all ways of expressing and evoking the self-giving love of God, manifested supremely in Jesus' life. They communicate spiritual truths, often not in a literal but in a poetic way. They encourage us to take our own moral decisions with sensitivity and care for others. They show that God's love will never abandon anyone, and that it extends to everyone in the world without exception. And they promise a fulfilment of our hopes for a just and peaceable world that surpasses anything we might describe or imagine.
Putting aside literalist, authoritarian, legalistic, judgemental and divisive presentations of Jesus' teachings, the author shows that what remains is the gospel of a divine love - a love stronger than death, and the only power that can and will redeem our disordered world.
Literal truth and poetic truth 1
The Gospel portraits of Jesus 5
God's revelation in Jesus 8
2 Jesus' moral teaching 11
Should I hate my family? 11
Hyperbole in the teaching of Jesus 14
The Sermon on the Mount: may I be angry? 16
Should I pull my eye out? 19
Can I have a divorce? 21
How the churches have interpreted these teachings 25
Can I never swear on oath? 28
Must I always turn the other cheek? 30
Must I be perfect? 33
3 The kingdom of God 36
Jesus' teaching about the kingdom 36
The kingdom as non-literal 38
Rewards in heaven 41
The kingdom as present in Jesus 43
The spiritual rule of Jesus 45
Interpreting Old Testament prophecies 47
Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy 49
Time and eternity 53
How do we interpret 'the Son of Man'? 56
4 The end of the age 60
Jesus' teaching about 'the end' 60
The foreshadowing of the end - prolepsis 62
The fulfilment of history 65
'The end' and modern cosmology 69
5 How non-literalism helps us to understand Jesus'
teaching 72
Jesus' teaching of God's absolute love 72
The parables 74
Jesus in John's Gospel 78
Interpreting the Gospels 81
Christianity beyond literalism 86