Thursday 27 June 2013

Jason B. Hood on Imitating God in Christ


I recently received a copy of Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), having had it on pre-order for some time. I’m trying to save it for holiday reading later this summer, but it’s been very tempting to dip into it.

It comes in four parts – Imitating God, Imitating Jesus, Imitating the Saints, Imitation Yesterday and Today – and looks as if it’s seeking to let Scripture set the agenda in its treatment; I suspect it will be an important contribution to current thinking around discipleship, vocation, and sanctification, among other topics. Given what he has written elsewhere, it will almost certainly also address ongoing debates around the appropriateness of ‘moralising’ from Old Testament texts.

Anyway, there are some interviews with Jason Hood here and here which provide a flavour of what to expect.

Here’s a taster from one of them:

‘What’s often missed is that imitation doesn’t start with Jesus. Imitation starts with our identity as God’s image-bearers, made to reflect his character and his creativity. From the very first page of the Bible, humans are imitating God in response to his initiative and his grace. In the gospel we see the restoration of image-bearing in God’s True Image, Jesus his Son. All four gospels, and Paul’s theological explorations, are pretty saturated with the great theme of imitating Jesus and the theology that lies underneath it. Jesus didn’t just come to die and leave us as is; as Augustine says, “Christ, the master of the mint, came along to stamp the coins afresh.”’

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