Hip hip hooray! It’s my first Kickstarter today!
I wrote this book in a white hot fury. The process started out leisurely enough, even lethargically, from my running out of ideas for preaching on Trasnfiguration Sunday after only four years back in the pulpit.
I thought, there has to be more to it than I’m seeing.
And then I thought, if I’m having trouble preaching on this annual festival after only four years, surely others are in the same quandary!
So I started poking around, and finding stuff… surprising stuff… intriguing stuff… astounding stuff.
Then, in a characteristic burst of hysterical energy, I abruptly decided to write a book whose title I chose before I’d written any of its contents: Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration. I just liked the sound of it. I figured I could come up with seven ways.
I probably could have come up with seventeen, to be honest. The threads of connection spiraled out from the Transfiguration to weave their way around one thing after another. Before long I felt like a detective! Tracking one clue after another, trying to find the solution.
The solution to what, exactly? Though the Transfiguration raises all kinds of interesting questions, the two that provoked me most were:
What can it possibly mean for the eternal and everlasting Son of God to change? “Transfiguration” comes from Latin for “metamorphosis” in Greek. You could also say it in English as “transformation.” That’s a pretty significant claim to make about someone who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. How can Jesus change?
What does the Transfiguration tell us that Resurrection doesn’t? At first I took the Transfiguration to be a sneak peek or preview of the Resurrection. But the more I looked into it, the less convinced I became. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all go out of their way to describe the transfigured Jesus very differently from the risen Jesus. Something else is going on here. But if so… what?
I chased my way around the entire canon of Scripture in pursuit of these questions, kicking up a lot more questions in the process. I delved into the Greek and even into the Hebrew. I read up on ancient Hellenistic notions of metamorphosed gods and humans. I found cheesy spiritual self-help manuals (Transfigure Yourself in Forty Days! OK, not quite that bad, but bad enough) and patristic sermons on the Transfiguration.
And I found the answer to both questions. The answers are not only extremely satisfying—they also opened up a whole new perspective on Scripture, and on Jesus himself, that I hadn’t ever seen before.
I hope by now you are unbearably intrigued and dying to learn more! If so, please head on over to my Kickstarter page! You’ll find a number of different ways to get the book, and a lot more detail about it as well. Your support means the world to me, and it shows that you want to see more creative, illuminating, surprising, and engaging theology in the world and for the church!
