The task of interpreting the religious significance of Jesus Christ takes shape in this book with the tension determined by two goals: fidelity to the classical Christological tradition, which draws our attention to Jesus in the first place, and plausibility with respect to all forms of contemporary knowledge. To ignore the classical tradition is to assume uncritically that contemporary plausibility structures are beyond question, while to forsake plausibility is to embrace the irrationalism of the theological ghetto-dweller. This book argues that maintaining this tension in our time can be achieved only with a modest interpretation of Jesus Christ, one that repudiates the hermeneutical absolutism associated with affirming that Jesus Christ is uniquely, exhaustively, unsurpassably significant for revelation and salvation.
Wesley J. Wildman (1961-present) was born in Australia and moved to the United States in 1987. Since 1993 he has been a professor at Boston University, in the Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics Department within the School of Theology. He teaches and writes in those areas, and also in religion and science issues--especially the scientific study of religion. His home page is http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/.
Most of his writing is for academic specialists (yawn) but he is also working to communicate academic research to a wider public. To that end, he co-founded the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion (www.ibcsr.org), LiberalEvangelical.org, and the Spectrums Project (www.spectrumsproject.org), which reflect rather different aspects of his intellectual and political interests.
