Customer Reviews

Life of Christ

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Fulton Sheen's book Life of Christ is a literary masterpiece. Sheen brilliantly navigates through the life of our Lord and highlights some of the more touching moments, while really bringing to life the moments that often get overlooked. Most importantly, this book will help you to nurture and inculcate a deeper and more profound love for Jesus Christ.

Sheen's treatment of Jesus' childhood is masterful. His narrations of Jesus' presentation in the Temple is so moving and spectacular that it will almost bring tears to your eyes. Sheen highlights that throughout Jesus' young life the cross was always looming over him and accompanying him wherever our Lord went.

Most of the book deals with Jesus' public ministry and Sheen does an excellent job of probing the gospel accounts for deeper spiritual insight. His constant references to the cross are always highlighted by His appeals to His resurrection and glory. Sheen illustrates how the apostles only wanted a bread king or a political Messiah, but never a suffering Messiah who was a sacrifice for our sins. It would be impossible for me to highlight all of the wonderful topics Sheen discusses in this book, but his treatment of Jesus' public ministry and his true reason for becoming a man are always highlighted throughout the book.

This book is perfect for anyone wishing to understand Jesus on a more intimate level, but it is also perfect of pastors and church leaders who wish to use this material for future lessons and sermons. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wished to know more about Jesus because when it comes to our redemption, Jesus is the only thing that truly matters.

I am not a Catholic and I don't share all the views of this life of Jesus, but I have to say it is a wonderful presentation of the Gospel and of the Divine Jesus. I would recommend highly that everyone read this book. The insight of Bishop Sheen is astounding. It is a wonderful way for laymen to benefit from a man of God who obviously dedicated a large part of his life seeking the Creator, and then presented Him to the rest of us. Please read this book and take the adventure yourself to meet Jesus,the source of life and the way to salvation. You will not regret it and I'm betting it's message will remain forever etched in your being. I just want to say, Please read it! .

This book more than any other demonstrates the ability of Bishop Sheen to bring heavenly concepts down to earth. Bishop Sheen reawakens the magic of those familiar gospel stories, which we learned to listen to with half a heart. I found myself reading the sections such as the "the women caught in adultery" over and over again. Each page offers an insight into the mind of Christ. This book is a novel, a theological work and above all a prayer.

This is the most complete and comprehensive theological study of the life of Jesus that I have ever read! It is undoubtedly one of the best works in a long time on this subject! It is easy to read, compelling and integrates all four cannonical Gospels (Matt, Mark, Luke, John) superbly. It is one of the best interpretations of Christ's life written! A true "Gospel" !

I always liked Bishop Sheen but this book in telling all about the life of Christ by quoting scripture and then elaborating on each quote is Bishop Sheen's, in my opinion, best and most important work. It explains the time and circumstances around each quote. This book has helped me realize more fully how much Our Lord suffered for me and how much he loves me. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get closer to the Lord.

In the pleasure and pure awe of the realizations derived from this beautiful enlightened volume on the death of Christ so that we may live, I am nearly speechless. I am almost driven as much as if I was reading the Bible itself. Bishop Sheen has simplified the explainations of the message and brought out the realizations of the cross overshadowing the stablecrib. "He came to die so that we may live."

I have never felt so secure in the aquisition of news of the faith. I highly, highly recommend it . Read it again, and again, and again.

Fulton Sheen is arguably at his best in his "Life of Christ", which, as he said in the book's introduction, he wrote "when gall did mix with ink in those dark hours". Suffused with scriptural references, exegetical insights, and a truly down-to-earth manner of bringing to the reader what is important in each Gospel narrative of this Nazorean called the God-Man, Fulton Sheen conveys to the reader a Person's life that is hard to reject, is hard to spurn once understood. This is a book that must be read a number of times over a period of one's life for a full benefit to indwell in the reader. Combined with Sheen's "The Priest Is Not His Own", "The World's First Love", and "Go To Heaven", the "Life of Christ" emerges with them as the working of a truly gifted and genuinely kind-hearted communicator, a text which marks Sheen as one of the truly inspiring religious writers of the 20th Century.

When I met Fulton Sheen at his office in 366 5th Avenue in 1966 I departed thinking to myself "Only one such person comes along every hundred years like this Bishop". When I read his "Life of Christ" for the first time in 1970 and most recently last year, I knew that what I thought in 1966 was truer than I had ever imagined.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ is, simply put, an incredible work and the best Christian non-fiction book that I have read to date. It is a book in which you sense the author's sweat, blood, tears, and joy on almost every page, and there's good reason for this. According to the introduction, Sheen experienced a "dark night of the soul" over a period of several years that threatened to overwhelm him. Instead of falling into despair or unbelief, however, he threw himself into Christ's embrace and used the time to study and draw strength from the life of his master, savior, and lord. The result is astonishing: He left behind a rich, deep, and profoundly moving work that has the potential to draw any Christian, whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, into a much deeper relationship with Christ.

Sheen takes the Gospel according to John as his launching point and main source; this gospel provides the broad outlines of Jesus' life as covered by Sheen. The synoptic gospels are used to flesh out the story with additional material not found in John's gospel, but even so, Sheen has not provided us with a complete recounting of Jesus' life that could be derived from the four gospels. Sheen evidently intentionally passes over much of Jesus' teaching; he neither discusses the parables, nor does he provide a full examination of the sermon on the mount. Instead, he places his emphasis on events in Jesus' life of great spiritual significance.

And it is in such emphases that Sheen really shines. Even if you've been a Christian for many decades, you may well be stunned, as I was, at the connections that Sheen makes between different events in the life of Christ, or between events in the life of Christ and events from the Old Testament. You may be awestruck, as I was, at Sheen's deep mining that unearths truths that you never dreamed of in a million years.

Does this sound like an intellectual tour de force? Think again. This book is as much or more heart as head, as much or more feeling as thinking in orientation. Sheen, out of his travails, produces lyrical, poetical passages that leave you heartbroken or overwhelmed with joy. Only someone who faced a great darkness and intentionally if painfully carried his cross into the light of Christ could produce passages such as those found in this book. Some of the writing found here is among the most wonderful you will find in any book.

In effect, through this book, Sheen becomes a spiritual director leading other Christians on a journey of love and pain through the life of Christ, showing them just how much their lord did for them and how much he loves them and the church. This journey is a hard one: Sheen over and over again emphasizes how Christ came to die for us, not to live and be a great teacher. While there is much repetition on this point, you can sense just how much Sheen himself learned this experientially through these dark years. And in this book he invites all of us to travel down the same road, one in which we take up our cross to follow Christ wherever he may lead, even "through many dangers, toils, and snares" ("Amazing Grace").

This journey took me two years; I just finished it a few days before I wrote this review. Life interruptions caused me to put down this book at different periods of time. Still, I'm very glad I did not rush through it. Your journey with this book may well be a quicker one than mine was, but take it slowly and attentively. Sheen packs more meaning into one phrase or clause than many writers do into an entire book, and his emotional passages are worth much rereading so as to let them sink into your soul.

This book seems timeless except for Sheen's repeated references to communism. Those sections keep reminding you that the author wrote this book in the middle of the last century, but, overall, they do nothing to detract from the power of the work.

If you're a Christian, you should read this book for spiritual nourishment and, particularly, to love your savior and lord more deeply. It's hard to imagine your love for Christ not increasing as you read this book, even if you're a Protestant who disagrees with some of Sheen's theology.

If you're not a Christian, know that this book is very traditional and theologically orthodox in its perspective. Sheen apparently had very little respect for the liberal theology of his day. Furthermore, some of his arguments are similar to those made by C.S. Lewis. If your heart is open, you might find this book profoundly moving and even life-changing.

As for me, it'll be a long time before I can forget much of Sheen's wonderful prose and imagery: the ox and the ass present to worship at the birth of Christ in repentance for how men had worshipped them throughout the ages; Jesus ascending the pulpit of the cross to deliver his greatest sermon; the beginning of Jesus taking on the sins of the world not on the cross, but in the garden of Gethsemane; the marked contrasts between Peter and John in their reactions to their resurrected Lord; and many other passages too numerous to mention. This book is one of my top three "desert island" books: I would always want to have it on hand as spiritual sustenance. (The other two books, for the record, are the Bible and The Lord of the Rings.) It has been a life-changing book for me, and it may be for you as well.

If you've read anything by Fulton Sheen you know that he was an astonishingly talented writer. This book was probably his masterpiece. It's a life of Christ that is so beautiful, and touches the heart so deeply that I promise you that you will weep over certain chapters. Buy the hardback copy if possible becuase you will want to read this treasure again and again.

The way Bishop Sheen presents Jesus life from the beginning of time and the importance of His death is remarkable. Everything is substantiated in the Bible and is written in Jesus Christ's time line explaining everything from all the testaments. He brings His life alive and so much meaning, I feel like this book has brought me closer to knowing Jesus more than all the previous books I have read together! It is great if you already know the Bible, so you see how it Jesus fulfills the prophecies. If you haven't read much of the bible you will want to look up verses Sheen points out. I have loaned my book to many, everyone absolutely loves it!