C.S. Lewis noted that the church has a problem: Whenever Christians are brainstorming together about who Jesus is and who we are, we go out and read mostly people who agree with us, or who live in our same time and place. It’s hard to separate the cultural wheat from the chaff. But what happens when we do read people’s answers to Jesus’s question from the past lives and places of the church, people who may be wholly unlike us. Jesus Through Medieval Eyes, by Grace Hamman, looks to the Christians of the Middle Ages, to a time & culture dissimilar to our own, for their answers to these questions. Medieval Europeans were also suffering through pandemics, dealing with political and ecclesial corruption and instability, and reckoning with gender, money, and power. Yet their concerns and imaginations are unlike ours. Their ideas, narratives & art about Jesus open up paradoxically fresh & ancient ways to approach and adore Christ and reveal where our own cultural ideals about the Messiah fall short.
