This week's selection of my Friday's Finds series comes from the Christology section of my collection. And I want to highlight the modern classic, Wolfhart Pannenberg's Jesus--God and Man. I first read this massive book as part of an undergraduate readings theology seminar, when we paired it with Martin Kahler's So-Called Historical Christ and the Biblical Jesus. Over the years I've deleted Kahler's book from my collection (while his little book is a theological curiosity, it's not really that significant in terms of his argument), but I've hung onto Pannenberg's book because of its scope and lucidity. Pannenberg (rightly, I think) argues that the resurrection of Jesus is the event from which Christian accounts of who Jesus is and what Jesus does take their beginning. Pannenberg sympathizes with Kahler's desire to resist reducing Christology to history (which any number of theologians have been doing since the Enlightenment) but he rejects the notion that we can separate the Jesus-of-history from the later Christians confessions of Christ. For him, history isn't a crutch for theology but is one of the legs on which it stands. Jesus--God and Man is one of those books that shaped how I think about Jesus and believe Jesus from such an early age and remains an important text in my theological development.
So if you've haven't read Pannenberg's christology, you should. Yes, it's dense, so it'll take a few weeks to read through. But it's worth it.