Peter Traben Haas' review "The Real Christ"(2017), a book by Bernadette Roberts

BOOK REVIEW

“The Real Christ” (2017) by Bernadette Roberts


-reviewed by Peter Traben Haas, Ph.D.

Paperback: 522 pages
Publisher: ContemplativeChristians.com

(Peter Traben Haas is a certified Centering Prayer instructor and retreat leader, and author of numerous books on contemplative prayer.)


The Real Christ is simply the E=MC2 of theology, unfolding the deepest mysteries of the Trinity with such profound clarity that every question I have ever had regarding the nature, history and purpose of the Trinity and Christ was answered.

We’ve needed this work of enlightened theological reasoning for centuries and are blessed to be around to finally receive it. Perhaps we weren’t ready for it until now. Perhaps our cultural context of increasing religious diversity and our decreasing dependence on the patriarchal worldview, along with the vast positive insights into the quantum level of reality, biology, and cosmology to name a few disciplines, provides the larger story in which Bernadette’s theological narrative was able to be unveiled and understood.

Like other “Einstein’s” of our intellectual heritage, Bernadette has a way of solving the most perplexing theological problems with elegance and simplicity. While there is hardly anything new or unorthodox in what Bernadette has written, it will be evident to anyone with a basic theological background, that a novel, deepened, more honest understanding of the Trinity is revealed through Bernadette’s work.

My prediction is that The Real Christ will change ecclesiastical history; perhaps on par with Augustine’s Confessions and Aquinas’ Summa. Enduring, The Real Christ, will stand as a monument of light in the shadows of this confounding Kairos moment we face as a species in the early decades of this third millennium of Christian faith.

This is a must read book for anyone who has struggled with remaining a Christian or grown frustrated with the banality of what seems to be the “Jesus Industry” of “commercial” Christianity. Please prayerfully and slowly read The Real Christ. It is full of some of the most liberating and transforming ideas currently available to humankind. It is what Christianity was meant to be and, quite truthfully, must still become. We are urged to take up and read, and consider again the complete superstructure that is Christianity so to really discover and really become Christ.