The Gospel According to Jerry

The testimony of this book reaffirms the original New Testament witness, that the Christian’s separation from the world is so radical that in the eyes of the unbaptized worldling he is quite literally out of his mind (Acts 26:24). Paul’s description of the Christian gospel as “folly” (1 Cor. 1:18) therefore is seen to be no mere literary device but a deep penetration to the root of the Christian’s alienation from the world. The basic proclamation of that gospel^__that God was in Christ, who died for our sins, rose from the grave, ascended into heaven and will some day return to judge both the living and the dead^__is at best hard to believe (Mark 16:9-14), and at worst has been placed in the same category of delusional psychology of which those with experience in caring for the mentally ill can give numerous examples (Albert Schweitzer, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus). My own experience of the gospel, having run this gamut from best to worst, has been for me a brilliant illumination of the “depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (Rom. 11:33).  I believe it cannot but result in enlightenment for others also, and therefore I publicly make this confession.

^___from the author’s Foreword

G. A. (Jerry) Rodgers, born 1925 in Roanoke, IL, born again 1953 in San Francisco, is a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, happily married husband in an interracial marriage, father or stepfather of five, grandfather of seven, and great-grandfather of three. Raised the son of a Methodist preacher; after leaving home and studying philosophy at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago he professed agnosticism until his conversion at the age of 27. His conversion experience made his family think he had lost his mind, and they had him committed to mental hospitals for several years after his discharge from the Navy in 1953. His story is an archetypical example of Anton Boisen’s thesis in his Exploration of the Inner World (1936) in which he examined the mirror-image relationship of mental illness and religious experience; and it throws a glaring new light on Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, initiated at the beginning of the last century.