The Easter Stories

Trevor Dennis

Rating:

Vice Dean Trevor Dennis of Chester Cathedral has deep appreciation of the power of stories, and the gift to brilliantly illuminate our minds with words and phrases.  His first chapter is on places, moments and people, contact with which cause us to feel the ’thinness’ of the veil between earth and heaven.  He finds particular ‘thinness’ in the Gospels’ resurrection accounts, which form the rest of his book.  He closes with  ‘Reflections’ , a chapter of his own poems and stories exploring experiences of transcendence in the resurrection and other events in the life of Christ.

He combines well-informed Biblical scholarship with poetic feeling, as he shows each resurrection story bringing God and His ways close to us.  He follows conservative scholars Tom Wright and Richard Baukham, but also Jesus Seminarian John Dominic Crossan, to find understandings of ‘Jesus events’ that help us to penetrate the veil.  His chapter on ‘Women at the Tomb’ is especially moving, exalting female devotion and Jesus’ challenge to prejudice then and now. 

Revelation, according to Dennis, is in sacred story.  In his loving evaluation of the Temple veil’s rending he dismisses its historicity.  He doesn’t say the tomb wasn’t empty, but  the question ‘Did it happen?’ feels like a category mistake.  God has become story, and in what the story does to us in our communities.  Incarnation is narrative floating up from the largely inaccessible past.   Poetically impressive, this theology is impotent in a real universe where humanity is a temporary, self-destructive visitor.

Reviewer: Richard Wilkins, Retired, former General Secretary, Association of Christian Teachers

Review posted on: 14 April 2008

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