Leonard I. Sweet

Leonard Sweet writes like the silverback alpha male in a band of disciples who are squatting around a fire and just discovered semiotics. I love this writing style--filled with depth and sly puns, often venerating the unusual, requesting a sidebar, and wincing with us. The main content is in elaborations of four perspectives on Jesus as a Cosmic Christ: Logos (Fire of Energy) "The Word", Pathos (Land of Matter) "...made flesh", Ethos (Wind of Space) "...and dwelt among us", and Theos (Sea of Time) "..we beheld God's Glory".
See what he did there? From the Gospel of John, "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, we beheld God's glory".

LOGOS. Heraclitus (500 BC) was first we know of to use Logos as a term for the underlying coherence of the cosmos. He said "Everything becomes fire, and from fire everything is born." Here, Sweet introduces Process theology. "Stuff" is an activity, not just an aggregation. [61]

In PATHOS, the author finds weltering humanity mixed with a godhead. "Everything matters". We are created by our surround and we are the landscape. Citing the "major voice of 20th century Christianity" and process theologian, Teilhard de Chardin: "God makes things make themselves". Sweet empowers the human-scale small church of four hundred interconnected interactive members -- the "optimal" number. [144]

ETHOS is an elaboration of the church as a "spatial force", in which space and energymatter have coevolved. Exploring "geomancy" as the act of finding the right time and place for the right human activity. [167-168].

In THEOS, Sweet finds the Einstein/Minkowski secret that E=mc2 is really about Time. And can the infinity of the Present, fusing time and space where motion enables neither, be anything other than the place of basileia, the glory of God? [219]

This work is filled with explanations of the work done by the most significant theologians while at the same time diving into the post-modern perplexities and sciences. One of the Sweet additions to scholarship is that when he introduces another author, he uses identifying labels, often surprising, always helpful. For example, in quoting Honore de Balzac ("I feel in myself a life so luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral."), described as "Nineteenth-century French novelist/printer/typefounder". He cites Newton's story of playing on the seashore, and identifies him as "Mathematician/philosopher/botanist/ biblical commentator."

This robust work will be gratifying to those who have come to realize that we have spent too much time and energy on senseless "theology". Sweet adapts and adopts "new light" language and reveals a genuine skill and contagious interest with semiotics. It is ironic that the Evangelicals only recently got around to accusing Sweet of "false teaching". After the Evangelical Right has devoted itself to supporting a gambling hall swindler, they wildly attack the leaders of the Emergent church. How sad.… (more)