The cross in the lotus world

by Choan-Seng Song

God is the story of Jesus, and Jesus is the story of the people. Jesus and the Reign of God is a powerful and compelling evocation of the vision and reality of God's reign and its possibilities for the "transfiguration of life" in faith. Song's search for a "vision of life in God," inaugurated in his previous volume, Jesus, the Crucified People, takes him from ancient Egypt and China to modern Singapore, from Gethsemane to Tiananmen Square and always pulls him back to the Gospel stories. In its earnest and intense quest for religious integrity in a world no longer dominated or defined by Christianity, Song's theology is a startling rebuke to Christologies centered either in historical-critical searches or church doctrines. For him theology is the biography of God, and Jesus' message of God's reign is evident in the densely packed histories of strangers and outcasts: in an Egyptian Muslim who composed a Christmas carol, in a Korean woman in Japan, in an old musician in a ruined church i