The following is a long quote from pg. 43-44 of J.I. Packer's book Keep In Step With The Spirit. A book he wrote on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Although long, the quote helps to further clarify my position regarding right thinking about Jesus. This could be read as a continuation of my objection to Dr. Pagels wrong thinking about Jesus.
"The less men know about Christ, the sooner it will be necessary to raise the question whether their response to the Jesus of whom they have only hazy and distorted ideas can really be viewed as Christian faith. the further folk depart or stand aloof from biblical categories of thought about Jesus , the less real knowledge of Christ can they have, till they reach the point where, though they talk about him much (as Moslems, Marxists, and theosophists, for instance, will do), they do not really know him at all. For the biblical categories are all concerned with Christ as the answer to questions that the Bible itself teaches us to pose about our relationship to God, questions that arise from the reality of divine holiness and our sin; and the further one stands form these categories, and therefore from those questions, the less knowledge of the real Christ and the real God can one have, in the nature of the case. A person who thought that England is ruled today by an ex-go-go dancer named Elizabeth who legislates at her discretion form a wood hut in Polynesia could justly be said to knwo nothing of the real queen, and similarly it takes more to constitute real, valid, saving knowledge of Jesus than simply being able to mouth his name.
To put the matter another way: The givenness of Jesus Christ is bound up with the givenness of New Testament theology, which is (so I urge, following its own claim as mainstream Christian tradition has always done) nothing less than the Father's own witness through the Spirit to the Son. Surely there is no real Jesus save the Jesus of that theology. And New Testament theology, whether in Paul, John, Luke, Matthew, Peter, the writer of Hebrews, or whoever, is essentially proclamation that Jesus Christ saves men from the bondage to false gods, false beliefs, false ways, false hopes, and false posturings before the Creator, into which all non-Christian religions and philosophies, impressive as they often are, are locked. New Testament proclamation diagnoses this whole kaleidoscope of falseness and falsehood as rooted in actual if unwitting suppression of general revelation, misdirection of man's worshiping instincts, and ignorance or rejection of the gospel God has sent. Romans 1:18-3:20, to look no further, is decisive on that; and certainly Emil Brunner was correct when he wrote: "In all religion there is a recollection of the Divine Truth which has been lost; in all religion, there is a longing after the divine light and the divine love; but in all religion also there yawns an abyss of demonic distortion of the Truth, and of man's effort to escape from God."
But if so, the the antithesis between the God-taught truth of the Gospel and all other ideas of what is ultimately real and true must always be lovingly and firmly pointed up and may never out of lax benevolence or courtesy be watered down.....For it is simply not true that all religions and ideologies ask the same basic questions about either God or man or look in the same direction for answers. A vast difference exists between dialogue that explores the the antithesis between Christianity and other faiths, the antithesis that ultimately requires the negation of the one in order to affirm the other, and the sort of dialogue that looks for Christ in, or seeks to graft him onto, some other faith as it stands."
Well said Dr. Packer.
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