562 - All Things Are Possible to Believers: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount

All Things Are Possible to Believers: Reflections on the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount
By Rudolf Schnackenburg
Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 1995. 102 pp. $12.99.

How seriously are Christians to take the disconcerting teachings of the Sermon on the Mount? That centuries-old question is the focus of this book, a translation of a work first published in 1984, drawn from earlier lectures and studies. This background is apparent in the somewhat repetitive nature of the material.

For Schnackenburg, Emeritus Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Wurzburg, the key to our appropriating the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' "scandalous trust" in God, evident in the saying from Mark 9:23 that provides the book's title. This same absolute confidence undergirds the Lord's Prayer, according to the author; and it is just such trust that Jesus seeks to awaken in his disciples through the material in the Sermon on the Mount.

Schnackenburg explores the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer in both their Lukan and Matthean forms and seeks to place them in the larger context of Jesus' life and teachings. He is convinced that they are "a faithful rendering of frequently expressed thoughts of Jesus." He does not see in these teachings a new legalism; instead he contends that, at the very least, we find "fixed impulses, motives for action."

The concluding section, "Trust in Times of Testing," is a very poignant and honest questioning of whether it is still possible to proclaim the Sermon on the Mount and to pray the Lord's Prayer amid the horrible events of the modern world. Schnackenburg's affirmation of Jesus' optimism, growing out of trust in God, does not minimize his appreciation of the very real strength of "the evil powers of destruction and annihilation. "He offers a thought-provoking Challenge to Christian living that does not discard the radical demands of the Sermon on the Mount.

Robert Q. Pierce
Ginter Park Presbyterian Church
Richmond, VA.