Harry T Cook

Have you ever found yourself humming a favourite childhood hymn, only to realise you could no longer embrace its message? In What a Friend They Had in Jesus, Harry Cook explores how hymns reflect the religious beliefs of their times. He revisits the texts of popular hymns, posing such questions as: How true are they to the biblical texts that seem to have inspired them? What aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century piety have persisted into the twenty-first century through the singing of those hymns? And, how does one manage the conflict between the emotional appeal and the theological content of such hymns?

The idea of salvation by faith is a dangerous proposition directly traceable to St. Paul and the legacy he left for a later writer to expound: For by grace are you saved through faith . . . not by works, lest anyone should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). That proposition has convinced generations of Christians that, if they only had a little faith, things would get better and wrongs would be righted by and by. This book proposes that salvation is a here-and-now initiative by which human beings may act to save their planet from the killing scourge of degradation and their societies from violence-producing economic and social injustice. The state of salvation is what the New Testament calls the rule or domain of God. The Gospel of Luke quotes Jesus as saying that God s rule is right there in your presence, suggesting that human beings have at hand the wherewithal to save themselves and their environment. Salvation is then a do-it-yourself project.

Using fresh translations and paraphrases to wrest some measure of relevance and contemporaneity from twenty-four important biblical passages, Harry Cook addresses two important questions: How did ordinary people of first-century CE Palestine read or, better yet, hear these important passages, and how can twenty-first-century English speakers in the western world best appropriate them for instruction, inspiration and understanding?