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(Under Construction) • Physical Visitations • Dreams, Visions, & Other Inner Experiences • What can these experiences tell us about Jesus? • Important Resources
Helena Rocca Linda Decloedt Nellie Christian Important Resources Visions
of Jesus:
--- Phillip H. Wiebe, The Author
I
Am With You Always:
--- Steve Schroeder
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"This
book is a critical examination of visions of Jesus Christ, with special
attention given to contemporary experiences. I located thirty living
persons reporting having had one or more experience that they interpret
as Jesus appearing to them. These people were awake, their eyes were
open, the being was identified as Jesus, their experiences were not
part of a near-death experience, and they were spontaneous (not generated
by fasting, sleep- deprivation, etc.). I devote a chapter to their description.
Other chapters are devoted to an examination of visions of Jesus in
Christian history and theology, to assessing the challenges in accepting
such reports, and to various explanations of the phenomenon. I devote
three chapters to competing explanations. One chapter discusses the
explanations offered by the Christian church. Another discusses the
explanations offered by psychologists (Freud, Julian Jaynes, Jung, etc.).
The third chapter examines the attempt to explain visions neurophsiologically.
I argue that no explanation can handle all of the experiences as they
are detailed to us by those who have them. I use fifteen phenomenological
variables to describe the visions, and six demographic ones. I defend
the legitimacy of considering a transcendent source for these phenomena,
all the while granting that a perceiver's neurophysiological structures
will be involved."
"For
the past five years, transpersonal psychotherapist G. Scott Sparrow
has collected and studied accounts of contemporary face-to-face encounters
with Christ, including his own. In spite of the subtitle, he wisely
refrains from any narrowly defined attempt to assess the objective truth
of the encounters, opting instead to focus on their subjective experiential
authenticity. In many cases, they have had profound impact on the persons
reporting them, and in some cases they have the potential of profound
impact on persons reading them. For the most part, the book simply reports
the encounters, though Sparrow does provide interesting commentary that
places them in a history of Christian encounter stories beginning with
Mary Magdalene. He organizes the material into broad categories--awakening,
physical healing and consolation, emotional healing, initiation, and
spiritual instruction--that could prove useful as heuristic devices
for the study of contemporary mystical experience. But the interest
of the book lies more in its raw material than in its theoretical insight."