From its very beginnings Christianity was peopled by followers, disciples, of Jesus. Those gifted with the ability to write about discipleship enabled generation after generation to understand and pass down the nature of this lifestyle. In this book Luke Timothy Johnson sifts through these writings to provide us with what he considers to be the authentic tradition of Christian discipleship. As he sees it, this tradition is salvific and the maker of saints. In contrast, he fears that the inroads of Enlightenment thought, and the modern culture that developed from it, have poisoned Christianity with the belief that “…  society itself is malleable and subject to manipulation by human ingenuity.” (p.113). The acceptance of such a belief and the modern dependence upon reason alone to perfect individual and communal living neglects, according to Johnson, the foundation of the Christian tradition. Movements such as liberation theology and the social gospel are visible threats to the ancient tradition as they abandon the world of the scriptures for that of the materialistic one offered by modern life. So too is the disastrous use of process theology (p. 142) and of the historical critical approach to understanding the bible. (p.100)

Johnson’s review of the literature since the time of Christ reveals that the true Christian is one who is dedicated to becoming like Jesus–– imitating him. If you have forgotten, or never knew of such a tradition, the entire book is worth reading. He provides in great detail what he thinks it is.  The New Testament, for example, shows the imitation of Christ as both an act of our will and an act of God resulting in our baptism into the life of the Holy Spirit and the dynamic of the paschal mystery which includes our willingness to suffer in imitation of Jesus’ suffering and death. True discipleship is, in other words, a transformation of self as “the Holy Spirit empowers an ‘imitation of Christ’ that is internal and indeed ontological” (p.17) and that urges us to live in continual agape with the new world that is being created.  It is a transformation that is clearly seen throughout Christian history as evidenced among the martyrs, the desert Fathers, monks, mendicant orders, medieval mystics and a multitude of protestant reformers. The ancient Christian tradition of discipleship is repeated throughout the centuries by Christians of all ages, intellectual background and nationalities until the Enlightenment and the beginning of the modern age when the point of departure for any claim to spiritual wisdom began to be the human subject not God or God’s word in the bible.

From the seventeenth century onward spiritual perfection included the transformation of society, now the church was seen as a social body whose purpose was the amelioration of society at large, now suffering was to be eliminated as the necessity of embracing our suffering as God’s favored way of transforming human freedom was denigrated and any focus on Christ’s passion was abandoned. (p.183). Modern spiritualities now lack “a self-sacrificial love reflected in such habitual actions as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.” (p.184).  Without these, the modern spiritualities of discipleship are Pelagian, materialistic, atheistic, and lacking in the gospels’ foundational eschatologies of heaven, hell, sin, and afterlife. They are not, according to Johnson worthy of the name Christian.

Johnson offers a strong argument for the traditional way of following Jesus. Only by reading the book will you understand what that way is and how it is presently being destroyed. This book is written with the overwhelming desire that people are aware of the 1700-year Christian tradition of what makes someone a saint and then a deep conviction of a two-hundred-year Christian tradition that is destructive of the first and is false to the teachings of the Classical one.  It does this by an initial presentation of one long survey of famous Christian writers supporting the classical position and another long presentation of authors who developed and/or supported a different one, titled modern Between the two lengthy surveys the author argues for cultural changes in thought and technologies after 1700 AD that determined the changes guiding what dominates current Christian thought and practice surrounding what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

Believers are divided on a question central to Christian identity: what does it mean to follow Jesus? For centuries, imitating Christ meant the pursuit of holiness, conforming the self to Jesus through self-sacrifice in order to join him in eternal life. But some Christians today consider this model to be self-centered. Instead, they say, true disciples ought to imitate Jesus in confronting corrupt social systems on behalf of the oppressed.

In Imitating Christ, esteemed New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson seeks the origin of this fissure. Surveying the New Testament, medieval mysticism, modern theology, and more, Johnson shows how twentieth-century social-gospel and liberation theologies created a new model of discipleship. He then evaluates the theological implications of the two models and asks what we can learn from each. Inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton, Johnson puts forward a vision of discipleship that can revitalize Christian witness in the world today.