I’ve just finished reading C. Baxter Kruger’s new book, Patmos, subtitles Three Days, Two Men, and One Extraordinary Conversation. Aidan, the book’s protagonist, is transported to the Island of Patmos, where he meets up with John, who is treated as the author of the gospel of the same name, the Book of Revelation and the Johannine letters. The adventures of Aidan and John serve to take Aidan to a new and deeper understanding of Jesus Christ and the Trinity in particular, as well as of other dimension of human religious experience.

I could clearly discern the voice of an exhausted scholar crying out after years of study and almost in despair – “yes, but what does it all mean?!” After what seemed to me to be a long, slow takeoff, Aidan comes to understand that Jesus has entered into humanity’s darkness, and it dawns upon him that he’d been reading the Bible the wrong way his entire life. John explains that the machinations of Ophis (Gr. “serpent”) to convince humans that they were somehow separate from God were largely responsible for that.

As the conversation continues to unfold, Aidan comes to experience that “Jesus means that God and humanity are together.” That, supposedly, was the way things were when John wrote, but apparently Greek philosophy and Roman law “slithered in” to the Roman Church, creating the false dichotomy between God and man. Tricky little serpent, that Ophis.

The Reformation is described as a protest against this separation. If it were only that simple! But the book is not really about church history per se, and Aidan moves on to discover the separation within himself and what heals it. There are a few observations about the Trinity at the end of the book which I found interesting. They were necessarily preceded by Aidan’s new understanding of Jesus and his relationship both to the Father and to us.

I found particularly interesting Aidan’s excursion into the realm of failure, and the presence of God within us even as we fail, sin and otherwise engage in performances that conflict with our notions of who we would prefer to think we really are, but truly are not. There appears to be something necessary about failure, something that is a crucial part (no pun intended) of the message of the crucifixion of the incarnate Christ.

I liked the interweaving of the “young Aidan” theme with the main story. It drew me forward, wondering how it was going to resolve, and I was not disappointed. Other aspects of the author’s style didn’t appeal to me though.

I found his John to be superficial and frankly unbelievable. Aidan himself lacked a human face. I found myself wondering why he felt he had to make a mattress for John. Like the rest of us, Kruger might wish to scan his work for parochial references and perhaps find less obscure ways to get his point across. Not everyone knows what a Boudreaux joke is, fewer still I’d suspect know or care about “The Grove.” Fortunately, I like crawfish and knew what they were, but most folks probably don’t.

A perennial trap in works like this is the tar pit of comparative Christianity. It’s really not necessary, and it can turn folks off from appreciating the much richer and very important message of the book. If the author really dislikes Scottish Calvinists or the Roman Church that much, I would gently urge him to choose to disappoint Ophis and choose to love even those “deplorables.”

That said, I would recommend the book to anyone (like me) who is traveling the short but difficult path from the head to the heart.  We need all the help we can get!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.