New Pic and a Book Review

Well, as you can see I have changed my blog's "profile pic" again. This picture was taken Sunday evening at Passion Stockholm. I am keeping up with the Passion World Tour via Louie's blog, which you can read here: http://www.268blog.blogspot.com and wishing we were with them, travelling the world! But, alas, we are here in B'ham, so I will pray, and live slightly vicariously through his blog. (Sad-I know)

And so, for a book review: I just finished Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Anne Rice is an accomplished writer, who's well-known works include Interview With a Vanpire (which I have not read). Rice has aparently become a Christian several years ago and has now set out to write a series of books on the life of Jesus Christ. I (inadvertantly) read her second book, which picks up when Jesus is about 30 years old and still working in Nazareth as a carpenter. The interesting thing about Rice's characterization of Jesus, is that she has Him coming to a gradual realization of His diety. The novel is written in first-person (a brave move, on her part), so you see the progression of Jesus coming to fully realize His deity when John baptizes Him in the Jordan.
Aparently, there is a sect of theology that deals with this subject: whether or not Christ fully understood that He was fully man, and fully God at the same time, for His whole life on Earth. It is NOT saying (or debating) that Christ was not fully God and fully man, just more or less speculating on His cognitive realization, with the following implications, of deity. Theologians who debate this say that He was fully human, so it would follow that as He grew up, He still had to learn to think, to reason, to understand the world around Him (even though He created it?). Scriptures DOES say that "Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52). However, just before that passage in Luke is when Jesus was around 12 years old, and was left behind after the Feast, and was found in the Temple, listening and learning and teaching with the men. When questioned about the incident by His mother and Joseph, He says, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" (Luke 2:41-49)
And so, we have a little theological debate before us....and I am just not sure where I stand. Does it REALLY, in the grand scheme of things, matter if Jesus really understood at ____ (insert age) years old that He was fully God? I don't think it does, in my opinion.
All I DO know and believe, is that Christ was, and still IS, fully God and fully man at the the same time. Both 2000 years ago when He physically walked this Earth, and today, as he is sitting on the throne in Heaven, a raised God-man.
All in all, the book was interesting. However, I felt the novel had two extremes: it was pretty slow, almost uninteresting, at the beginning through the middle; but the chapter on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness was brilliant!
As far as MY personal reccommendation, I would reccommend reading it, of course with a "grain of salt", realizing that is IS, afterall, a NOVEL.