As an outgrowth of the author’s psychiatric practice, he has spent a lot of time analyzing and studying the brain and how humanity relates to each other and God. In his book, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life, the author outlines how lies, deception, and selfishness are at the core of humanities problems. He goes on to point out, “The only power in the universe that can heal our hearts and free us from fear is the power of love. Our fear-ridden hearts cannot produce this love, we can only receive this love from God and let it flow through us to others.”
The ideas presented in this book, serve as a springboard for the development of this paraphrase of the New Testament. He points out that once Christianity became the state religion, under Constantine, the lens through which it was translated and through which we understand it was clouded by the legal system. His contention is that even today, modern translators continue to skew the original understanding based on legalism.
As Jennings states in the Preface, “Amazingly, the early church understood that Christ’s mission was to rebuild humanity back into God’s original design. They realized that God’s law of love was the template on which He built His universe, and rightly realized that – in order to save humankind – the law on which life is constructed to operate had to be restored into humanity. Christ’s mission was to restore humankind back into harmony with God.”
Jennings goes on to say in the Preface, “The Remedy is an expanded New Testament Bible paraphrase in which interpretation is filtered through the lens of God’s design law of love – the template on which life is built. This paraphrase is intentional in its focus to re-orient the Christian mind to God’s character of love and His mission to heal and restore humankind, as taught by the early church.” It is his goal to use the paraphrase to draw us back to what God originally intended when the Scriptures were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
The author has done a masterful job of helping his readers see Scripture from another perspective. I would have preferred for him to use a more conventional book format instead of the traditional “Biblical” format of columns, chapters, verses, and red letters. The paragraph and chapter format found in most books would have broadened his audience past the traditional church crowd, allowing a new generation of reader to see the Scriptures in a whole new light. It would also allay the confusion some might have since this, as the author points out, is a paraphrase and not a translation.