Abstract

The life and psycho-theological integration of Canadian New Testament scholar Henry Burton Sharman are discussed. Author of ten major works on the teachings of Jesus, Sharman's singular mission during the first half of the Twentieth Century was the "mediation" of the religion of Jesus to students and teachers in Canada, the U.S., and China. His modus operandi was unique. A proponent of theological liberalism, Sharman was indifferent toward organized/institutional religion and sought methods of replacing dogmatic belief with awareness of the human Jesus' paradoxical message of personal fulfillment and "salvation." ;The vehicle of the "Sharman method," as it came to be known, was the group seminar. Using Sharman's source-critical text, Records of the Life of Jesus, group participants were able to recognize, modify, and discard their religious preconceptions and to yield their individual wills to God, unconditionally, in order to realize true fulfillment. This paradox, summarized in Luke 17:33, was for Sharman the "great law of life" and the heart of the singular religious truth represented and taught by Jesus. The group seminars influenced many people, particularly those in the Sharman-founded Student Christian Movement, to reexamine the traditional Christology of the Church and thereby cultivate their spiritual selves in accordance with the unembellished teachings and personhood of Jesus. ;Born in 1865 in Ontario Canada, Sharman's world-view evolved through four discernable stages of religious influence. After growing up in an orthodox Christian home, he began his volitional religious pilgrimage as an agnostic, was converted to an evangelical orthodoxy, and then endorsed the modernist liberalism encountered at the University of Chicago. His resultant faith, from which his life's work flowed, developed toward a Christocentric naturalism. ;Yet Sharman's faith was not merely psychological or intellectual, as some critics of liberal theology claimed. Rather, it always retained profound involvement of the human will and its relationship to the will of God. Therefore, Sharman is particularly noteworthy for his ability to define, and then practically apply, a distinctly effective method for engendering psychological/intellectual self-awareness as integrated with the religion of Jesus. Today Sharman's legacy continues to assert a subtle influence along the common boundary of theology and psychology