Why Jesus? The Son sent to rebellious Israel

Discussing Robert P. Jones’ book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, David Smith writes in the Guardian:

Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic—creating fertile ground for Trump’s demagoguery.

That’s probably true, one way or another, for a lot of churches and Christian demographics in the West. The demagogues may change; there are more of them inside the church, I suspect, than outside. But the failure remains the same.

So how do we get from there to Jesus? I went this way.

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Why Jesus? Which Jesus?
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The Spirit of prophecy and renewal
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Speaking words of wisdom
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The “voice of a god” and the “form of a god”
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What can we learn from “urban monasticism”?
In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and his… ()