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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David has provided a very nice commentary on my previous post about the resurrection of Jesus on the third day. He has made it clear that he gets the main contention about the historical framing: “Too often we read the New Testament as if it dropped out of the sky rather than emerging… ()
If we think that the resurrection of Jesus is the climactic event in the testimony of the early church, constituting the triumph of life over death for all humanity, we are missing the point.At the beginning of an extensive discussion of resurrection, Paul recapitulates the “gospel” which he had… ( | 3 comments)
In a fourth piece on the kingdom of God, Joel Green argues that the kingdom of God is a “master lens through which the nature of reality is disclosed and by which all rival accounts of reality are measured.” It is not a doctrine, it is a way of seeing. That sounds like a very modern notion. Is it… ()
In his rather short third post on the kingdom of God, Joel Green begins by asking what we can learn about God’s royal rule by examining how the expression is used in the Gospels. He summarises the various contexts: the kingdom of God is entered, proclaimed, possessed, has drawn near, etc. Then he… ()
This is a rather technical examination of Jason Staples’ argument in Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites that when Paul speaks of Israel as “vessels of wrath,” he does not mean that the people are are the objects of God’s wrath; rather they are… ()
Joel Green’s second post on the kingdom of God begins with an excellent thought attributed to Marianne Meye Thompson: Jesus did not bring the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God brought Jesus. Very good! ()
Joel Green is doing a series of posts on the kingdom of God on Substack. He has some good things to say about how narrative works, but his argument about the kingdom of God doesn’t escape the gravitational pull of planet theology. I will summarise his posts and try to show where and why and… ()