Christianity Page 4
Click on Book for Amazon
There’s no shortage of ways to fill the minutes of our days―from doomscrolling to binge-watching TV to playing video games. But will you find what you are really looking for on a screen? There’s something missing in our lives, and we all feel it.
In our instant world, Jesus has been ignored, forgotten, and reduced. He’s a life coach dedicated to our success, a therapist for our anxiety, a political ally for our causes, or a genie for our desires.
In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues. He introduces readers to an ancient Jesus whose life experiences and ethics were totally unlike those of modern Americans, conservatives and liberals alike.
Jesus for President is a radical manifesto--more urgent today than ever--to awaken the Christian political imagination, reminding us that our ultimate hope lies not in partisan political options but in Jesus and the incarnation of the peculiar politic of the church as a people "set apart" from this world.
Idleman, Kyle; Moore, Mark E.. The Missing Messiah: The Jesus We Can No Longer Ignore (p. 2). Tyndale Elevate. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Ask most people what Christ means, and they’ll probably tell you it’s Jesus’ last name. As if Jesus had been born to Mary and Joseph Christ in Bethlehem and eventually started the religion that bears his family name. But Christ isn’t a last name; it’s a Greek title that means “Anointed One,” or “Messiah” in Hebrew. Somewhere between the first century and today, we’ve forgotten what that title actually means. When the first followers of Jesus called him Christ or Messiah, they were not giving him a surname; they were making an explosive political, theological, and revolutionary claim. They were saying that this carpenter from Nazareth was the promised King that Israel had been waiting for. The one who would establish God’s Kingdom. The one who would challenge every earthly power. The one who deserves total allegiance. In the first century, it was dangerous to call Jesus “the Christ.” It was the kind of thing that got you killed. People didn’t casually throw that title around. If you said someone was the Messiah, you were saying he was the rightful King, which meant Caesar wasn’t. You were saying his Kingdom was ultimate, which meant Rome wasn’t. You were pledging your allegiance to him above all other authorities. That’s what Christ meant. We’ve domesticated a revolutionary claim into a religious label. And in the process, to some degree, we have lost the Messiah himself.
Keddie, Tony. Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels (p. 16). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
According to prominent Republican Christian influencers, including politicians, media pundits, and corporate lobbyists, Jesus’s death and resurrection marked not the end, but the beginning, of a Christian crusade against Big Government. Appealing to the Bible as the constitution for their right-wing movement, these Republican influencers have duped millions of Christians into believing that their nefarious interpretations of the Bible not only are factual but are God’s own Word. Politically conservative believers, as a result, hold their distinct political views in part because they think the Bible tells them so. I’m not buying it. As a professional historian and university professor whose expertise is politics and economics in the world of Jesus and the gospel writers, I feel obliged to denounce the Republican Jesus as a tool designed and wielded for political gain. This Jesus has no place in the ancient world. He was manufactured by right-wing politicians and their corporate bedfellows in the midst of American cultural and political contests over the last century. Republican Jesus is by no means the only interpretation of Jesus’s politics and ethics with currency in American culture, but it is by far the most consequential interpretation. This book identifies and discredits the insidious, cherry-picked biblical interpretations that serve as the foundation for the Republican Jesus. Republican Christian influencers have created a gospel for themselves that is very unlike the ones written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Claiborne, Shane; Haw, Chris. Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (p. 17). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
This book is a project in renewing the imagination of the church in the United States and of those who would seek to know Jesus. We are seeing more and more that the church has fallen in love with the state and that this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. The powerful benefits and temptations of running the world’s largest superpower have bent the church’s identity. Having power at its fingertips, the church often finds “guiding the course of history” a more alluring goal than following the crucified Christ. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual virtues of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love. We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world. And so we’re hardly able to distinguish between what’s American and what’s Christian. As a result, power corrupts the church and its goals and practices. When Jesus said, “You cannot serve two masters,” he meant that in serving one, you destroy your relationship to the other. Or as our brother and fellow activist Tony Campolo puts it, “Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.” As Jesus warned, what good is it to gain the whole world if we lose our soul? So what we need is an exploration of the Bible’s political imagination, a renovated Christian politics, a new set of hopes, goals, and practices.