What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus

Jesus as a “teacher” is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him. Most Christians today would, I suspect, see straight through that reductionism. But would they know what to put in its place? Or would they simply substitute some version of the first answer, that Jesus came to enable us to go to heaven?

Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But des

You and I desperately need to consider whether we have ever truly, authentically trusted in Christ for our salvation. In this light Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount are some of the most humbling in all Scripture. Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father

If we take seriously the public persona of Jesus as a prophet, the material we think of as ‘moral teaching’, which has been categorized as such by a church that has made Jesus into the teacher of timeless dogma and ethics, must instead be thought of as his agenda for Israel. This is what the covenant people ought to look like at this momentous poin

This impossibility of letting in daylight on a delusion does sometimes cover and conceal a delusion of divinity. It can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody suppose