Sublime

New Testament scholar Craig Evans says:

The technical term for this is prosopological exegesis—more simply, person-centered interpretation.

Today (especially since the recent publication of The Obstacle Is the Way), Stoicism has found a new and diverse audience,

churches that can thrive in our secular age.

If Jesus was truly the smartest, most interesting, and most transformative man who ever lived—if he was truly God—we ought to be able to make a case for his existence and impact, even without a body or any evidence from the New Testament.

If, however, we follow either Meyer or Sanders, and see Jesus’ aim as the restoration, in some sense, of Israel, beginning with the highly symbolic call of twelve disciples, then the apparently peculiar idea of Jesus ‘founding’ a community designed to outlast his death gives way to a more nuanced, and perfectly credible, first-century Jewish one:

Nietzsche said that we took God into the human conversation, into our history, and now He is dead.

By the late 1800s, Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead.” What he meant is that a critical mass of the intelligentsia didn’t believe in God anymore, not in the same way their forefathers did. In the absence of God, a new Leviathan now rose to pre-eminence, one that existed before but gained new significance: the State.

Donald McGavran’s The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions.11 McGavran had been a missionary in India, and his book studied people groups with massively distinct socio-cultural and religious differences.