The American Church Struggle

Friends, this week we're diving into something that's been eating at me for a while now—how the architects of Christian nationalism have had the audacity to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. I'm talking about Project 2025 invoking "costly grace" as if Bonhoeffer wasn't writing about them. Here's the thing: when Bonhoeffer penned those famous words in 1937, he wasn't crafting a devotional for suburban book clubs—he was running an illegal seminary under Nazi surveillance, training pastors who were forfeiting their careers, their pensions, and their safety to follow Jesus instead of the Führer. The German Christians of his day fused faith with national identity, blessed political power, and demanded loyalty to a strongman who promised to make their country great again. Sound familiar? The brutal irony is that those who now quote Bonhoeffer are functionally aligned with the very forces he resisted—they're the German Christians quoting the Confessing Church, and that's about as theologically obtuse as Caesar celebrating the cross while forgetting he's the one who put Jesus on it. Costly grace is still available, y'all—it just actually has to cost something.

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What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

⁠⁠⁠⁠This Lenten class ⁠⁠⁠⁠begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

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