Bøger af Joel Looper

"Joel Looper offers his fellow evangelicals a theological rationale for resisting Christian nationalism. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. So wrote Paul to the Galatians who demanded the circumcision of gentile converts. Such rigid adherence to the old law prioritized one culture over the universal church. Joel Looper hears an urgent message for American Christians today in this biblical controversy. Though evangelicals emphasize fidelity to the gospel above all else, many have fallen in step with "a different gospel" of Christian nationalism. Analyzing Scripture, church history, and current events in the United States and Russia, Looper shows how the nation can supplant the church as Christians' primary allegiance-and why Jesus calls us to a different kind of community. He also engages directly with Christian nationalist authors, exposing their distortions of theology. Looper communicates a fresh, insider's perspective on how this false gospel has colonized American evangelicalism. He also shows us how we can revive the traditional Christian vision of community, drawn together by the Holy Spirit. Thoughtful and balanced, Another Gospel offers readers a way out of the rut of a well-worn argument-and a way forward for the American church"--

In the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary looking for a "e;cloud of witnesses."e; What he found instead disturbed, angered, and perplexed him. "e;There is no theology here,"e; he wrote to a German colleague. The New York churches, if possible, were even worse: "e;They preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed... namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life."e; Bonhoeffer acts for American Protestantism as an Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, a cultural and political analysis of the new republic, appeared a century prior. But what the Berlin theologian found was, if possible, more significant than the observations of the French aristocrat: Protestantism in America was a "e;Protestantism without Reformation."e; Bonhoeffer's America explicates these criticisms, then turns to consider what they tell us about Bonhoeffer's own theological commitments and whether, in fact, his judgments about America were accurate. Joel Looper first brings Bonhoeffer's reformational and Barthian commitments into relief against the work of several Union theologians and the broader American theological milieu. He then turns to Bonhoeffer's own genealogy of American Protestantism to explore why it developed as it did: steeped in dissenting influences, the American church became one that resisted critique by the word of God. American Protestantism is not Protestant, Bonhoeffer shows us, not like the churches that emerged from the Continental Reformation. This difference gave rise to the secularization of the American church.Bonhoeffer's claims against the church in the United States, Looper contends, hold strong, even after considering objections to this narrative-Bonhoeffer's experience with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the possibility that Bonhoeffer, during his time in Tegel Prison, abandoned the theological commitments that undergirded his critique. Bonhoeffer's America concludes that what Bonhoeffer saw in America, the twenty-first-century American church should strive to see for itself.