We're starting a Book Club, and you're invited! We talk about why we wanted to do this, how you can be involved, and the first book we'll discuss: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by journalist Tim Alberta.

The Book Club will be a weekly discussion on Fridays at 12pm ET starting August 2, 2024 (recordings available to all members). To participate, get yourself a paid membership to the Gravity Community.

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, Joel Looper offers evangelicals a theological rationale for resisting Christian nationalism.

Joel Looper teaches at Baylor University where he serves as coordinator for Shalom Mission Communities, a network of international Christian communities. He's the author of Bonhoeffer's America: A Land Without Reformation and the book we talked about on this episode Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity.

Show notes:

• The article we referenced about the Texas school board member who disavowed the far-right platform she campaigned on: "A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum."

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There is no such thing as substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah, which changes everything we thought we knew about Jesus's death. The consistent message throughout the entire NT is not that Jesus died instead of us, rather, Jesus dies ahead of us so that we can unite with him and be conformed the image of his death. It's not about substitution, it's about participation, and Andrew Rillera helps us see this in his book Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death.

Andrew Rillera is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at The King's University in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada.

Connect with Gravity Commons:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join the Gravity Community to interact with other listeners, and get our list of curated links each week to all things edifying and interesting.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Podcast? Contact us at podcast@gravitycommons.com.