What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus

I don’t believe the theology of Paul or any other New Testament author was sophisticated enough or influenced enough by philosophy to work with a category like divine transcendence in the sense important for later Christian theology.

Jesus is unquestionably within the human story, but he is remembered as one who absorbed and did not transmit deprivation and violence. And that is hopelessly paradoxical.

Thus the speaker has been turned up so loud—“YES! THERE IS A GOD! YES! JESUS IS GOD!”—that the much more subtle and interesting point the gospels are making has all but been drowned out,