Word: godly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...markedly different from those of the earlier Jewish prophets, above all Isaiah. Jesus' emphasis on acceptance and mercy is especially strong, even to the point of demanding that his followers not resist evil. He insists that the unrepentant outlaws of the world will enter the reign of God before the righteous. Yet he demands that his hearers be "perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." His sense of the imminence of God's reign, and the change of heart it demands, is expressed in earlier Hebrew scripture, but only Jesus expects to administer the reign...
...uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure of Jesus should wane--as it has in some of the West today--are the existential promises of his teaching sufficient to maintain a world faith? What else has he to offer a ferociously diverse but rapidly...
...believer might point out, there is the chance that Jesus was right. Perhaps he was what he claimed to be--the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel. Since his Resurrection, he has become--in the minds of billions--a transnational Messiah who continues to care for individual humans and to save them from internal and external evil...
...night and conclude that their individual accounts bear enough relation to one another to suggest that they spring from a common event. Their internal differences are occasionally extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark's affirmation that he was the "beloved Son of God" to John's flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures--ourselves above all. Nonetheless, the four together make a strong case for the urgency with which Jesus' early followers longed...
...country village, the boy's mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation--she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed--God's archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home...