Bradley Jersak
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Out Of The Embers
$24.99Deconstruction: Trendy brand name for falling away from belief in God? Or a process essential to authentic faith?
Liberation or trauma? Prison break or exile?
It’s complicated. Just like you.
Christian history records a Great Reformation and a Great Awakening. But today’s “Great Deconstruction” will surely leave an equally profound impact.
In Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak explores the necessity, perils, and possibilities of the Great Deconstruction-how it has the potential to either sabotage our communion with God or infuse it with the breath of life, the light and life of Christ himself.
In this collection of vulnerable memoirs, philosophical memos, and candid provocations, Jersak resists both the hand-wringing urge to corral stray sheep and the exultant desire to play the happy-clappy Ex-vangelical cheerleader. He employs the wisdom and expertise of the great deconstructionists-Christianity’s ancient influences (Moses, Plato, Paul, and the Patristics), “beloved frenemies” (from Voltaire to Nietzsche), and the masters of deconstruction (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Weil)-to double down and deconstruct deconstruction itself.
Where is faith after deconstruction? The author’s heart is to engage and empathize with the bereft and disoriented, stoking the brittle ashes for live embers. In this quest for the resilient gospel of the martyrs, the marginal, and those outside the threshold…inexplicably, in this liminal space, life stirs. A Light shines through the ashes. We find, often for the first time, that living connection Jersak calls “presence in communion.”
There is a sea change occurring across the Western church and civilization. Whether we’re watching a radical course correction or a complete collapse remains to be seen, and how it pans out will likely depend on how we see what’s happening, who we are becoming, how we live in response-and, most important, where we find Christ situated in this storm.
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More Christlike Word
$24.99The Scriptures are an essential aspect of the Christian faith. But we have often equated them with the living Word Himself, even elevating them above the One to whom they point. In doing so, we have distorted their central message–and our view of God. Tragically, this has caused multitudes of people unnecessary doubt, confusion, and pain in their encounters with the Scriptures.
Many people understand God as being truly loving and good. Yet, they struggle with depictions of God in Scripture as wrathful, violent, and genocidal. These “toxic texts” have caused some to set aside their Bibles as R-rated and unreliable. They have led others to completely reject their faith.
Author and theologian Bradley Jersak has wrestled deeply with such passages over many years. He has experienced the same questions, doubt, and pain. In A More Christlike Word, he offers a clarifying and freeing path forward, whether you consider yourself a believer, a doubter, or a skeptic, inviting you to a better and more ancient way to read the Scriptures. He calls this path the “Emmaus Way” because it focuses on Jesus Christ as the final Word on God. It demonstrates how all Scripture, by design, points to Jesus, revealing the true nature of the Father.
After deconstructing the modern biblicist/literalist approaches to Scripture interpretation that have failed us, Brad turns to the early church for a hermeneutic of prefigurement, treating the Bible as the grand narrative of redemption, told through a polyphony of voices and worldviews, culminating in the arrival of Christ as the eternal Word of God–what God has to say about himself.
The interpretive system of the church fathers and mothers who gathered the New Testament and preached the gospel from the Old Testament has largely been ignored or dismissed by both evangelical and liberal movements, the twin children of modernity. The patristics explain and model the apostles’ Christ-centered interpretation of the Scriptures. Brad applies their approach to “unwrath” sample passages from each genre of the Bible, showing how even the cringe-worthy texts have an important place in the christotelic saga of divine love.
Your journey on the Emmaus Way will open up to you the fullness of the Scriptures, and, most important, lead you to the God who deeply loves and welcomes you.
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