“How could we have been listening to the Scriptures all these centuries and still be surprised and chagrined by the humiliation of Christendom? How could we have honored texts like the Beatitudes (“Blessed Are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”) and yet formed in our collective mind the assumption that Christian faith would be credible only if it were popular and numerically superior, and respected universally? How could we have been contemplating the “despised and rejected” figure at the center of this faith for two millennia and come away with the belief that his body, far from being despised and rejected, ought to be universally approved and embraced?”