Christians Question Sacred Institutions
What a relief. After15 years of postmodern drivel from Emergent Church evangelists, some Christian voices are finally breaking away from Institutionalized Christianity without rejecting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Emergent Chrch Evangelists dump Politically Incorrect portions of the Bible to attract disillusioned church youth, and their Creative Christianity captures far too many restles souls, while Bible believers sat in pews, wondering where all the kids went. Too many believers wrap Jesus in Christian traditions, and even unconventional leaders like Mark Driscol remain tethered by the Dark Ages (also known as Reformed Theology).
Over at the Jesus Creed Web site, Reformed theologian Scot McKnight is pushing a book titled I Knew Jesus Before He Was a Christian… And I Liked Him Better Then. McKnight is far too sympathetic with Emergent Evangelists like Tony Jones, but he is a Bible believer, and it is heartwarming to see Christian books breaking away from useless Christian traditions like this one:
First there was Jesus. Then there were his followers who made up the church, and they came to be called Christians. But these Christians tried to preserve the understanding of the true Jesus while doing damage to his cause and image at the same time.1
Unlike the Emergent Evangelicals, this unusual writer understands the problem with Christianity is the way God’s Word get overshadowed by human systems–a problem that keeps recurring in history, he says:
Ironically and tragically, misrepresenting God is not a problem unknown to religious history before Christianity. The faith and life envisioned in the Hebrew Bible degenerated to a religion we typically call Judaism by the time Jesus came among humankind. And the two were as fundamentally different as I am claiming the faith and life modeled by Jesus for his followers and institutionalized Christianity to be in our time.2
Traditional Christian evangelism
Say it like it is!
I can’t vouch for the rest of the book, but I like the direction he’s going. Hopefully someone gets a chance to read it before I do and tells me if it’s worth reading. It is getting considerable attention, so I want to check it out the rest of the way.
Has anyone heard of this book? Does anyone know about