I’m pleased to announce my new book, Reimagining the Kingdom: The Generational Development of Liberal Kingdom Grammar from Schleiermacher to McLaren, is now available in print. There are a few ways to order it:
•From me directly for $12 ($6 off this week) with free shipping
•From Barnes and Noble for $10.94 (39% discount) plus shipping
•From Amazon
•It is also available as an ebook for NOOK and Kindle.
And all this week if you order a print version, I will email you an ebook version for NOOK or Kindle for free. Just forward to me your receipt and let me know which ereader you have.
As I have mentioned before, this book traces the generational development of liberal Kingdom grammar from Schleiermacher to Ritschl, Rauschenbusch, and Tillich, in order to see how that grammar is affecting contemporary articulations of Kingdom in evangelicalism, particularly progressive Emergent evangelicalism.
I think it’s important to deal with the pieces of liberal Kingdom grammar, because of how I see those pieces beginning to influence and impact historic orthodoxy and evangelicalism with the increased attention paid to the Kingdom of God. Yes, paying more attention to the Kingdom teachings of Jesus is a good thing, and so too is recapturing that language. It isn’t, however, if the Kingdom becomes the mode of salvation, rather than faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
This week I’m going to blog through some of the themes of my research, especially some of the great questions a friend of mine asked of the introduction. Beforehand, I thought I’d post the book’s foreword, which my friend and mentor graciously Mike Wittmer wrote. It describes a bit of what my research shows: that “Liberal Christianity offers the Kingdom on sale…The liberal gospel offers salvation at a steep discount, but it’s no bargain.”
I recently received an email from a car dealership that read, “We are incredibly pleased to announce the return of the $14.95 oil and filter change,” but only through the end of the month. The email contained a convenient hyperlink to schedule a service appointment and avoid waiting in line.
I happily contacted the dealer, only to learn that the oil change for my car would cost twice as much. I knew this was the normal price for my oil change, so I asked whether the dealer’s sale was really a special deal. The service person replied that this was their “new” price (which still sounded a lot like the old one) and that it would still be good after the end of the month. Not surprisingly, I learned that I could not schedule the promised appointment, but would have to cross my fingers and prepare to wait in line.
Wise consumers know to watch out for the bait and switch. Not every sale is actually a sale, and many “free” items end up costing you in the end. Wise Christians must be on guard too. In his classic book, Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen noted that liberal Christians use terms such as “Jesus,” “sin,” and “salvation,” but they mean something different by them. Machen concluded that “liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.” ((J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1994), 7.))
Jeremy Bouma explains why this is the case in his important guide, Reimagining the Kingdom. Liberal Christians from Schleiermacher to McLaren have spoken often of the Kingdom of God. What’s not to like? Who wouldn’t want the Kingdom to come to earth?
Enter Reimagining the Kingdom, a sort of Consumer Reports for Christians. Bouma studies how the liberal giants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used the term “Kingdom,” and he uncovers a trend that is too consistent to be a coincidence. Just as some sales are not actually on discount, so many who speak of the Kingdom of God do not mean what Jesus meant by it. Specifically, Bouma finds that liberal Christianity offers a different King, a different Kingdom, and a different way of entering the different Kingdom.
Liberal Christianity offers the Kingdom on sale. It’s cheaper to enter the liberal kingdom, for new converts do not need to believe such humbling doctrines as total depravity or Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement. They do not need to accept that Jesus bore the Father’s wrath to save us from the hell we deserved. It’s enough to believe Jesus died to show us how special we are, and hopefully inspire us to follow his loving and trusting example.
The liberal gospel offers salvation at a steep discount, but it’s no bargain. Reimagining the Kingdom is more than a research project. If you are one who is attracted to the liberal gospel, this consumer’s guide might just save your soul.
