There is a version of the Christian faith being practised in thousands of churches, broadcast on millions of screens, and passed down through generations of families that has very little to do with the first century movement it claims to represent.
This is not a new observation. But it is rarely made with the specificity and the evidence it deserves.
The Unexamined Gospel is not an attack on faith. It is an act of faith. The faith that the truth is strong enough to survive examination. That the original message, stripped of its institutional accretions and its cultural distortions and its deliberate obscurations, is more compelling and more radical than most of its current practitioners have been allowed to discover.
For the person who loves the faith and is troubled by the institution. For the person who has left and wonders if they left the right thing. For anyone serious enough about what they believe to ask why they believe it.
Synopsis
Moving from the historical context of the first century Jesus movement through the institutional developments of the early church and into the contemporary landscape of global Christianity, this book traces how the original message of freedom, love, and radical inclusion became so frequently a vehicle for control, exclusion, and the preservation of power. And it points toward what remains when the layers are removed.
