Why Christianity Must Change Or Die

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061756121
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Christianity Must Change or Die written by John Shelby Spong and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and heartfelt book, he sounds a rousing call for a Christianity based on critical thought rather than blind faith, on love rather than judgment, and that focuses on life more than religion.

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061750255
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A New Christianity for a New World written by John Shelby Spong and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his bestselling book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Bishop John Shelby Spong described the toxins that are poisoning the Church. Now he offers the antidote, calling Christians everywhere into a new and radical reformation for a new age. Spong looks beyond traditional boundaries to open new avenues and a new vocabulary into the Holy, proposing a Christianity premised upon justice, love, and the rise of a new humanity -- a vision of the power that might be.

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0060675071
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living in Sin? written by John Shelby Spong and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1990-02-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is celibacy the only moral alternative to marriage? Should the widowed be allowed to form intimate relationships without remarrying? Should the church receive homosexuals into its community and support committed gay and lesbian relationships? Should congregations publicly and liturgically witness and affirm divorces? Should the church's moral standards continue to be set by patriarchal males? Should women be consecrated bishops? Bishop Spong proposes a pastoral response based on scripture and history to the changing realities of the modern world. He calls for a moral vision to empower the church with inclusive teaching about equal, loving, nonexploitative relationships.

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 006236233X
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy written by John Shelby Spong and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global and pioneering leader of progressive Christianity and the bestselling author of Why Christianity Must Change or Die and Eternal Life explains why a literal reading of the Gospels is actually heretical, and how this mistaken notion only entered the church once Gentiles had pushed out all the Jewish followers of Jesus. A man who has consciously and deliberately walked the path of Christ, John Shelby Spong has lived his entire life inside the Christian Church. In this profound and considered work, he offers a radical new way to look at the gospels today as he shows just how deeply Jewish the Christian Gospels are and how much they reflect the Jewish scriptures, history, and patterns of worship. Pulling back the layers of a long-standing Gentile ignorance, he reveals how the church’s literal reading of the Bible is so far removed from these original Jewish authors’ intent that it is an act of heresy. Using the Gospel of Matthew as a guide, Spong explores the Bible’s literary and liturgical roots—its grounding in Jewish culture, symbols, icons, and storytelling tradition—to explain how the events of Jesus’ life, including the virgin birth, the miracles, the details of the passion story, and the resurrection and ascension, would have been understood by both the Jewish authors of the various gospels and by the Jewish audiences for which they were originally written. Spong makes clear that it was only after the church became fully Gentile that readers of the Gospels took these stories to be factual, distorting their original meaning. In Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, Spong illuminates the gospels as never before and provides a better blueprint for the future than where the church’s leaden and heretical reading of the story of Jesus has led us—one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story in the modern world.

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : HarperOne
ISBN 13 : 9780060675325
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Christianity Must Change or Die written by John Shelby Spong and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 1998-04-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Creed for a New Millennium, from an Outspoken Advocate for a Christianity that is true to Jesus. Building on his bestselling books Resucing the Bible from Fundamentalism and Living in Sin?, Bishop Spong explores the future of ethics, prayer, and Christianity itself. His manifesto is both the summation of his life's work and a guide for every reader searching for a reasoned, just, and loving faith.

Author : Paul Johnson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451688512
Total Pages : 816 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History of Christianity written by Paul Johnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1976, Paul Johnson’s exceptional study of Christianity has been loved and widely hailed for its intensive research, writing, and magnitude—“a tour de force, one of the most ambitious surveys of the history of Christianity ever attempted and perhaps the most radical” (New York Review of Books). In a highly readable companion to books on faith and history, the scholar and author Johnson has illuminated the Christian world and its fascinating history in a way that no other has. Johnson takes off in the year AD 49 with his namesake the apostle Paul. Thus beginning an ambitious quest to paint the centuries since the founding of a little-known ‘Jesus Sect’, A History of Christianity explores to a great degree the evolution of the Western world. With an unbiased and overall optimistic tone, Johnson traces the fantastic scope of the consequent sects of Christianity and the people who followed them. Information drawn from extensive and varied sources from around the world makes this history as credible as it is reliable. Invaluable understanding of the framework of modern Christianity—and its trials and tribulations throughout history—has never before been contained in such a captivating work.

Author : John Shelby Spong
Publisher : HarperOne
ISBN 13 : 9780060675325
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why Christianity Must Change or Die written by John Shelby Spong and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 1998-04-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Creed for a New Millennium, from an Outspoken Advocate for a Christianity that is true to Jesus. Building on his bestselling books Resucing the Bible from Fundamentalism and Living in Sin?, Bishop Spong explores the future of ethics, prayer, and Christianity itself. His manifesto is both the summation of his life's work and a guide for every reader searching for a reasoned, just, and loving faith.

Author : John Piper
Publisher : Crossway
ISBN 13 : 1433520575
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Jesus Demands from the World written by John Piper and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2011 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the Gospels and examines what Christ requires of his followers in a redemptive-historical context. New and seasoned believers will see God's loving plan for their ultimate satisfaction. Now in paperback.

Author : James Davison Hunter
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199745390
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book To Change the World written by James Davison Hunter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive--and provocative--answers to these questions. Hunter begins with a penetrating appraisal of the most popular models of world-changing among Christians today, highlighting the ways they are inherently flawed and therefore incapable of generating the change to which they aspire. Because change implies power, all Christian eventually embrace strategies of political engagement. Hunter offers a trenchant critique of the political theologies of the Christian Right and Left and the Neo-Anabaptists, taking on many respected leaders, from Charles Colson to Jim Wallis and Stanley Hauerwas. Hunter argues that all too often these political theologies worsen the very problems they are designed to solve. What is really needed is a different paradigm of Christian engagement with the world, one that Hunter calls "faithful presence"--an ideal of Christian practice that is not only individual but institutional; a model that plays out not only in all relationships but in our work and all spheres of social life. He offers real-life examples, large and small, of what can be accomplished through the practice of "faithful presence." Such practices will be more fruitful, Hunter argues, more exemplary, and more deeply transfiguring than any more overtly ambitious attempts can ever be. Written with keen insight, deep faith, and profound historical grasp, To Change the World will forever change the way Christians view and talk about their role in the modern world.

Author : Brian D. McLaren
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061969494
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A New Kind of Christianity written by Brian D. McLaren and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Some books provide us with information about the world, but every once in a while a book appears that enables us to imagine new, more wonderful worlds. [A New Kind of Christianity] is one of these.” —Peter Rollins, Ikon A New Kind of Christianity is Brian D. McLaren’s much anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough work of the emergent-church movement, A New Kind of Christian. Named by Time magazine as one of America’s top 25 evangelicals, McLaren, along with such contemporaries as N.T. Wright, Jim Wallis, and Rob Bell, is one of the acknowledged leaders of a new generation of Christians who want to update their faith for current times while remaining true to the core message of Jesus. In this controversial and thought-provoking book, McLaren explores the questions that will determine the shape of Christianity for the next 500 years.