Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile Book

...I'm still kind of waiting for the substance, like maybe if I keep thinking about what I read it will be revealed to me. Perhaps I'm being a little mean, but this book, though given the honorable task of calling Christians back to Christ, attempts this by making naive and indefensible generalizations about politics and history (of which I happen to be a student) through the lens of an only less naive interpretation of the Bible (not that I'm a scholar) which quite happily leaves out things like Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers, seeming acceptance of slavery as a social fact, etc.

My complaint also stems from something typical of Bell and other emergent-church types: pure deconstructionism/criticism without any building back up. Of course, Bell says we are supposed to have more faith and rely less on theological systems and so forth, but Bell's answers to "how do we then live, or understand God?" seem to be, "well, read the bible and look at how nice Jesus is." But EVERYONE already knows how nice Jesus is. Even Nietzsche was able to like Christ if not Christianity. Just do whatever feels good, man. If it doesn't feel good, it's not from God. This sounds like something a stuffy old man would write about the youth, but my point is that I wanted a book that would plot a course, but it really was just kind of a high-floating sermon, and fairly preachy, too.

All this being said, it's a good book for someone new to these areas and will appeal to many people on the verge of becoming Christians or those who just want to find an outlet for the anger they have against the sins of the church. If I had read this 6 years ago I may have found it to be a little bit more compelling. As it is, I've been reading "the Sickness Unto Death" by Kierkegaard as I read Bell's book, and what I've found is that Kierkegaard has more lessons to teach Christians than any emergent church writer, and you can go ahead and throw the lessons of the Reformation on top of that. Kierkegaard gives a much different attitude towards people's feelings. He would ask: Where is the masculinity of Christianity, it's defiance against what people want, it's demand for perfection and honor, it's requirement of the subservience a knight owes to his king? Bell might answer: we need to present God in such a way that everyone would agree with him without any offense.