Reviews for The Last Christian

The average rating for The Last Christian based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-11 00:00:00 Tristan Burns This is a fascinating book. My wife reads voraciously and it's rare she says, "Hey, you really should read this book." I am sure glad I did. It's a page turner, so be forewarned. Anyway, plenty of reviewers have written synopses of the book. I offer instead what I think might be an ideal prologue or epilogue (or both). It's simply a quote from the last chapter in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis entitled The New Men: "Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning - for two thousand years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. (Never forget that we are all still 'the early Christians.' The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense - and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them - that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-22 00:00:00 Pam Jones I stopped reading this book when I realized that the only reason I was still going was to collect quotes with which to write a scathing review. That seems like a terrible reason to keep reading a book so, about 2/3rds of the way through, I gave up. This book has a solid plot setup and could easily have been made into a good sci-fi thriller, even if (for someone who reads sci-fi as much as I do) the basic layout was pretty boilerplate. The problem is that this is message fiction. The plot and the characters are just an excuse to peddle a very particular brand of Christianity which I find incredibly off-putting. I think if I had agreed with the message, I would have found the book a little less unpleasant. But it didn't even have that going for it. In terms of writing, the biggest problem is that there just aren't any characters in this book. There are only sock puppets and straw men. Even by those standards, however, they are still shallow. It's bad enough to read a thinly veiled lecture. It's much worse for the lecture to take itself seriously as some kind of counter-cultural ensign when it's really just a vapid collection of platitudes. I'm still vaguely curious to know how it ends, however. Which goes to show you the potential that could have been here if David Gregory had put any effort into making his characters have any internal lives whatsoever. Instead we get a stereotypical knee-jerk Christian who is literally incapable of doubt or nuance in any meaningful sense (these are apparently virtues in Gregory's mind) and a scholar of Christianity who has all the depth and incision of an Internet troll, plus a few random one-dimensional bad guys of varying degrees of evil to keep the plot running. Oh well.