Amazon.com Amazon.com's Best of 2001 (ISBN 0060670843, Hardcover)

Christianity will not be a viable belief system for honest people in the contemporary world, writes John Shelby Spong, until it drops a few outmoded ideas--for instance, belief in a supernatural God who reveals Himself from outside creation. A New Christianity for a New World continues the work begun in Spong's bestselling Why Christianity Must Change or Die, in which the former Episcopalian bishop diagnosed Christianity's major problems. Here, he offers a vision of what authentic Christian belief might look like today, stripped of theism and all its corollaries (doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Atonement). Christians may come to believe that "God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God and Jesus is my way into God." Readers inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer's tantalizing writings on "religionless Christianity" in Letters and Papers from Prison and by John A.T. Robinson's Honest to God will find much challenge and comfort in Spong's New Christianity, his most mature and most radical book. --Michael Joseph Gross