Buy New

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Buy Used
Used - Good See details
Price: £2.80

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Colour:
Image not available

 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

The Lost Message of Jesus [Paperback]

Steve Chalke , Alan Mann
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
Price: £7.59 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £1.40 (16%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock but may require up to 2 additional days to deliver.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Paperback £7.59  
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. Learn more.

Frequently Bought Together

The Lost Message of Jesus + The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement + Pierced for our transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution
Price For All Three: £27.37

Some of these items are dispatched sooner than the others.

Buy the selected items together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Product details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Zondervan (12 Dec 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0310248825
  • ISBN-13: 978-0310248828
  • Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 12.7 x 19.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 199,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Authors

Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Product Description

Synopsis

This book presents a fresh - and perhaps controversial - look at Jesus by one of Britain's most respected Christian authors. Who is the real Jesus? Do we remake him in our own image and then wonder why our spirituality is less than life-changing and exciting? Steve Chalke - a high-profile visionary in the United Kingdom and an evangelical recognized not only by Christians but by the general public as well - believes that the real Jesus is deeply challenging. And each new generation must grapple with the question of who he is, because only through a constant study of Jesus are we able to discover God himself. "The Lost Message of Jesus" is written to stir thoughtful debate and pose fresh questions that will help create a deeper understanding of Jesus and his message. It is an encounter with the real Jesus of his world - not the Jesus we try to mold to ours. Themes include: the Kingdom of God - shalom - is available to everyone now, through Jesus; the world outside your own church needs to hear of the depth of God's love and suffering. Jesus was a radical and a revolutionary! Jesus offers immediate forgiveness, without cost, to anyone.

Jesus shows us repentance isn't a guilt-laden list of dos and don'ts, but an inspirational vision of a new way to live. Focusing on some of the key episodes, events, and issues of Jesus' life, we will see how too often the message we preach today has been influenced more by the culture we live in than the radical, life-changing, world-shaping message Jesus shared two thousand years ago.


Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
Much that once was, is lost, for none lived who could remember it. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars Great until you get to the deal breaker 28 April 2013
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I began this book enthusiastically and loved its debunking of urban Christian myth, but then........ We got to the part about personal 'salvation' and ouch! The opining that a person didnt really have to make a personal decision to follow Christ was one debunking too far for me. God accepts any and everyone IF they come through His son, ergo they need His son in their life, Jesus isn't a dictator and only goes if asked - we all have free will which is a gift we are given - so at the very last point the book fell flat on its face for me. Until near the end it would have been five star, afterwards it had slipped to a one star, or even a no star. A huge shame but I would not give it to a non Christian.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
92 of 124 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book contains much that is thought-provoking and challenging. Chalke rails against the way Christians (and the church) can be judgmental rather than gracious - assenting in principle to what Christ says but failing to put it into practice. And yes, we do need to keep asking ourselves where in our church and society we would be likely to find Jesus if he walked this earth again today. And we need to keep repenting.

However, Chalke pushes the pendulum so far back that he loses the crucial balance of what Jesus actually did say! (It's also significant, I think, that he quotes very little from the book of Acts and the Epistles, which tell us what the first eye-witnesses of Jesus thought his message was, and how they put it into practice.)

Some of the book comes across at first glance merely as slightly wacky: for example he asserts that the reason God tells Moses, "no one may see my face and live" is not because of God's overwhelming majesty and holiness (cf Isaiah 6), but because God's face is riven which so much pain that the sight of it would be too much for Moses to bear. But the book, along with the challenges and insights, and the things that raise an eyebrow or a question mark, has a dangerous undertone.

Someone once said that most heresy comes about simply because we emphasise one truth at the expense of another! Christ's humanity rather than his divinity (or vice versa); God's sovereignty rather than man's free will (or vice versa). And, in his attempt to emphasise God's love and grace, Steve Chalke has subtly downplayed talk of sin and judgment.

This started to alarm me long before I got to the pages which proved the most controversial: Chalke's attack on the principle that one of the awful things happening at Calvary was that Christ was being punished, by his and our loving Father, for our sins.

It is encouraging that Chalke recognises early in the book that "although God is love, this doesn't exclude the possibility of him eventually acting in judgment". However, when it comes to examining the Cross of Christ, Chalke seems to be unable to hold those two ideas - love and justice - together.

His view of the Cross is predominantly that is was God's final and total identification with the lost, the outcast and the marginalised. This is true. But the bible also teaches (and no, we shouldn't find this easy to stomach!) that:

"God presented [Christ] as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished - he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus." (Romans 3:25-26).

Compare that with Steve Chalke:

"The fact is that the cross isn't a form of cosmic child abuse - a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement "God is love". If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus' own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil. The truth is, the cross is a symbol of love. It is a demonstration of just how far God as Father and Jesus as his Son are prepared to go to prove that love..."

Very sadly, this starts to remind me of Richard Niebuhr's famous description of the essence of theological liberalism: `A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.'
Was this review helpful to you?
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Coming a little late to the debate ... 12 Oct 2012
By Baruch
Format:Paperback
I decided to look at this, trying to do some catch-up on evangelical arguments about the atonement, and given that it seems still to be regarded as something of a landmark book, and a sort of test-case for evangelicalism.

The chapter on the atonement is hard to take, for sure. I'm a traditional enough evangelical to believe that penal substitution is part of the bible's message. You can't just snip Isaiah 53 out of the book. What made it hardest for me was the flippant, glib, trying-to-be-cool tone of the chapter, but then that is a feature of the whole book.

It is, as plenty have recognised, a gospel for a world that doesn't want to know about consequences. Despite the fashionable readings of texts like turning the other cheek, of the two 'thieves' as representatives of violent secular change strategies, and so on ... it's interesting that the encounter with Zacchaeus manages to completely sidestep the issue of restitution, and whether or not repentance is possible without an attempt to make restitution.

Repentance will be the core issue for many evangelical readers, I suspect. In one passage, Chalke almost seems to be saying that repentance is about 'being good to yourself'. Readers with a reformed background will find his concept of repentance simplistic. But then equally they'll find his conception of the Trinity, in so far as the book gives evidence of it, superficial.

There's nothing new about all this. Forgiveness without repentance, a conception of sin that ignores consequences, the elimination of any notion of restitution; these are commonplaces of contemporary evangelicalism, easy to find in many popular evangelical books, and in the sermons of popular conference speakers.

The thing that has left me with the nastiest taste in my mouth is that I don't think I've read, certainly not in the last ten or twenty years, a book purporting to be Christian which was more brazenly self-serving and self-regarding than this. In anecdote after anecdote Chalke presents himself as the hero of his own story.

It's not completely without good bits. Chalke has the decency to acknowledge his debt to the late David Watson for a helpful analogy for conversion not necessarily being at a particular moment, or not being recognised by the convert as it happens. There is some very reasonable contextualisation of things such as Jesus' radical confrontation of Pharisaical rules about table fellowship, etc. But constantly the flip, self-serving tone intrudes, and at times I found it verging on blasphemy. Not surprisingly, the last few pages of the edition I read are full of straightforward commercial marketing blurb for church.co.uk and their products, which range in price from a very reasonable £1.50 to £16.99. Not taking inflation into account, of course.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book
If you enjoy Keith Ward, Tom Wright, or Rob Bell you will enjoy this book.

The book is pointing the church back to the subversive message of Jesus. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Faraday
1.0 out of 5 stars One to avoid
Steve Chalke has many gifts - however, he has really overeached himself here. Any book titled along the lines of 'lost message' immediately makes one wary. Read more
Published on 8 July 2010 by D. Whittaker
5.0 out of 5 stars Christianity can be summed up in one word .... grace!
I am sad to read so many unkind reviews about this book, as I think the author has set out an engaging and accessible introduction to the concept of God's grace. Read more
Published on 5 Jun 2010 by N. Andrews
2.0 out of 5 stars The road of good intentions...
To his credit, Steve Chalke comes across a man who deeply loves people. He seems to be the type of guy you would want in your corner if you are being mistreated. Read more
Published on 19 Jan 2010 by Joshua D. Jones
1.0 out of 5 stars The heretical message of steve chalke
I have been a christian for over 30 years and this is one of the worst books that Ihave ever read by a person who professes to be a christian. Read more
Published on 19 Nov 2009 by Mr. S. Mcglade
1.0 out of 5 stars Chris Dobson Review!
The book though well-written with a racy style is not going to break any ice spiritually in today's hedonistic generation. Read more
Published on 1 Jun 2009 by C. Dobson
5.0 out of 5 stars The lost message of Jesus by Steve Chalke
Excellent book, really makes you think about how you understand different aspects of the bible. It is really readable and challenging without being over-theological or too dumbed... Read more
Published on 17 May 2009 by Mrs. Laura M. Edmonds
5.0 out of 5 stars The Lost Message of Jesus
This is one of the most enlightening books I have read on Jesus and His message. Steve Chalk and his co-author have written this book in a clear and understandable manner and... Read more
Published on 10 April 2009 by Peter Dawson
2.0 out of 5 stars Departure from orthodoxy
One might say that Chalke's title has an unexpected appropriateness. He has lost any message about sin. He denies original sin. Read more
Published on 10 Jun 2008 by G. J. Weeks
1.0 out of 5 stars Drivel
Rowan Williams could have written this - and I don't mean that as a compliment either. Essentially Chalke and Mann argue that a liberal evangelical message will be more palatable... Read more
Published on 4 Jun 2008 by jshack73
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges