The Lost Message of Jesus [Paperback]

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.

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.'

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.