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

The Time article Is Hell Dead? covers Rob Bell's book
Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. He's a pastor of a church that attracts 7,000 people every Sunday. He's also written Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality, Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile and Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith.

The description for Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile states:

>There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers. Jesus Wants to save Christians is a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity. It's about empty empires and the truth that everybody's a priest. It's about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from. It's about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch is a good book about the history of Christianity. He talks a lot about the Hebrew and Greek influences on the formation of the faith.

Jesus Wants To Save Christians by Rob Bell (I know, I know) is an EXCELLENT book on the sociopolitical role Christians should play.

Reading The Bible Again For The First Time by Marcus Borg is a great book on Biblical interpretation and context and translation. Helped me a lot.

And of course, like captainhaddock mentioned, Surprised By Hope is a classic which everybody who's at least interested in Christianity should read.

Just write a Christian book about it:

"Farting Against Church Windows - A Sinner's Struggle With Love, Grace, and Postmodern Architecture."

With one of these cheesy covers, of course. That seems to get better in the US (random example), but over here in Germany several publishers still try to make me not read their books due to cover design nausea.

Cover design nausea.

That would be a neat Christianese™ term.

Example: Hey X, have you read that new blessed book by Max Lucado/Anselm Grün/John Eldredge yet? I really felt the Lord speaking to me, and it was a blessing to lift my heart up in silent time afterwards. - Uh, well... I tried, but I got a severe case of Cover Design Nausea in the bookstore.

Books

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg. This is a good place to start learning a Christian approach to the Bible that doesn't assume inerrancy.

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. Wright offers a hopeful eschatology that stands in stark contrast to the "Left Behind"/dispensationalist eschatology that the evangelical church has widely embraced.

Jesus Wants to Save Christians by Rob Bell and Don Golden. Bell and Golden tell the large story of the Bible and reveal the social vision and mission of the God of the oppressed.

Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross by Mark Baker. Baker offers a collection of essays written by different pastors and theologians on the subject of the atonement. This would be a great place to start understanding the atonement outside of penal satisfaction theory.

The Prodigal God by Tim Keller. This is the best thing I've ever read on the Prodigal Son/Parable of the Two Sons. He is Reformed though.

Whose Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K.A. Smith. This is a good introduction to postmodernism for church people (one that doesn't caricature and demonize Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault) .

Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus by Ann Spangler. A great crash course in the Jewishness of Jesus.

Podcasts

I regularly listen to the podcast from Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Michigan featuring pastors Shane Hipps and Rob Bell (I know he's infamous in evangelical circles, but give him a chance and decide for yourself if he's a heretic).

I love the Mennonites. I get my regular Mennonite fix from Trinity Mennonite Church. Their sermon podcast can be found here.

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The OpenYale introductions to the Old and New Testament are phenomenal. If you want a look at how some of the best scholarship approaches the text, check them out.

Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne, and Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile (which is not called Jesus Wants to Save Christian: Learning to Read a Dangerous Book).

There are many factors involved.

1. God answering prayer is not on your time schedule. It seems he answered your prayers. It's not that he refused to answer before and now he is, but his answer back then was to be fulfilled later. This may have simply been his will to teach you something, or it may have been a direct result of other factors.
   
   
2. Grace is incarnational. Why did Jesus come to earth? Why didn't he just believe his purposes and fulfill God's mercy and justice that way? Asking it like this shows us clearly that these things happen in real life, that spirit and flesh are circumstantially tied together. Christ came in flesh because justice had to be done in spirit and flesh, man needed healing in both spirit and flesh, and likewise our sanctification happens in both spirit and flesh. So you don't become superman and slap away any temptation, but bad company can corrupt good morals, and God calls us to come out and be separate, a holy people devoted to his purposes. Only light shines out darkness, so you have to fill your life with light to overcome the darkness in your flesh and surrounding you in the world. Ephesians 5 and Galatians 5 make this clear. If you weren't going to be obedient enough yourself, God found a way to call you into a situation where it could happen before you even knew it was what you needed.
   
   
3. Grace is also not wholly dependent on you. We are part of one Body in one Spirit, and we hurt together and also heal together, and that is not just the Christians on earth but the Christians in heaven. Merit results in fruitfulness, and that is not compartmentalized into our individual lives. Much good in your life is from believers in your life simply doing what they should and others directly praying for you, both on earth and in heaven. This is called the Economy of Grace and it would be a good topic for you to study.
   
   
4. The temptations of our flesh is also not the only enemy. There is spiritual warfare being fought over our souls, demons and angels. What you think of as an opportunity to choose to sin or not, the demons count as their primary offensive. When your life is not filled with righteousness, you are a man walking onto a battlefield with no armor. Paul makes this clear in Ephesians 6. We must know that without holiness we are defenseless against the forces of darkness active in this world. We have to orchestrate factors against these vulnerabilities and remain vigilant in prayer, thanksgiving, spiritual fellowship, and good works.
   
   
5. Your holiness is not for you. This is a hard thing to face, but it may be that sometimes when our prayers are not answered, it's because we only wanted holiness to ease our consciences and be lazy and self-serving. Why would God honor that? So we can trick ourselves into thinking we are doing it ourselves and don't need him? To think that our lives are just for us and our own happiness? James 4 shows us a different picture. Holiness is to love God with all our being and love others as ourselves. With the state the world is in, there is a lot of work to do. If you want the fruits of purity and holiness, it will most strongly come when your life is in the patterns of righteousness.
   
   
6. You are becoming dangerously close to Luther's view of grace. Scripture does not describe it in this way, it is left mysterious, just as something like the concept of unity in the Spirit. We don't really understand, but we accept what scripture explains. What it says is we affect ourselves and yet the will and the effects are also through God. We aren't machines that mindlessly follow grace, we do choose, and those choices have real impacts, but our choices are not empowered by ourselves. In some passages it is made very explicit:
   
   >Philippians 2
   12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
   
   >2 Corinthians 4
   1 Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. 2 We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. 3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. 4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God. 5 For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
   
   So you are seeing and choosing and working, but it is as God is showing and calling and working. It's both at once. And yet as I said before, not only God...
   
   >1 Timothy 4
   1 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, 2 through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared,
   
   So we must be careful. Without a life rich in God and acts of faithfulness, it can be very easy to be led astray, and to have our consciences seared so we do not even feel what we are truly doing to ourselves. There are even some ways that we can be blind to a whole culture of sin we don't even recognize because we are distracted by the most severe offenses of passion.
   
   For some good examples of what I mean by that last bit, I recommend a book called "Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile" by Rob Bell. He isn't always a good teacher, so he has fallen out of popularity and you can find the book used for a penny on Amazon, but while I wouldn't recommend everything he has written, that one book is a good easily accessible teaching on incarnational faith and opening your eyes wider to what holiness is about and the kind of spiritual circumstances we're in with our modern materialistic culture and how it can affect our spiritual vitality.
   
   But as for right now, a simple analogy. We say "bearing fruit" right? Well if a plant isn't bearing fruit, do you change the plant, or do you change the conditions the plant is in? Clearly everyone knows you do the latter, and cultivating our faith is the same way. It's not about just forcing ourselves to desire and to do good in any state, but we amend our lives so that holiness grows in us naturally from all the factors we have arranged. Some of it is where and how we are grounded, some is receiving enough light, some is a regimen of disciplines to nourish us. It's not all pruning.