I really enjoyed some things about this book. Mainly I appreciated that it pissed off so many fundamentalists. If you google the title you are sure to find some rants and raves about it. I didn’t really think it was very radical, however I did think he nailed the fact that Jesus’ message has been skewed by the development of Christianity. Basically he boiled down the message of Jesus to:

“Kingdom of God is available now to everyone through me”.

The main controversy is that Chalke renounces a crucial biblical dimension of the atonement: penal substitution. For Chalke this is unnecessary and offensive. He describes it as ‘a form of cosmic child abuse – a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed, morally dubious in total contradiction to the statement “God is love”’. This is nothing new and has been a cornerstone for many quests to change traditional Christian doctrine. The concept of Jesus dying on the cross to pay for our sins is a result of Christian theologians attempting to explain Jesus death while still keeping their Jewish or Pagan view of God as an angry ruler in heaven demanding conformity to his rules or condemning us to eternity in Hell.

What I take from books like this is that Christians from every culture in our history have skewed the message of Jesus to fit their particular culture’s view of God and their particular needs. Early Christian’s that came from ancient Israel viewed God as an explanation for natural disasters and as a great king that would lead them to victory. That makes sense because Israel had long been using God as an excuse to conquer their enemies even including slaughtering women and children in a quest for land. It was natural that they would see the messiah as a political leader coming to overthrow their oppressors. This carried out also in Rome as Roman Christians naturally saw Jesus’ message of “kingdom” as a call toward imperialism that eventually lead to evangelism through crusades, domination and rigid rules for compliance by “the” church. Greek Christians developed a view of Jesus’ message that mimicked their view of God as a Zeus like mastermind using humans as playthings. It is no wonder that we have seen Jesus message turned into the all too common “prosperity gospel” developed in our modern American culture of wealth and commercialism.

I agree with Chalke that the true message of Jesus has been lost by the church and that it is correctly centered on “the Kingdom”, but I would rephrase the synopsis of his message to be:

A wonderful life of love and community is available now to everyone by following the example of Jesus’ life, void of pride and full of humility and compassion.

Of course it would be easier to just think we can believe in a particular event or theory and all will be well. Books like this remind me that the “new character” we are challenged to take on is not achieved overnight and I have a long way to go, but at least I’m working on it now instead of waiting for it to happen after I die.