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Gospel Renewal in an Age of Deconstruction

C.S. Lewis probably said it best in his book The Abolition of Man, written 80 years ago: 

You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque… a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

If everything is deconstructed, eventually you’ll be left with nothing, and nothing is a great place for power-grabbing “strong men” to thrive. 

Same Questions, Same Answer 

Is there a way to know the difference between authentic and artificial spirituality? And, if Christian institutions have failed you, is there a place you can still look to find truth? 

You might argue that The Apostle Paul wrote the book of Romans for just such a context. 

The Apostle Paul, an early-church leader, wrote a letter to the first church in Rome to help them get their minds around the core of Christianity. The heartbeat. The essence. To see past their own culture wars, religious confusion and institutional corruption.

My goal in writing Essential Christianity was to take Paul’s essential flow of thought in this majestic letter—starting with our innate questions and reasoning toward the gospel as their only answer—and translate that into our context. Essential Christianity is not a commentary on the book of Romans, but it takes Paul’s logic in Romans and translates it into our context.

It may seem like a wild notion to consider that a first century writer can meaningfully speak to our 21st century questions and problems. But Paul’s line of reasoning in the book of Romans is (as a non-Christian friend of mine told me recently) “surprisingly relevant” for those who aren’t sure about Christianity. After all, Paul himself started out as a hardcore skeptic—the idea of the resurrection of Jesus was just as outrageous to him as it might be to you. 

Think about it: Here are the basic questions Paul asks and answers in Romans:

  • How Do We Even Know There’s a God?
  • If God Is Real, Why Doesn’t Everybody Believe in Him?
  • Is Religion the Answer?
  • Why Do Christians Talk about “Being Saved”?
  • Can Anyone Actually Know They’ll Go to Heaven?
  • But Is It true?
  • Aren’t All Religions Basically the Same?
  • Why Does the Christian Life Seem So Hard?
  • What about the Christian View of Sexuality?
  • What Is the Difference Between Being Religious and Being Spiritual?
  • Now What?

As my non-believing friend (who became a Christian as we studied the book of Romans together during the writing of this book!) said, “This one book proves that the fundamental anxieties and questions of the human condition have not changed in 2,000 years.” These are the questions we plunge into in Essential Christianity, in the same order Paul gets to them.

When I was a new Christian, someone handed me John R. W. Stott’s Basic Christianity. I must have read it 10 times. And I gave it away at least 20. To this day, I’m still not sure if it was written more for the seeker or for me, the believer wanting to get a better grasp on the essentials of Christianity. Basic Christianity was like a beefy, cutting-edge gospel tract on the one hand, and a “basic soteriology” for growing Christians on the other. 

That’s what the book of Romans is—it’s a book written for believers and unbelievers on the wonders of the gospel—and it’s what I wanted Essential Christianity to be, too.