Jesus never tortured or killed or ruined the life of anyone, but the same cannot be said for the religion that claims to follow him," McLaren continues. McLaren, like any doctrinaire progressive, lays out his doctrines with the absolute conviction that he alone has the truth, while simultaneously claiming that those who think that they have the truth should be avoided. McLaren adds, "Christians like very much to call Jesus the Son of God. Jesus much preferred to call himself the Son of Man (or son of humanity). There are many layers of meaning to the term. But the simplest and most obvious is this: a son of humanity is a human being."

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the

He repeats the classic 19 th century Protestant liberal dismissal of anything supernatural in the Bible. For example, he believes that Dr Luke was unaware of mental illness, chemical imbalances etc. We came away seeing the ugly underbelly of Christian Zionism and “philosemitism.” We saw with heartbreaking clarity how Christian Zionism hurts Palestinians, whether they’re Christian or Muslim. We also saw how Christian Zionism has become a fundraising tool for extreme right-wing political alliances that many Jews find morally horrifying. We saw how Christian Zionism perpetuates a simple but terribly dangerous theological idea, an idea that Christian missiologist Lesslie Newbigin called “the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism,” the idea that God chooses some people for exclusive privilege, leaving everyone else in a disfavored (or we might say “dis-graced”) status.14 They are the other. They don’t belong here. They are in the way. Their rights don’t count. Through the years I have tried to rectify my ignorance about my own religion’s downsides and the upsides of other religions. But honestly, even after years of research, I can’t be certain how much I still don’t know simply because Christian institutions have so effectively denied, minimized, and rationalized our faults, recalling the old bromide about the victors writing history. The irony is so stark that it’s hard to process: a Jewish movement with a Jewish founder and all-Jewish original followers becomes, in the matter of a couple of decades, viciously anti-Jewish. From late in the first century onward, beginning with the author of the Fourth Gospel and later including Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, many of Christianity’s most revered leaders vilified Jews, setting the stage for inhumane acts of persecution against Jewish people in the coming centuries, from ghettoization and banishments to forced conversions and mass executions.5

The citizens of Strasbourg rounded up the community of [2,000] Jews, brought them to the Jewish cemetery, and said that it was their religion that was leading them to poison the wells where Christians drank—and that was the source of the bubonic plague. They had either to renounce their religion or be killed on the spot. Half of the Jews held to their religion, and they were burned alive. He then moves to vintage “new kind of Christian” Brian McLaren fare. “I have found the permission and freedom to be a new kind of Christian, a progressive Christian, a contemplative-activist Christian, a Christian humanist, or whatever you want to call me. I am learning to be content whatever I am called, as long as I remain passionately eager to embody a way of being human that is pro-justice, pro-kindness, and pro-humility. You have that permission too, if you would like it.” Dubbed “a heroic gate-crasher” by New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle, Brian D. McLaren explores reasons to leave or stay within the church and if so how…

Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the

Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road?: Christian Identity in a Multi-faith World The author goes some way to assuring readers that the humanity that they share is both a religious and universal calling: “Loyalty to reality does not feel like certainty. It feels more like humility. It feels like awe, wonder, curiosity, patient attentiveness. It evokes Jesus’ calls to the perpetual rethinking of repentance, to lifelong childlikeness, to the cultivation of the born-again or beginner’s mind.”After laying out reasons to leave and stay, McLaren, in the third and final section of his book, begins by reframing the questions: “ Will we stay Christian? and Will Christianity survive? are less important questions than these: How shall we humans survive and thrive? What good future shall we strive for? How can we align our energies with the divine energy at work in our universe?” In this section, McLaren lays out an agenda that humanists both Christian and secular will likely agree on. McLaren ends the book by calling for a radical redefinition of Christianity to match his humanist vision: “I could not stay a Christian if my only option was the old way, the old way of white Christianity, the old way of patriarchal Christianity, the old way of Theo-Capitalistic Chris­tianity, the old way of violent, exclusive, and authoritarian Christianity with its suppressed but real history of cruelty.” Lest his readers begin to lose hope at this point, he moves forward into a positive vision for Christian faith: