Now available in digital, paperback, and hardcover.

Christianity is supposed to work. If it doesn’t it’s either wrong or it’s been misused. Essential Faith asserts that the core Christian message, the gospel, continues to be God’s power to save humans from the clear and present dangers we face.

This book will rattle the foundations of western Christian thought. It clears the doctrinal overgrowth of the past 2000 years for a vigorous strain of Christian faith to run unencumbered through human society.

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Here are some excerpts:

Why then don’t Sunday morning audiences challenge their pastor’s claim to have God’s power to save? I think it’s because we’ve forgotten what we need saving from. It seems to me that nobody expects a demonstration of God’s saving power because “salvation” has come to refer to an imperceptible change in spiritual status leading to an unverifiable rescue from postmortem doom.  In Romans 1:16, Paul called the gospel “the power of God for salvation.” He seems to have been in awe of his own message. That awe compelled him to proclaim it. The way many contemporary Christians handle the gospel strongly suggests they despise rather than revere it.”

Page 16

If a deeply pious, conscientious Jew like Saul of Tarsus was capable of mass murder, where does that leave the rest of us? Conformists and rule-followers will conscientiously exterminate their fellow humans under the right circumstances. It’s easy to imagine a moral backbone when our behavior is propped up on decent laws in a polite society. Virtue signaling signifies nothing significant. People who toe the line value their toes more than the line.

Page 40

Christ died to rescue us from the control of the elementary principles of the world. Those principles exert their power over us in part through rules. So, being saved means living free from rules.

Page 46

Jesus Christ is God. It’s an essential truth of the gospel made extra explicit in this ancient faith statement. But if Christ is God, how could he be the vehicle of saving faith? Surely that’s one attribute God could never possess. How could the all-seeing-One walk by faith and not by sight? Jesus couldn’t engage faith if he could see the future. But how could he become our exemplar if he couldn’t demonstrate the one trait God requires of us?

Page 78

The gospel is God’s power to save both Jews and Gentiles because it reveals the way to be righteous by God’s standard. This is the standard by which God considers himself righteous. The gospel is the definitive account of God’s righteous action according to his own righteous standard. That righteous standard is apparently faith.  It is the righteousness of God.

Page 88

Through the justification of faith that comes through the gospel, people from every nation enter Christ’s relationship with the Father by the Spirit. And since he has fulfilled the law for the sake of Israel’s calling, in Christ we become realized Israel. He is the Son of God and Son of Man raised to God’s right hand according to Psalm 80. As such, he is the true vine planted by God at the base of Israel’s ravaged vineyard.

Page 136

Faith in the gospel produces understanding of Scripture and not the other way around. At the same time, the Scriptures attest to Christ and reveal his face through the lens of the gospel.

Page 140

If a person must obey the Bible to experience God’s purpose for salvation that purpose will never be fulfilled. That’s because the purpose is for all people to come together as they are into one nation under God. This can’t happen if everyone who would come must learn to read in a foreign language (or must have a copy in their tongue), must conform to its quaint requirements, and adopt a foreign cultic ritual. We must be saved apart from the Bible for God’s purpose in Scripture to be realized.

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