Instead, he is “small ‘o’ orthodox.” He’s right about that: Zahnd has a far better grasp of mere Christianity than Childers who reads her version of conservative Protestant evangelicalism back into history from Aquinas to Augustine to Athanasius while blasting anyone outsider her narrow scope with the fires of impending eternal damnation.Īs I read through the book yesterday and this morning, I posted tweets on it and I have included below those tweets as the bulk of my review.

I interacted with Brian Zahnd on Twitter yesterday and he said he doesn’t understand himself to be a so-called “progressive Christian”. To be honest, I’m still reeling about all this, the fact that people like Strobel and McDowell praise this noxious, utterly uncharitable screed that sows division and propagates misunderstanding. And as Childers says at the end of the book, those who fail to assent to the set of doctrines she deems essential, including (by implication) all these false teachers of another religion, are going to hell. But it is not a new movement: in her view, it is another religion altogether. Although it is praised by Christian apologists like Lee Strobel, Sean McDowell, and Frank Turek, yet page after page it exhibits poor argumentation, utterly unchristian caricatures of opposing views, and attacks of a woolly target that Childers has described as “progressive Christianity.”Īccording to Childers, progressive Christianity is a new movement whose leaders include people like the late Rachel Held Evans, Richard Rohr, Peter Enns, and Brian Zahnd. Indeed, this is one of the most harmful books I have read in a long time. As I will note briefly below, it does have some diamonds embedded in the coal.

It is a hugely popular book that came out a year ago and has almost two thousand reviews. I just finished reading Alisa Childers’ book Another Gospel?.

Critique of jesus and john wayne