Customer Reviews

Christianity: A Beginner's Guide (Beginners Guide (Oneworld))

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I bought this book because I really liked Keith Ward's essays in another book ("The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis") and because I'm looking for a good, simple, clear book that could be recommended to new Christians or seekers. Unfortunately, for each chapter in this book Ward gives three different viewpoint--usually a traditional conservative view, a standard liberal view, and what might be called a third-way or progressive option. To me this results in a confusing, disconnected experience for the reader. I wish he would have instead divided the book into three sections, where each section would cover all of the points from start to finish for each of the three viewpoints. I also wish he would have omitted terms like "perichoresis" and "pleroma" and just kept the language simple.

I found the Atonement section particularly disappointing. He didn't spend enough time here in making a persuasive or plausible case for any of the views or models of the atonement. By comparison, S. Mark Heim, in his book, "Saved from Sacrifice," gave concise, persuasive, compelling summaries of all of the various traditional atonement models (and Heim made compelling cases for each model even though he isn't satisfied with any of them as they are traditionally understood).

Bottom line is that I'm still looking for a good, simple, clear introduction to Christianity. I will read more of Ward's books, though, because I think he does have some very interesting ideas regarding theology and philosophy.

For a book entitled the way it is, it doesn't seem very exclusive in what it "teaches"..

Well, this is what the Christians say or the Bible teaches... but really there are many ways to look at this...

I have shredded my copy just so no one else would be fooled into thinking what this title says is accurate Bible teaching. What it states inside is not the same regardless of denomination. A book like this could ruin the lives of many new Christians.

There is only ONE way to get to Heaven... there is not a grab-bag full of options!

Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc...ARE NOT THE SAME!