CHRISTIANITY THEN and NOW: Can It Be Saved?

This short book presents a renewed understanding of the Christian religion, based on a new textual analysis of John's Gospel, discovering the previously unnoticed fact that it was written not as biography as with the synoptics, but as a systematic argument for the divinity of Jesus. This makes it the locus classicus-the original authoritative presentation-of the traditional Jewish Christian religion to the philosophical and scientific Hellenistic Gentile world, rendering Christianity eligible to be a worldwide religion. The book was not planned or intended. Its chapters began as separate individual pieces celebrating a series of historical occasions at my church. The discovery about John's Gospel provided an anchor for a continuous treatment, which then required connecting linkages, thus evolving into a coherent book. Our timing now is critical. It is possible that this arrives too late to be of much help, that the decline of our religion is too far gone now in this secular and technologically transforming age. But since we have no need yet to surrender, we offer this as a late arrival for public consideration.