"What if Jesus of Nazareth was right--more right in different ways than we ever realized?" Explore the answer with this book.

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Product Description

When Brian McLaren began offering an alternative vision of Christian faith and life in books such as A New Kind of Christian and A Generous Orthodoxy, he ignited a firestorm of praise and condemnation that continues to spread across the religious landscape. To some religious conservatives, McLaren is a dangerous rebel without a doctrinally-correct cause. Some fundamentalist websites have even claimed he's in league with the devil and have consigned him to flames.

To others though, Brian is a fresh voice, a welcome antidote to the staleness, superficiality, and negativity of the religious status quo. A wide array of people from Evangelical, Catholic, and Mainline Protestant backgrounds claim that through his books they have begun to rediscover the faith they'd lost or rejected. And around the world, many readers say that he has helped them find-for the first time in their lives-a faith that makes sense and rings true. For many, he articulates the promise of what is being called "emerging Christianity."

In The Secret Message of Jesus you'll find what's at the center of Brian's critique of conventional Christianity, and what's at the heart of his expanding vision. In the process, you'll meet a Jesus who may be altogether new to you, a Jesus who is…

• Not the crusading conqueror of religious broadcasting;
• Not the religious mascot of partisan religion;
• Not heaven's ticket-checker, whose words have been commandeered by the church to include and exclude, judge and stigmatize, pacify and domesticate.

McLaren invites you to discover afresh the transforming message of Jesus-an open invitation to radical change, an enlightening revelation that exposes sham and ignites hope, an epic story that is good news for everyone, whatever their gender, race, class, politics, or religion.

 "Pastor and best-selling author McLaren revisits the gospel material from a fresh-and at times radical-perspective . . . He does an excellent job of capturing Jesus' quiet, revolutionary style."

--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Here McLaren shares his own ferocious journey in pondering the teachings and actions of Jesus. It is McLaren's lack of salesmanship or agenda that creates a refreshing picture of the man from Galilee who changed history."

--Donald Miller, Author of Blue Like Jazz

"In this critical book, Brian challenges us to ask what it would mean to truly live the message of Jesus today, and thus to risk turning everything upside down."

--Jim Wallis, Author of God's Politics and editor of Sojourners

"Compelling, crucial and liberating: a book for those who seek to experience the blessed heat of Christianity at its source."

--Anne Rice, Author of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215529 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Pastor and bestselling author McLaren (A New Kind of Christian) explores Jesus's teaching in this book, placing it in its Jewish context, analyzing its tenets and expression, and trying to work out how it should be lived today. McLaren starts with the assumption that the church may not have accurately understood Jesus's "secret message" (hidden "as a treasure one must seek in order to find"). He revisits the gospel material from a fresh—and at times radical—perspective. The church has focused on salvation as a means to "heaven after you die" for too long, according to McLaren; we should take Jesus at his word when he says "the kingdom of God is here now," and work to assist that kingdom by being peacemakers and loving others. McLaren admits to not exploring every topic here in depth, in an effort to keep the book brief, but he does an excellent job of capturing Jesus's quiet, revolutionary style—the prophet who spoke in parables, who didn't want people to talk about his miracles, who challenged established Jewish thought, and paradoxically found ultimate fulfillment and victory through death. Conservative evangelicals will be critical of some points (and there are weaknesses here), but this book will appeal to a broad spectrum of people who want to understand Jesus. (Apr. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Brian D. McLaren is internationally known speaker and the author of over ten highly acclaimed books on contemporary Christianity, including A New Kind of Christian, A Generous Orthodoxy, and The Secret Message of Jesus.

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Customer Reviews

Provocative
The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything by Brian McLaren is a book that assumes the church did not understand Jesus' `secret message." McLaren argues that when Jesus said "the kingdom of God is here now," He meant it literally. McLaren wants us to live this word by being peacemakers and trying to love each other.
There is a beautiful new book about Jesus, God , faith and what you will do after death entitled "The Enlightenment, What God Told Me After One Million Prayers: A Message for Everyone," by John H. Eagan. I just finished it. It's really great and deals with God, the creator, Jesus' teachings, and His Passion. It brought me to tears. I think the readers of McLaren's book will really enjoy The Enlightenment.

Political Jesus
I recently read Brian McLaren's bold and challenging book: The Secret Message of Jesus, which was generously provided to me by the publisher in order that I might write about it on this blog.

Let's start with points of agreement. We can affirm much of "the secret message" that McLaren "recovers" in this book. Okay... forget the hyped-up title for a moment (the title sounds more like something from the Gnostic Gospels, or a new Da Vinci Code). If you can get past the McLaren's implicit claim to be just now, after 2000 years, recovering the original message of Jesus, you might just find a lot to agree with.

I appreciate the emphasis McLaren puts on the Kingdom of God as a central component to the gospel. This is missing in many evangelical presentations of the gospel, and its omission is glaring once we read the Gospels in their original context. McLaren is right to bring us back to the idea of God's reign and Christ's lordship as being central to the gospel.

I also affirm the aspects of the gospel that transform life on earth here and now. McLaren does a terrific job of reminding us that Christians should be working to see life here and now look more and more like life in the new heavens and new earth. He challenges us out of complacency to begin working to bring that future into the present. He rightly corrects several mechanistic views of "heaven" and shows how the biblical portrait of God's presence is so much greater than what we have settled for.

But it's here that McLaren swings the pendulum too far... way too far. McLaren's passion for seeing the Kingdom at hand, in the here and now, leaves hardly any hope for the hereafter. You won't find much here about hell or judgment or God's wrath. Instead, you will find an agenda for social action to make our world a better place. Not to say that this advice is useless, but McLaren's social agenda divorced from personal conversion through faith in Christ as the means of salvation leads us to the same cliff as last century's social gospel liberalism.

McLaren frowns on the evangelistic mentality that focuses on "saving souls from hell" because it conflicts with his embrace of inclusivism, which oozes out of this book at every point. Notice how many times he mentions Jesus' "inclusiveness." Not to say that he is altogether wrong when he speaks of Jesus' building bridges to outsiders. Evangelicals can too easily build walls between us and the people we're called to minister to. And in this sense, our exclusivist attitude is an affront to a loving God.

But if inclusiveness means embracing and accepting anyone (including Muslims, Hindus, and Jews) as part of God's Kingdom, we are far from the biblical picture that demands allegiance to the King (Jesus).

McLaren is delightfully counter-cultural when it comes to our capitalistic, consumerist, Western-soaked mindset. He shows how our worldviews fall short of the biblical picture. That is why it is so frustrating to watch him then capitulate so quickly to postmodern culture by refusing to preach Jesus as the world's True Lord and the only way to God. Where's the counter-cultural claim that Jesus is Lord and that His lordship is exclusive? Where's the counter-cultural biblical teaching on human sexuality? McLaren is counter-cultural in some ways and woefully culture-embracing in others.

Also troubling, he redefines repentance as "discovering you may be wrong." Is that it?

I thoroughly enjoyed much of McLaren's book, but I kept wanting him to say more, to be bolder in confronting our pluralistic, postmodern worldviews, not just the comfortable evangelical ghetto we inhabit.

That brings me to my final critique. The church and her role in salvation history is completely missing in this book. McLaren rightly condemns church abuses in the past and how Jesus' followers have botched His message. But McLaren never comes around to speak of the importance of the local church for God's Kingdom. McLaren advocates small group discussions of his book. But nowhere does he direct his readers to the broken, fallen, but nevertheless divinely commissioned followers of Christ found in churches all across the world.

I come away from this book saddened. Does theology have to be "either-or" all the time? Is there anyone who can effectively bring together the present implications of Jesus' message without neglecting its future implications? Is there anyone who can counter both evangelical culture's love affair with modernist assumptions and our world's blind leap into postmodernism's arms?

False teaching
What a louzy book. There is no secret message of Jesus. What Jesus has to say is completely found in God's Word, the Bible. It is the message of repentant faith found solely in the Savior, Jesus-- only one way for salvation. McLaren is very misinformed and trusts humanistic/ecumenical ideas and reinterprets sola scripture. Stay away from this book. It is completely flawed. God to God's Word. It alone is sufficient!