What Is Christianity?

Abstract

This chapter begins by offering a fourfold scheme for analyzing the essentials of any religion by which the rest of the book’s argument will proceed. What’s real? What’s best? What’s wrong? And what can be done? It then clears away many half-remembered, half-understood, and half-correct conceptualizations that most educated people have about Christianity in our time. Proceeding to the basic teachings of Christianity, it zeroes in on the key plotline of the Bible, setting out a Christian Story that is at once familiar and yet very strange, a Story that seems to defy common sense even as it makes sense on its own terms.