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Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

By Bruce Bawer.
Crown. 1997. 340 pp. Pb. $26

ISBN 0-517-70682-2

Reviewed by Robert W. Bohl

 


Bruce Bawer is one of today's most perceptive and articulate cultural critics, especially in the arena of the religious cultural, political and theological climates. At the outset of Stealing Jesus, Bawer brushes aside worn-out phrases like fundamentalism and liberalism, traditional and modern, biblical and non-biblical religion and uses the terms Church of Law and Church of Love.

The first three chapters -- "Are You a Christian?", "Who is My Neighbor?" and "Love and Law" -- set the descriptive terminology to help the reader understand the rise of religious legalism in this country during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. But Bawer gets the reader equipped to see how what he calls "Rauschenbush's Kingdom" broadened the conflict into the 20th century.

From Rauschenbush to Texas preacher C. I. Scofield...

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