What is the heart of Christianity? What does it mean to be Christian today? In this book, I describe two quite different answers to this question. The first is an earlier vision of Christianity; the second, an emerging vision. Both are present in the churches of North America today, deeply dividing Christians. We live in a time of conflict and change in the church. I write with both conviction and passion. The conviction: Christianity makes sense. In my own life, this conviction took time to develop. For about twenty years, from my mid-teens to mid-thirties, Christianity did not make much sense to me. Largely for intellectual reasons, the form of Christianity that I learned in my childhood
ceased to be persuasive. For some time now I have been convinced that there are no serious intellectual obstacles to being Christian. There is a way of seeing Christianity that makes persuasive and compelling sense of life in the broadest sense—a way of seeing reality and our lives in relationship to what is real; a way of seeing God, our relationship to God, and the path of transformation.