Pagitt chooses Jesus, not Augustine, as Lord

Review of Doug Pagitt’s A Christianity Worth Believing

As the emergent church movement continues to challenge the status quo, attitudes, and assumptions of today’s Christianity, there are many people within the movement raising difficult-but-terrific questions. Doug Pagitt, in his new book A Christianity Worth Believing (Jossey-Bass), furthers that questioning process while pointing readers toward some historically-grounded and hope-filled answers.

Pagitt, a pastor at Solomon’s Porch Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been part of the emergent movement since its rise in the late-1990s. In A Christianity Worth Believing he shares the story of his teenage encounter with Jesus, some disparaging interactions with well-intentioned Christian leaders as a young believer (referred to as “uh-oh” moments in the book), and an eventual shift toward a holistic and Kingdom-minded faith.

While many readers will resonate with Pagitt’s journey – spiritual probing that interacts with school bus bullies, punk rock heroes, and natural medicine – this book is more than a provocative memoir. Approaching theological topics such as the purpose of the cross, the nature of truth, bodily existence, and the curse of sin, Pagitt takes the Western Church to task for their wholesale adoption of a Greco-Roman worldview and the consequential abandonment of the Hebraic, holistic mindset of Jesus and his earliest followers.

Acknowledging the prevalent role of Platonic philosophy and Gnosticism in the Christianity of Augustine of Hippo and his followers throughout the centuries, Pagitt calls Christians to return to Jewish and Early Christian approaches to creation, humanity, sin, atonement, and the Kingdom of God. Pagitt’s connection between a Jewish mindset and the move of God today is the strongest since Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis. And for an emergent movement often criticized for deconstructing without offering hope, A Christianity Worth Believing is one emergent leader pointing listeners back to the beliefs of original Christianity while also toward an appropriate contextualization of the gospel story today.

Hopefully more Christian leaders will, in coming years, explore the Jewish context of the first century, and the Hebraic theology of Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and the earliest Christians. Such study would show that not only is Pagitt’s Christianity worth believing, it’s deeply integrated with the teachings of a certain rabbi from Nazareth.