Mark a Schaefer

Religious, Not Spiritual Mark a Schaefer

Contemporary Christian faith is often an overly spiritualized, escapist faith focused on the guarantee of life after death as the main end of Christian living. Escapist ideas like the Rapture, once on the fringe, have become understood both within the church and without as central to the Christian message. Such a faith can seem disconnected from the real world issues that so many people face and as a result becomes less and less appealing to those who are looking for a faith of substance. Religious, Not Spiritual is a review and reaffirmation of the often neglected, but deeply material nature of Christian faith. Examining traditional doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, Sacrament, Resurrection, and New Creation, the book demonstrates that Christianity has everything to do with the physical world and our place in it. In the book we discover that far from promoting a spirituality that looks toward the day when we can escape the world and live in heaven with God, Christian faith has always affirmed the world as the place of God's salvation, which God does not abandon, but seeks to redeem and restore. Religious, Not Spiritual reminds us that Christianity is deeply engaged with our physical being, our embodied existence, and life in the here and now.