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One of the biggest questions I am getting is why I used the word “New” in the subtitle of Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity. It get this.  I really do.  It’s easy to assume that I’m presenting the idea that I’ve come to some special knowledge.  I haven’t.  The simple answer is that new represents the paradigm shift the book is intended to create.  Much like seeing an answer for the first time, that state of “Aha” is not technically new in that it being created as we speak.  It always existed.  But what changed was our capacity to see the new.  It became new for us.

This idea is called a paradigm shift, which for a while became a terribly overused word.  Stephen Covey brilliantly explored this idea with a simple story in Seven Habits.  A man walks onto a train to see another man’s kids causing havoc and disrupting the people on the train.  He’d annoyed that the father does nothing.  When he finally asks the father why, the father explain that their mother just died and he’s in shock.  Immediately the first man’s paradigm shifts and he’s no longer annoyed.  His paradigm shifts because he can see it in a “new” way.  He didn’t create anything.  He just saw it differently for the first time.

When we change the assumptions, we change the conclusions.

As I was finalizing production of the title of the book I was wrestling with the title.  “Discovering The God Imagination” was set for a long time.  But the original subtitle was actually “Reframing Suffering, Justice and Reconciliation in the Gospel Story.”  I sat on that subtitle for a long time.  And as much as it conveys the nature of the book, it doesn’t convey the change the book creates.  The argument I am making in the book is that our assumptions in the Garden of Eden create a perception of the problem God is solving.  And our historical assumptions get it wrong.  I argue that these assumptions are natural extensions of the actual root problem.  If we understand the problem we can expect these assumptions to be created.  They make sense from the perspective of the root problem, which is to blame, or to cast the problem away from where its actually located.  The act of blaming hides the capacity to see the location of the problem.  These assumptions then create a historical understanding of Christianity that is ultimately disempowering because it locates the problem incorrectly.  And thus our understanding of the cross becomes distorted.

All I did was re-examine the story to see if these assumptions held water.  And they didn’t. The story actually revealed a much different understanding of the root problem, which completely reframed everything.  In other words, the changed assumptions created a different perspective.  It created a paradigm shift in my understanding of Christianity that was new.  For the first time it reconciled in a way that spoke of a ferocious love.

I want to be clear that I’m not making the argument that this is special revelation or that I’m the first to get this.  I honestly believe many in the story like Noah, Abraham, and David got it.  I believe that Jesus clearly got it and communicated the basic understanding of the root problem to his disciples.  (I also have my assumptions about why God doesn’t spell it out to us, but I could be wrong.)  I believe that Paul and the first century church got it.  The evidence I would use for this is their exponential growth and life that just happened.  When we see the root problem, exponential growth is immediately possible. They fundamentally understood why love was so important to the process.  But over time that understanding became lost.

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Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity offers a sweeping new interpretation of the narrative of Christianity, Jonathan Brink explores the remarkable dissonance between our historical understanding of Gospel and what the story in Scripture actually reveals.  It offers a compelling possibility for those looking to reconstruct their faith in a whole new way. Available today from CreateSpace and Amazon. Order from CreateSpace and use code 5GFARGT9 to receive a 15% discount.