About five years ago I published my first book with Quoir Publishing. It was about my journey from being raised a Conservative Republican Christian in Texas who joined the NRA, owned a bunch of guns, and listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously. I ended up with a faith that couldn’t be distinguished from my political party. The Holy Spirit eventually untangled me from all of that and once I got free I realized I was not the only person struggling with the distinctions between following Jesus and voting Republican.
The book, Jesus Untangled: Crucifying Our Politics To Pledge Allegiance To The Lamb released on Inauguration Day when Donald Trump took his oath of office. The Foreword was provided by Greg Boyd, author of The Myth Of A Christian Nation, which really blessed my socks off. That book was about how Christians cannot serve two masters and need to admit that they cannot convert a culture if that culture has already converted them.
Little did I know how prophetic my warnings in that book would become over the next 4 years.
I also didn’t realize at the time that this book would become the first in a 7-part series of books dealing with different facets of Christian theology that many believers today wrestle with the most as they go through something called “Deconstruction.”
The second book, Jesus Unbound: Liberating The Word of God from the Bible, featured a Foreword by Brian Zahnd and dealt with the troubling tendency of Christians to confuse the Word of God [Jesus] with the Bible [a book we wrote about Jesus]. In that book my goal was to demonstrate how confusing the menu with the meal or the map with the treasure leads to missing the meal and the treasure completely.
This is also the book I typically recommend everyone start with in the series – even though these are not sequential books – simply because this book unpacks a foundational concept of approaching the Scriptures thru the lens of Christ [rather than taking the usual Flat Bible approach]. So, if you understand this concept first it will make all the other books in the series much easier for you to process.
NOTE: I’ll be leading a 3-week online course on this book starting Monday, Jan. 10 and you can register today for only $19.99 HERE>
My third book in the series was Jesus Unveiled: Forsaking Church As We Know It For Ekklesia As God Intended. This one took one of my previously self-published books [This Is My Body] and updated the content with an additional 48 pages of new material on the subject of starting and facilitating an organic house-based ekklesia in your own home or community. This was based on our 11 years of experience doing exactly that and it is probably one of the most personal books I’ve written since it chronicles this entire experience from beginning to end.
My fourth book was one my publisher strongly encouraged me to write. Jesus Undefeated: Condemning the False Doctrine of Eternal Torment takes a look at all 3 Christian views of Hell from the historical and scriptural perspective. Honestly, it has been one of my most popular titles in the series, and I’ve had so many people thank me for writing it, so I guess I owe my publisher a huge “thank you” for making me write it.
After that, I wrote Jesus Unexpected: Ending the End Times to Become the Second Coming, which is one of my favorites in the series because it once-and-for-all exposes the false teachings of John Nelson Darby about the End Times Rapture, and unpacks my view that we [the Body of Christ] ARE the second coming of Christ and that there is more of Christ in the world today than there was 2,000 years ago.
Next, I wrote Jesus Unforsaken: Substituting Divine Wrath With Unrelenting Love which takes on the myth of Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory as the Gospel, and presents a better idea of the atonement which underscores the fact that everyone has been reconciled to God through Christ and all sins are forever forgiven and forgotten for all eternity.
Finally, the book Jesus Unarmed: How the Prince of Peace Disarms Our Violence released on my birthday, last month [Nov. 9] with a Foreword by comedian and radio host John Fugelsang [Sirius XM Radio’s TELL ME EVERYTHING]. As you might suspect, this book takes on the question of whether or not Jesus was serious about loving our enemies and overcoming darkness with light. It also answers every single possible objection raised by doubting Christians [and it’s always and only the Christians for some reason who doubt that Jesus taught and practiced non-violence] like, “Why did Jesus say, ‘go and buy a sword’?”, and “What about when Jesus fashioned a whip and chased moneychangers out of the temple?” and “what about when Jesus said, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword?'”, etc.
Looking back over the last 5 years, I can hardly believe that I wrote and published all 7 of these books in such a short amount of time. Even more, I can hardly believe all of them launched on Amazon’s best-sellers list and many of them stayed in the Top 20 for months after the initial launch. A few of them are STILL in the Top 50 even now.
So, as I ponder the impact of these books, my hope is that they offer people real answers to difficult questions of faith, and based on the feedback I’ve received from so many of my readers, I’d say they’ve accomplished pretty much everything I could have hoped for.
I always say that my ministry is defined as “Introducing Christians to Jesus” and these books are a huge part of how I’ve tried to do exactly that. There are so many man-made ideas, doctrines and theologies that we’ve created and built up over the centuries that obscure, distort and blur the message and the character of Jesus. My hope is that, by tearing down these toxic and anti-Christian teachings, people can finally and fully see the beautiful face of Jesus without all the garbage we’ve constructed along the way.
If my books have blessed you, please post a comment below and let me know! I’d love to hear from you.
So…what’s next? Well, I’m already about two chapters into my next book project right now. No, it’s not another “Jesus Un” title. I’ve ended that series and closed it all out for good now. Yes, I’m very proud of this series and I’ll always be very glad that I accomplished what I set out to do with these 7 books, but now it’s time to turn our attention to other topics and explore a different range of ideas.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to announce the title and publication date of my brand-new book in the next few months. Watch this space for further details.
Until then, I do hope you’ll continue reading my blog posts here, and maybe even decide to jump on my new platform “The Inner Circle” which will launch next month sometime. That’s where I’ll post a weekly series of articles about The Gospel of Thomas and The Didache over the next few months. Details on that coming very, very soon!
Thanks to everyone who has read and loved my Patheos blog here. I promise to continue posting here in 2022 and beyond. Good things are coming, my friends.
I hope you’ll join me for the ride.
Peace [on Earth]
Keith Giles is the author of the 7-part best-selling “Jesus Un” book series from Quoir Publishing. His latest -and final book – in this series, Jesus Unarmed: How The Prince Of Peace Disarms Our Violence is available now. Keith is also the host of Second Cup with Keith [a new solo podcast available now on the Ethos Radio App, for Apple and Android and on Spotify; and the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast [along with co-hosts Matthew Distefano, Dr. Katy Valentine, and Derek Day], and the new Imaginary Lines YouTube Channel with poet Darrell Epp. He and his wife, Wendy, currently live in El Paso, TX and work with Peace Catalyst International.
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