Book Reviews

Integral Christianity:
The Spirit’s Call to Evolve
Paul R. Smith
St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2011
Cloth, 381 pages, $24.95

Paul R. Smith has written a lively reminder that in all religious traditions
“there are many mansions” and that the role of faith is to unite and enlarge
rather than to divide and build walls of defense. Smith has been a pastor
of a Southern Baptist church in Kansas City, Missouri as well as teaching
in Protestant seminaries elsewhere in the US. His focus is on Protestant
Christianity, especially as it lived in daily life and worship. However many
of his insights hold true for other religious traditions that are increasingly
in contact with each other. Some form of encounter among faiths can no
longer be avoided, and we see fairly similar reactions among both church
leaders and ordinary members.
One reaction is what Paul Smith calls the “Tribal and the Warrior
church,” closed in upon itself, seeing others as a threat. The theology of
churches with such a consciousness is based on a vision of constant conflict,
the battle between God and Satan, and they see God acting to punish,
“vengeance is mine,” with Sodom and Gomorrah as prime examples. One
can find the same “Warrior church” consciousness in the Sunni-Shiite divide
and in armed attacks upon worshipers of rival mosques and shrines as these
days in Pakistan and Bahrain.
While the Warrior church is a minority in all religious traditions, its
preachers are particularly active on the internet and among those who feel
at home in a tightly defined world of good and evil, of friend or foe, of
“you are with us or you are against us.”
Fortunately, the great bulk of active religious people are not in the
Warrior church and are increasingly active in meeting people of other faiths
in discussion and dialogue. They seek out what is common and what unites.
In Europe, there tends to be one major Protestant church in each
country with members and pastors having differing theological positions
and concerns but who are bound together by a common history and often
a status as a state Church—the “Church of England,” the “Church of

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