Christianity - A Journey from Facts to Fiction — Page xiii
Foreword to the Present Edition xiii the noblest achievement of Jesus as. It was his life of suffering and pain [not his fictional death on the cross to suffer for three days and nights in Hell] that redeemed humanity. ’ He did not volun- tarily accept death: he conquered death. I believe that this book needs to be read from cover to cover. The main theme of the book—the critique of Christian doctrines like the Godhead of Christ as his ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Ascension’ etc—is covered in the first six chapters. The seventh chapter traces the history of the evolution of Christianity. The last chapter— Christianity Today —is important in its own right and must not be skipped over. Its two main themes are: (1) the relationship of Christianity and the West and (2) prophecy about the second coming of Christ as which was fulfilled with the advent of the Promised Messiah, Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as. Analyzing the relationship of Christianity to the West, the author makes a very important observation and says: ‘From the above it should be evident that the Christianity we are talking about is very distant from the Christianity of Jesus Christ as. To conceive of Western culture as Christianity is a manifest error. To attribute the current form of Christianity, in its various spheres, to Christ as is indeed an insult to him. There are exceptions of course to every rule… [Thus] there is a small number of individual islands of hope and life in the Christian world where Christian sincerity, love and sacrifice are genuinely practiced. There are the islands of hope around which rage oceans of immorality that are slowly and gradually corroding and finally claiming more edges of these islands. Had the Christian world not been bejewelled with such shining examples of Christianity practiced in the spirit of Jesus