I am happy to announce the publication of a reprint edition of my 2009 book, Theology as if Jesus Matters: An Introduction to Christianity’s Main Convictions (Pandora Press, 2025), 217pp.

This book asks what Christian theology would look like if it consistently took Jesus’s central command to love God and neighbor as the most important consideration. Engaging that question, the book addresses the main beliefs Christians affirm in clear, practical, and challenging ways. Christian theology too often seems overly complicated, abstract, and removed from actual day-to-day life. Yet Jesus’s own teachings are simple, concrete, and directly engaged with people’s lives. Theology as if Jesus Matters approaches Jesus’s life and teaching as the model and core content for theology.

From the Preface to the new edition: “Reconsidering this book now nearly two decades after I first wrote it, I realize that I believe I may have produced something a bit more significant than I intended to. I believe it still works as a basic, non-technical introduction to Christian theology, and I would love for it to be used as a textbook within and beyond Mennonite circles. However, I think it also works as a constructive proposal for an important option for construing the Christian theological task. I am grateful to Maxwell Kennell and Pandora Press for making this book available again.

“Theology as if Jesus Matters offers a practice-oriented more than doctrine-oriented approach to Christian theology. It does so by placing and keeping Jesus as the center. What do all the main theological themes look like if we think of each of them as meant to serve Jesus’s call to his followers to love their neighbors? This is a serious proposal that theology center more on the gospel story in its broad biblical context than on doctrinal traditions, creeds, and confessions.”

Endorsements:

“This deeply compelling, engaging book brings theology back to the rough ground of our lived experience, where it can have traction again. Grimsrud recaptures a vision for theology that begins and ends with Jesus, and in so doing manages to call back the discipline from its metaphysical holiday to its home in the life of the messianic community.”—Christian Early, James Madison University

“Grimsrud provides an expansive, accessible, provocative, practical, and practice-able theology rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus. This book provides a foundation for a sensible, Jesus-rooted theology for the twenty-first century.”—Keith Graber Miller, Goshen College

Available online from Amazon.