Real Christianity

In 1797, William Wilberforce, then in the midst of his twenty-year parliamentary campaign to abolish the British slave trade, published a book that proved as controversial in its own way as his political crusade. A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, known today as Real Christianity, was a direct challenge to the comfortable, nominal Christianity of England's educated classes: a call to examine whether the faith they professed bore any meaningful relationship to the transformed life that genuine belief in the Gospel actually produces. Wilberforce's argument was simple and pointed: much of what passed for Christianity in polite English society was little more than a respectable habit, a form without substance, an observance without transformation. Against this he set the full weight of New Testament teaching, arguing that authentic Christian faith necessarily reshapes character, redirects ambition, and produces the kind of active, costly love for God and neighbor that he himself was living out in his abolitionist work. This edition, paraphrased into accessible modern English by Bob Beltz, makes Wilberforce's prophetic challenge available to contemporary readers without loss of its essential force. For any Christian wrestling with the gap between cultural religion and genuine faith, Real Christianity remains one of the most searching and useful books ever written.