The Kingdom Triangle - A MUST HAVE book!

The Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power (Zondervan)

J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University.


With the skillful eye of a philosopher, the heart of a pastor, and the biblically saturated worldview of a theologian, J.P. Moreland’s Kingdom Triangle offers a unique and provocative diagnosis of the spiritual, moral, and intellectual impoverishment of our time and the courage to envision a more preferable future. According to Moreland’s own admission, the Kingdom Triangle is “the single best and most important book I have ever written, including the best seller Love Your God with All Your Mind.” A Zondervan editor observed: “As a person who reads dozens upon dozens of books each year, Kingdom Triangle is one of the best three or four books I have ever read.”

With a forward by Dallas Willard and endorsements from Lee Strobel, Chuck Colson, Nancy Pearcey, Ravi Zacharias, and other luminaries, Kingdom Triangle is a passionate, weighty, vision-casting book that harnesses the settled reflection of Moreland’s thirty-five years of Christian activism. It is a manifesto clarion call to transformative action; a penetrating critique of the powers and persuasions of Western culture that have contributed to our spiritual and existential malaise.

The first half of the book analyzes the crisis of our age, which is reflected in the widely acknowledged rift in Western, and especially American culture; a rift, he believes, greater than any divide since the Civil War. Moreland deftly shows that this rift is not primarily political, socio-economic or racial; instead, it reflects a worldview struggle among the three central worldviews currently vying for allegiance: Naturalism, Postmodernism, and Christianity. Moreland identifies these worldviews, explains their interrelationship and pecking order, and shows how they have shaped the power brokers in the university, media, pop culture and public discourse in general. Not content with mere description, Moreland empowers Christians by providing them with resourceful tools for recognizing and interacting with these worldviews and discerning their real cultural presence and habits. Thankfully, though, Moreland’s book is not another typical “cultural crisis” sort of book about naturalism or postmodernism, where worn-out clichés, alarmist thinking, or dull analyses frequent its pages.

The second half of the book turns from crisis to cure as Moreland charts a powerful way forward for believers who desire to re-capture the church’s authority and integrity in the contemporary scene. Building on the model and the priorities of the church in its first three centuries, Moreland underscores, defends, teaches, and, most importantly, provides explicit practical advice for the three central components for the church’s renewed vision. These components constitute the three necessary “legs” of the “Kingdom Triangle”:

➢ Recover theology as a branch of knowledge and not mere true belief, along with specific steps for recovering a robust life of the mind and worldview thinking in one’s personal life and local church;

➢ Renovate the inner, emotional, experiential life of the heart through spiritual disciplines, direction, specific forms of (usually unheard of) meditation, therapy, and spiritual exercises;

➢ Restore an openness to experience the power of the Kingdom of God and the Holy Spirit by re-discovering the practice of healing prayer, demonic deliverance and the supernatural habits of the Christian life.

Readers are served a delectable feast of insight, the sort of mental and affective soul food that enables persons and churches to live their life skillfully and wisely. Longtime Moreland readers will not be disappointed by the careful treatment of ideas, and the ease to which Moreland attentively takes heady distinctions and makes them accessible to the lay reader. First-time readers of Moreland will also find much to be admired. For here, in a single volume, a modeled evangelical mind distills his choicest and wisest ideas. Kingdom Triangle is a robust précis of Moreland’s most important rumination about how best to flourish, individually and corporately, within our local churches.

J.P. Moreland’s authorial tone beneficially conveys his mature reflection. Readers experience a pastoral heart that feels like the strength of a faithful friend who wants you to mature and succeed in your life. He is an experienced, wise investor in the capital of Christianity. Moreland knows how to skillfully show his readers where to invest their lives in Kingdom values and priorities so that they can reasonably reap lives and churches that blossom with life giving life and vitality. The Kingdom Triangle is for the thoughtful Christian who cares deeply about forming a receptive heart that expects the power of God and the presence of His Kingdom to in-break into individual lives and culture in a transformational way.


Listen to sermon where J.P. shares from the book.