Proof that sales’ figures are a notoriously iffy guide to quality, William P. Young’s The Shack (Hodder & Stoughton, £7.59 Times Books) has sold just under two million copies.

The story revolves around Mack, whose youngest daughter is abducted and killed. Returning to the shack where she was murdered, he is greeted by God (called Papa), Jesus and the Holy Spirit (going under the name Sarayu), who are intent on healing Mack’s pain.

Up until that moment, The Shack is serviceable enough, even if it does read like a voiceover to a Jack Daniels’ whisky advert, written in a real rootin’-tootin’, gee-shucks all-American style.

More problematic is the religious side of things, dropped into the story line with all the subtlety of a Billy Graham sermon. Clunking fist religious dollops aside, the author also has a tendency for stodgy prose.

In short, this novel is sickly sweet religious sentimentalism, a kind of garbled afternoon-soap theology. A wishy-washy message of believe in God and be nice is not exactly Graham Greene, as fiction or religious insight. Non-believers will hate it, but not as much as those who love well-crafted fiction. The only resurrection witnessed here is the return of the penny dreadful.

Self-praise may be no praise, yet John Drane displays a penchant for lauding his own work in After McDonaldization:ministry and Christian Discipleship in an age of uncertainty (Darton, Longman and Todd, £10.76, Times Books) even if he does raise some pertinent issues.

Arguing that it’s time to re-imagine Church life, he writes, “Too often, the quest for relevance has ended up with the Church affirming the very aspects of the culture that are causing people so much anxiety”.

However, that same point is also the book’s Achilles’ heel. As correct as Drane is about churches seeking relevance, he seems to forget his own sound observation, leading to an element of contradiction throughout the book.

More fundamentally, Drane’s work is very much aimed at the Protestant churches, neglecting a rather large elephant in the room that constitutes the world’s largest Christian denomination. Simply put, whither the Roman Catholic Church?

Jesuit Jon Sobrino knows only too well the answer to that question, having received a slap-down from the Vatican last year over his writings.

His new book, The Eye of the Needle, No Salvation outside the Poor: a Utopian-Prophetic Essay (Darton, Longman and Todd, £9.95) is a fierce critique of the state of the world, Sobrino lambasting the West for its uncaring ability to live as it does without thinking of the millions in need. However, he contends that there can be no salvation without these very same poor. Rich and poor should carry each other – it is simply not enough to dictate progress developments to the impoverished, but spiritual gifts must be learnt from them in return for material wealth.

Ultimately a moving testament to the power of love, Sobrino’s work is a forceful and at times shocking polemic, which may prove its downfall in the popularity stakes. Nevertheless, despite protests to the contrary, his work does at times idealise the poor, a criticism regularly levelled at liberation theologians, among whom he is often lumped, meaning idealistic teenagers may be most moved.

Few could argue with the contention that the Martin Luther King of popular memory is a family friendly caricature of the real thing. Certainly, sociologist Jonathan Rieder, in his The Word of the Lord is upon me: the righteous performance of Martin Luther King, Junior (Harvard University Press, £17.96, Times Books) believes that King’s message has been sanitised to the point of impotence.

Thus, his generally achieved aim is to put the danger back into King’s language, arguing that he was not advocating America as a redeemer nation, as is regularly proclaimed, but that America was in need of redemption, a fairly pertinent point considering the events of recent years. Rejecting the notion that King “faked” language for different audiences, Rieder presents a gifted, learned orator.

Welcome on many levels, Rieder’s work can at times seem pernickety, but successfully underlines how uninspiring oversimplification can be. King may have loved the power and sound of words, but nowhere near as much as he loved the Word.

Marek Halter, author of The Messiah (Toby Press, £13.49, Times Books) also loves words, albeit too many of them.

Undoubtedly, his tale of a Middle Eastern Jewish prince, named David Reubeni, who arrives in Europe with an audacious plan to gain Christendom’s support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is a great yarn, even if historically contentious.

Nevertheless, The Messiah is not as good as it should be. Much of the novel does not feel like the 16th century, but this becomes most evident with the lead character. Reubeni’s vaguely mystical pearls of wisdom are simply not as spellbinding as Halter obviously intends them to be.

There is also Halter’s style, which renders his epic imagination an epic read in every sense of the word. Prone to bouts of description and increasingly repetitive introspection, it feels like one of those old Hollywood sagas. Long but bloated, the novel could have done with a vigorous edit.

Ultimately, this messiah is a little flabby and needs to trim down.