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Theology

“Radical” review: 183-217

Well, folks, this is it: the last chapter review from Radical. Since it’s largely a summary chapter, it gives me the opportunity to talk about some things I haven’t had the space for earlier.

One of the first problems that this chapter amptly highlights is David’s tendency to present things as either/or dichotomies:

Meaning is found in community, not individualism; joy is found in generosity, not materialism; and truth is found in Christ, not universalism. (183)

While there are certainly problems in individualism, materialism and in some ways universalism, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the opposite of those concepts are immune to critique or excess. Community at the expense of the individual can be unhealthy, even abusive. Even viewing generosity as the opposite of materialism is in itself a problem; materialism is the belief that the physical is more important than the spiritual, and giving all your stuff away isn’t actually a repudiation of that belief. In fact, generosity could be an affirmation that the physical is more important than the spiritual, and it’s possible to be generous for selfish reasons instead of altruistic ones.

Lastly, as a universalist, I staunchly reject the notion that I stand in opposition to Christ.

These things are not opposites. You don’t have to reject one to embrace the other. In part, David seems to have spent this book arguing that being “radical” is at least somewhat a rejection of nuance.

The rest of this chapter is an explanation for how the reader can live out a “radical experiment” over the course of a year, and he gives us five things to do that “guarantee[s] that if you complete this experiment, you will possess an insatiable desire to spend the rest of your life in radical abandonment to Christ for his glory in all the world” (184). These five steps are:

  1. pray for the entire world
  2. read through the entire Word
  3. sacrifice your money for a specific purpose
  4. spend your time in another context
  5. commit your life to a multiplying community

One problem, David: I spent the bulk of my teenage years doing all of that, and the only thing I learned to do was be heartily sick of all of it. I read my Bible through at least seven times in a variety of ways. I kept prayer cards in my Bible cover and prayed for a half-dozen missionaries every day. Every Wednesday my entire church would literally get down on our knees to pray for every single missionary we supported across the globe. Every year I would commit to give sacrificially “in faith.” I spent several hours every single Thursday going door-knocking, and every few years we would have cycled through our entire city. I was devoted to a church, and then a college, with similar goals as David’s Brook Hills Church.

Turns out it was all a cult and not really good for much except being ridiculously good at Sword Drills. I certainly did not graduate from almost ten years of living out those five steps having an “insatiable desire” to live in “radical abandonment to Christ.” In fact, it had the exact opposite result: me, in general, saying fuck it, I’m done.

So. Try not to make promises you can’t keep, David?

I’ve commented before on David’s apparent readiness to ignore any aspect of Jesus’ sayings that don’t agree with him for the purposes of this book, but it happened again in this chapter. He uses the instructions Jesus gave to his apostles in Matthew 10– which even a first-year Bible college student could tell you might maybe not apply universally to the entire Church for all of time— in order to convince us that prayer supersedes action in any believer’s life (186-87). Supposedly, Matthew 10 overrules all the other instructions Jesus gave to the apostles at other points, like the times when prayer doesn’t enter into it (“do you love me? Feed my sheep”).

You can’t just take what’s convenient at the moment. Yes, at several points, Jesus emphasizes the need for us to pray, both in word and example– but the bulk of his life points to action as being at least slightly more important. And, in encouraging us all to view prayer as primary to a Christian’s life, David cites Evan Roberts and his prayers as having “precipitated a revival in Wales in which an estimated hundred thousand people came to faith in Christ in a matter of months” (190). Except I looked up Evan Roberts, and the man didn’t spend all his time in a broom closet with his hands folded. He was a preacher, and an effective speaker capable of drawing huge audiences. That’s not prayer; that’s charisma.

Another glaring problem with David’s perspective is that it borders on idolatry of the Bible:

God has chosen by his matchless grace to give us revelation of himself in his Word. It is the only Book that he has promised to bless by his Spirit to transform you and me into the image of Jesus Christ. It is the only Book that he has promised to use to bring our hearts, our minds, our lives in alignment with him. (192)

Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I’m almost positive that God promised no such thing. Yes, they sent us their Word, but according to this “Book,” that Word is Jesus (John 1). Jesus transforms us. Following Jesus brings us into alignment with them. But only if we choose to act on what the Word illuminated for us: a radical life committed to love.

I also want to take a moment to highlight something that’s more an annoyance than anything else, and David is hardly the only one guilty of this. Jen Hatmaker did the same exact thing in Seven:

We are affluent people living in an impoverished world. If we make only ten thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 84 percent of the world, and if we make fifty thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 99 percent of the world. (194)

While yes, this is “true” after a fashion, these sorts of examples fail to take cost of living into account. If I made only $10k a year in my area, I’d be utterly destitute. I wouldn’t be able to afford rent, regular bills, and buying food regularly would be a serious concern. However, if I lived in Cambodia or Vietnam or Mexico and made $10k in American dollars, I’d be living it up. But, like I said, on the scale of things, this is merely annoying.

I think one of the larger problems woven throughout the entirety of Radical is David’s nearly overriding sense of white guilt, only translated onto a global scale. He dismisses the crises facing us here at home– how does one blithely use the $10k number without bothering to consider whether we here at home might be struggling with homelessness, even if we make that much? America, comparatively, is a wealthy nation, true– but that doesn’t mean we don’t face homelessnes and food insecurity, or point-blank food deserts. Many areas lack access to clean water, even. Collectively I think we’ve lost sight of that amid all our talk about “first world problems.”

In step #4, David encourages us to seek out “another context,” and pushes us toward contexts dominated by his idea of global poverty and ethnicity– an idea inculcated by his whiteness and economic status. Despite all the time he’s spent overseas, he has never let go of his tendency to see non-American peoples as the Other; he’s also never let go of the idea that he– and other middle-class white Americans like him– are “burdened with glorious purpose” and that brown and black people– who, because they’re not white and middle-class Americans– need us to fix them, their cultures, and their economies.

That position dismisses the disaster and harm white people have caused over the course of our many neo-colonialist attempts to assuage ourselves of guilt. Guess what? Black and brown people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (since, apparently, no individual countries exist in David’s world) are perfectly capable of handling their own damn problems, and many of their problems would be best served by white people staying the hell out of their way. (Which, of course, is not to say that foreign aid and investments and the like are all ill-conceived efforts we should totally abandon. We just need to re-examine our ready acceptance that TOMS shoes are a good thing.)

In the end, there are a lot of things that David and I agree upon, especially our mutual desire to help people. However, if this review demonstrates anything, it’s that when someone ignores how their white, male, able-bodied heterosexual, American experience affects their interpretive bias, inevitably there will be concerns.

March 21, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 161-182

We are approaching the end of Radical, finally– there’s only one more chapter after this one, and then we’re moving on. On that note, recommendations for the next book review would be wonderful. I’m thinking about tackling a purity culture book this time around– maybe something like I Kissed Dating Goodbye or When God Writes Your Love Story? Is there a book that’s really popular in purity culture circles today?

Today’s chapter of Radical— “Living When Dying is Gain”– is one of the few chapters where I agree with the starting premise. It’s happened a handful of times through this reading (more often than any other book I’ve reviewed with the exception of Zimzum, I should note), but each time I ultimately disagree with the final conclusion, because David and I are working with very different theological underpinnings.

He focuses this chapter around Matthew 10, which, to be honest, has a bunch of contradictory and perplexing stuff in it. Jesus forbids the disciples from going to Gentiles and says “I do not bring peace but a sword,” but just a few chapters later he condemns those who take up swords. Needless to say, there’s a few things that seem to complicate this chapter that David just breezes right over– most noticeably here:

Out of all the amazing statements in Matthew 10 this one may be … the most important: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

… Jesus was telling them–and us–that we need to fear God, not people. God is the ultimate judge, and he holds eternity in his hands. (175)

The problem with this is that even the most cursory glance at the commentaries would tell you that we’ve argued over who exactly “the One” is for centuries. Some say it’s God, some say it’s Satan, and some people argue that it’s neither. But David ignores the contested nature of this verse and the translation difficulties and spends the last seven pages building his argument off this interpretation. Because he personally reads the text as “fear God who can [and will] destroy your soul and body in hell,” he extrapolates from that to argue how we need to see death as the ultimate reward and how this physical existence doesn’t matter (179).

Obviously that is where David and I definitely part ways. However, our paths diverged a long while before this because our basic assumptions about Matthew 10 are radically different. He reads the instructions Jesus gave to the apostles there and decided to see it in terms of the Christian missionary movement (175-78). He views Matthew 10 through the lens of missionary biographies and stories about Christian persecution. When he reads Jesus talking about how he’s “sending you out like sheep among wolves,” the way he thinks about it is colored by a life spent reading about Jim Elliot and Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

Except when he says that “It’s Christian history. Persecution and suffering as we see today in the Middle East, Asia, an Africa have marked followers of Christ from the beginning of the church” (168), he’s speaking ethnocentrically. He’s blithely ignoring the “Christian history” of things like the Crusades, or the Protestant campaign against Catholics that frequently led to burning priests. Modernly, Christians spread hate against Muslims that frequently lead to their deaths, to American Muslim homes being destroyed, and their Mosques attacked or defaced. In fact, he does that himself when he says “The tribe was 100 percent Muslim. Talk about sheep in the middle of wolves” (165).

Christians aren’t the only persecuted religious group. Far from it. Buddhists persecute Muslims in Myanmar, atheists are persecuted, sometimes killed, for their lack of belief in many countries, and Muslims persecute Hindus. David is either ignorant of this– something he cannot afford to be considering his work in global missions– or he is deliberately misleading his readers.

He puts forward that “if we really become like Jesus, the world will hate us. Why? Because the world hated him” (167), but he never bothers to ask the question why did they hate Jesus? The traditional evangelical understanding is that people hate Jesus because they don’t want to feel guilty about their sin. They want to live their lives in peace, unbothered by any attempts by Christians to tell them that what they’re doing is wrong and they could go to hell for it. They don’t like feeling convicted, so they hate either Christ or his messenger.

I read this passage differently. Because my view of the Bible is rooted in liberation theology, I read “I send you out as a sheep among wolves” and I’m reminded of the protests in Ferguson, or the protests against Trump rallies in Chicago and Kansas City last week. To me it’s clear that standing up against oppression and hatred is what Christ has called us to do, and few things earn you more hatred and revilement in this country than daring to take a stand against bigotry. Don’t obey, don’t comply, don’t keep your head down and keep walking– you could be assaulted, arrested, tear gassed, shot.

I agree with David that proclaiming the life and message of Christ can be dangerous to live out. We just fundamentally disagree about why. I believe there is something in the message of the Cross that many find deeply challenging because I believe that the Cross is a subversion of power. I believe that Jesus’ life flies in the face of Empire and systemic, institutionalized oppressions. If I am called to be like him– which I believe I am– then yes, I’m going to be hated, because Empire hates resistance. Those in power will always try to dominate and control the ones who have no power, and will always be shocked and then vengeful when we rebel. When we do not contort our faces when the old men say “smile,” when we step off a sidewalk at a protest, when we stand proudly in the face of a heil führer salute, those in power will loathe us.

Like Jesus said, we should not be surprised by that. We should not be surprised when our friends and family abandon us when we fight against racism, when they betray us and spread lies about us because we’re a feminist, when we’re disowned and thrown out into the street for being LGBT+ . . .

However, unlike David, I think that our resistance matters. I have hope that each time we fight can make a difference. I believe that participating in Jesus’ vision to bring the kingdom of God to earth is the whole point of the gospel.

March 14, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 141-160

With a title like “There is No Plan B: Why Going is Urgent, Not Optional,” it should be obvious that this is one of those chapters were David and I definitely disagree. In fact, one of the biggest things I disagree with him on appears on the first page:

Applied to faith, this [equality] means that in a world where different people have different religious views, all such views should be treated as fundamentally equal. In this system of thinking, faith is a matter of taste, not of truth. (141)

What a reductionist view. Unfortunately, I understand where he’s coming from. David’s view of theology is one of the reasons why Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism can occasionally appear identical. If you believe in the Eternal Conscious Torment model of hell and that the only way to avoid being burned alive for all of eternity is to “receive the gospel,” then you cannot afford to be wrong. There are enormous and extremely permanent consequences to what you think about God, Jesus, the Atonement, and soteriology. If you’re convinced of this sequence, then you’re going to have serious problems with pluralism, as you should if you’re a decent person on any level.

However, all of that is one of the biggest reasons why I believe that the evangelical conceptualization of theology is immoral, and that their religion is based on an immoral deity. At one point David tries to argue that concerns like mine are a matter of “emotion” (148), but they’re not. It’s a matter of morality. Asking whether or not God condemns people to eternal conscious torment because they’ve never heard the gospel — and their only option for hearing the gospel is dependent on flawed beings– isn’t an emotional question, it’s a moral one with high emotional stakes. Many people, myself included, have concluded that a god who behaves like that would be, possibly, the most evil creature to ever exist.

David’s argument has one core problem: out one side of his mouth he says that people are not condemned to eternal conscious torment because they never heard of Jesus, but because they “rejected God” (144-45); the other side of his mouth says that accepting God is defined by receiving the gospel (153). He’s forced into this position by the Bible as things like the Hall of Faith in Hebrews make “hearing the gospel” an impossible standard. Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah– they’d never heard of Jesus, had no understanding whatsoever of the evangelical definition of “the gospel.” He tries to wiggle around this by saying that “they were trusting in the redemption God would bring through Christ” but this comes after ten pages of him saying that people “doing their best with the information they have” are condemned to burn for all eternity. How Abraham doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “did his best with the information he had at the time” is beyond me.

The logic pattern of “all people have knowledge of God, and all people reject God” is internally consistent, however it’s based in the premise that all people have knowledge of the Christian god, and that premise is a far cry from being realistic, let alone proven. Supposedly, according to David, the Christian god does something to reveal themself in such a way that it’s possible for every single last person on the planet to have consciously rejected them. This manifestation cannot look like Tonatiuh, or Ra, or Belenos, or Yuyi, or Sol … for reasons that no one has ever demonstrated to me convincingly. Because I said so is about as far as they get, usually.

There’s no logical separation between “God condemns us to hell because we’ve never heard of Jesus” and “God condemns us to hell for rejecting themself” when the mechanism of accepting the Christian God is fallible humans preaching the gospel. That is a morally repugnant position. If the eternal damnation of billions of souls rests on people being healthy enough, wealthy enough, educated enough, and self-sacrificing enough to go to “unreached people groups” and talk about Jesus, then Christianity is a catastrophic moral failure on a scale I can barely comprehend. But this is what David believes (156).

He believes this because of a fairly common problem in evangelicalism: he reads the Pauline letters in isolation. Without Jesus, without James, without John the Revelator, it seems inevitable for people who embrace biblical inspiration to arrive at this conclusion. However, Paul is only one man, and a fallible one. His perspective is not the sum total of soteriology, and his articulation is only one view. This is why we have the collected library of Scripture. Paul, held in balance with James, John, and Peter, and viewed in light of the words of Christ helps paint us a complex and nuanced picture of faith.

I don’t hold with the position that the gospel is “Jesus died on the cross to cover your sins with his blood so that you can be admitted to heaven.” I believe that the gospel is far more rich than that. I believe that Jesus’ entire life and earthly ministry is “the Good News,” and that reducing faith to a single, solitary belief is to make Jesus almost totally irrelevant. I believe that Jesus came to save sinners, but the question is how. I believe that he wants each of us to do what he did– to serve, to heal, to liberate, to love. I believe that Christianity isn’t about a single question. It’s about Jesus’ entire life. It’s about our entire life.

Seeing the gospel in this light enables me to read the same passages as David does and see a message of hope and encouragement instead of despair. I don’t see a world condemned to burn, but a world that desperately needs us to love it. I can grieve with Paul in the opening to Romans as he looks around and sees so many terrible things. Each of us should be compelled to grieve for all the ways the world is broken and all the ways it breaks us. It should make us angry, like it made Paul angry … but it doesn’t stop there in Romans, and it shouldn’t end there for us, either. Romans continues to assure us that Jesus’ life– the gospel– makes it possible for things to be different. I believe that Paul is trying to show us that our broken world can be repaired.

March 7, 2016 by
Social Issues

“Radical” review: 107-140

This is another chapter of Radical where I agree with the basic argument David makes. It’s a slightly longer chapter, which seems appropriate since he’s trying to convince an American audience that meeting earthly, physical needs of others is one of the fruits Christians are supposed to bear as believers. Obviously I agree with this premise, although we get there through different theological means.

To me, I see meeting physical needs as a requirement for Christians because ours is a religion that teaches our physical existence is sacred. Immanuel is God with us, God become flesh, God dwelling among us. When we observe the sacraments, we baptize our bodies and eat and drink. All through the accounts of Jesus’ ministry the “good news” was Jesus healing us and feeding us, not just giving us theological nuggets to chew on (although he also did that aplenty). I believe that the ultimate goal of the Christian God is to redeem and restore our physical existence, for us to remain embodied and earthy, except glorified.

Because of that, I prioritize making sure people’s needs are met and work to end human suffering.

However, David’s theological motivations are different. This chapter lacks the sort of impetus I’ve described above; instead, his argument amounts to Jesus said so and it glorifies God. This is not the sort of reasoning I’d ordinarily quibble over– if you are led toward taking care of people and ending poverty and starvation, I don’t exactly care what brings you here. However, this is an influential book, and I am going to quibble because of this:

The point is not simply to meet a temporary need or change a startling statistic; the point is to exalt the glory of Christ as we express the gospel of Christ through the radical generosity of our lives. (135)

There’s this thread of an idea that meeting needs isn’t sufficient as an end unto itself. If the person doesn’t come out on the other side of a Christian handing him soup with some urge to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, then giving him the soup was rather pointless. Meetings needs is a means to an end, and that end is “sharing the Gospel.” Except, the more I read about what Jesus did and said, it becomes startlingly apparent that Jesus took care of people’s physical needs far more often than he talked about the evangelical concept of “salvation.”

In fact, he talks about forgiving sins every so often, but most often he zeroes in on following him. And what does “following him” look like? Helping him help people. Feeding his sheep. Loving people. David talks a lot about the rich man that Jesus instructed to sell all that he had, but ignores the fact that Jesus concludes sell all that you have with follow me. Not “confess me as Lord,” not “admit you’re a sinner and need me to save you from your sin.” He says do what I’m doing. Only God can forgive sin, so what else is left, exactly?

Helping starving children in Africa and Asia isn’t a means to an end. It is an end.

The most glaring problem about this chapter to me, though, is that he constantly conflates his interpretation of the Bible with What is Absolutely True, Factual, and Accurate. The best example of that is here:

Of course, important principles are expressed throughout Scripture on the subject [of money]. One such principle is that wealth is not inherently evil. Scripture does not condemn riches or possessions in and of themselves. (112)

Again, the Bible does not teach that wealth alone implies unrighteousness or warrants condemnation. The rich man in this story [rich man and Lazarus] is not in hell because he had money. Instead, he is in hell because he lacked faith in God, leading him to indulge in luxuries while ignoring the poor outside his gate. (114)

As I read these pages, all I could think was are you sure about that, buddy? for two reasons. Reason number one comes from Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. This is one of the first differences they highlight:

Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. If you make your slice of pie larger, then my slice is now smaller. In those cultures, folks are more likely to consider the accumulation of wealth to be immoral, since you can only become wealthy if other people become poor.

Psalm 52:7 describes the wicked man who “trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!” In our Western mind, this man demonstrated his wickedness in two ways: he trusted his wealth and he destroyed others. Yet the psalmist considers these to be one action … (41)

They go on to explain the linguistic reasons for why that is, but I’ll stop with that. We see this same concept echoed in the Rich Man and Lazarus parable– in fact, David’s argument that he went to hell because he “lacked faith” isn’t supported by the text; in fact, all it says is “remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.” There’s nothing there about faith. It’s just about you had good things so now you’re in agony.

I’m not saying David is necessarily wrong here. He could be right. I just think he’s got an over-inflated sense of his interpretation being The Only Correct One.

The last significant problem I have with chapter six comes here:

And this is really the core issue of it all. Do we trust him? Do we trust Jesus when he tells us to give radically for the sake of the poor? Do we trust him to provide for us when we begin using the resources he has given us to provide for others? Do we trust him to know what is best for our lives, our families, and our financial futures? (123-24)

No.

No, I actually don’t.

I’ve known a lot of Christians who trusted to God to “provide for all their need according to his riches in glory” and ended up with malnourished children because they couldn’t afford to buy enough food. There’s tons of stories of people mysteriously leaving groceries on porches, but for every single one of those there’s a Christian kid not having life-threatening medical needs met because these Christian parents don’t have the money to get them treated. And, to be clear, David is specifically talking about sacrificing so much that not being able to receive medical treatment is a significant possibility.

So no. I don’t trust God to provide for me when I have all the hard proof I need to illustrate that this is not something they’re in the regular business of doing. Either God doesn’t provide all our need, or they don’t think that “food” and “shelter” and “healing” are needs. Obviously, Jesus, Immanuel, shows us that they do think these things are important. I agree with David that we are charged with continuing Jesus’ ministry, with feeding his sheep. However, I think that putting ourselves at risk of losing food stability, shelter, and medical treatment isn’t how we’re supposed to go about doing that.

This chapter illustrates really well that David is coming at this from a good place– he really does care about people, about the poor, especially. Where I disagree with him isn’t about the core idea as much as it is a matter of degree. Handsome and I prioritize meeting other people’s needs– our budget revolves around it. However, it is held in balance with the fact that I get two massages every month to manage my fibromyalgia and saving up for things like ellipticals. We all define “need” differently, and I don’t think anyone should judge each other for where we draw the line.

February 22, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 85-106

Thankfully, there’s no horrifying story opening Chapter Four of Radical, “The Multiplying Community.” This is one of the chapters I remember clearly from the last time I read this book because it contains an argument I’ve employed with church leaders fairly consistently over the last few years. I don’t agree with David on much– and there is, of course, things I disagree with him on even here– but the basic argument of this chapter makes sense to me.

David makes the case that the Great Commission isn’t about simply converting as many people as possible, but that our primary focus should be on the “baptism” and “teaching” aspect of Jesus’ command– and I agree with him on that:

Making disciples is not an easy process. It is trying. It is messy. It is slow, tedious, even painful at times. It is all these things because it is relational. Jesus has not given us an effortless step-by-step formula for impacting nations for his glory. He has given us people, and he has said “Live for them. Love them, serve them, and lead them” … (93).

I don’t know how ubiquitous “witnessing” or “doorknocking” is, but in the area I grew up in the practice was commonplace, as was street preaching. Every Thursday night we would canvas a neighborhood, trying to hit as many homes as possible. We would do our best to introduce the “Roman’s Road” (Handsome had never even heard of that, which shocked me, who’d had it memorized since she was eleven) and lead them through the “Sinner’s Prayer.” At the end of the evening we would report back on how many soul’s we’d managed to save. Once a month the teenagers would take the lead on the whole shebang, which led to some of my more humiliating moments.

The last church we attended was pretty numbers-focused, as well. The number of people who attended each service was a relied-upon metric and was promoted pretty heavily from the stage as well as through the pastoral staff. How “big” they’d gotten and how many people they’d convinced to attend a small group were pretty much the only standard for success we heard from anyone. When Handsome and I brought up the problems with relying on this metric– notably, that simply attending service once a week isn’t a good way to understand how people are growing to become more like Christ, which we understood as one of the main goals of this whole “Church” business– they were always dismissed. We don’t just see numbers, we see people, and that would be the only answer we got out of anyone. That exact sentence, usually.

David thinks all of that is ridiculous, and so do I. My blog is one of the ways I try to fulfill the “Great Commission,” but it’s not just the writing– it’s engaging with all of you. Getting to know you. I know all my regular commenters, and you pick up on things over time: faith struggles, how it feels to parent children, frustrations with partners or parents. If you write a blog, I’ve probably read a bit of it. Many of you I follow your blogs now and read them consistently. For all my lurkers– you’re in my thoughts, too. I care about you. I care about the way my words might affect you.

At the GCN conference I met with several people who are regular readers, but rarely or never comment, and it was amazing getting to see your face and meet you offline. To hear your stories. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: you are why I do this.

That seems to be what David is getting at with this chapter of Radical. I’m still confused on all of what he means by “sharing the Gospel”– on page 91 he says that it’s how people “come to faith in Christ,” but then he immediately turns right and around and starts talking about a married couple who help men and women in Tanzania start businesses. He leans on conversion-style rhetoric, and then he tells a story about how they opened a booth in Jackson Square for the primary purpose of sharing “Christ’s work on the cross” (95), but that ultimately ends up with them feeding the homeless there every few days … which results in a lot of those homeless people attending his church, a fact he doesn’t fail to mention (96).

This is one of the things that bothers me about David’s stance, but it’s hardly unique to him. It seems like he sees “The Gospel” as being the act of evangelizing and conversion, but that one uses the tool of “building a relationship with a person by helping them and loving them” as a means to get there.

My small group/book club/house church (we’re not exactly what we are anymore) is going through the Gospel of Mark at the moment, and the thing that is leaping out to me every week is that it talks about Jesus spreading the gospel … but the only thing he ever does is heal people and cast out demons and shout at the lawyers about how “God made the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath” and “damn right I’m going to heal this person on the Sabbath, now you sit down and shut the hell up.”

Yes. I paraphrase Jesus like that. It might be sacrilegious, but I find it delightful. Anyway, Jesus’ version of sharing the gospel seems to not have much to do with conversion, but with loving people and helping them.

I do have one pretty serious problem with this chapter, though, and in my opinion it’s a fairly egregious failing. He bases his entire argument on his interpretation of Jesus’ ministry: that Jesus’s style of “discipleship” was to focus exclusively on the Apostles (88-90). His support of that comes from John 17, supposedly:

What is shocking is that when Jesus summarizes his work on earth, he doesn’t start reliving all the great sermons he preached and all the people who came to listen to him … Instead he repeatedly talks about the small group of men God had given him out of the world. They [the Apostles] were the work God had given to him. They were, quite literally, his life.

When you read through John 17, you cannot help but sense the intensity of the affection Jesus had for this band of disciples and the gravity of the investment he had made in their lives. (88-89)

Except he doesn’t actually want us to “read through John 17.” If you read the entire chapter, the second half of it starts off with “I do not pray for them alone.” I also disagree with the argument that John 17 is about only the Apostles. The attention the Apostles receive in the Gospels isn’t insignificant, but those books also heavily emphasize the fact that there were many people that Jesus considered his “disciples,” and it definitely included women (like Mary and Martha, or the women who went to the Tomb, just for starters). David erases the women who were utterly essential to the success of Jesus’ ministry (89, 93), and he downplays anyone who wasn’t a member of the Twelve.

In a way he comes by it honestly. Most of Christian history has done the same thing.

But, it disturbs me how willing David is to completely ignore anything Jesus did or said that doesn’t jive well with his argument. He opened Radical with the claim that we’ve all twisted Jesus into something he isn’t, but I’ll repeat myself: David is twisting Jesus, too.

February 16, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 61-84

Interestingly, David starts off this chapter with another horrifying story.

In it, he relates how a pastor of a church he was speaking at responded to his to ministry in inner-city New Orleans and impoverished areas overseas:

David, I think it’s great you are going to those places. But if you ask me, I would just as soon God annihilate all those people and send them to hell. (62)

On this one example, David and I are in complete agreement. I would say “what the fuck is this shit,” but David is considerably more indirect than I am. He simply says “Wow” (63). After that reaction, though, our views of the situation diverge … as one would probably expect at this point in my Radical review. David looks at this pastor’s antagonistic and violent attitude toward global missions and argues that every Christian is commanded by the Great Commission to be a global missionary, because it says “to all nations.”

I look at that pastor’s violent approach to inner city communities and developing nations as one drenched with white supremacy and an uncritical adoption of American imperialism, colonization, and exceptionalism, along with a core-deep belief in capitalism as a moral system.

The problem is, David shares some of those problems.

He sees Christianity as an American export.

This perspective is, depending, both right and wrong. David has inherited a view of Christianity that’s very much entrenched in the western European articulation of it. All of that is exacerbated by British and American missionary movements and the indelible affect they’ve had on how American Christianity views itself. I don’t know about your experience, but in mine there’s nothing more pious than reading missionary biographies.

What those biographies failed to convey to anyone I knew was that American and British missionary efforts frequently went hand-in-hand with colonization. Many missionaries were more focused on westernizing people than they were in converting them (Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is an excellent depiction of this that pissed me off the first time I read it, back when I was still a fundamentalist). There are echoes of that in other situations, too– America and Canada have a sordid past with essentially kidnapping First Nation children and abusively forcing our culture onto them. This oppressive act was frequently justified to white people as “Christianizing” them (for a horrifying look into that point of view, there’s Janette Oke’s Drums of Change).

In another sense, modern American evangelicals are still engaged in the same exact thing. If you’d like to know more about that, God Loves Uganda (which you can stream on Netflix) talks about how our evangelical leaders have spent a lot of time and money trying to make countries like Uganda just as homophobic as us. For more on that, I highly recommend this piece by Bisi Alimi.

But, in a very serious sense, he’s also wrong. From his point of view, the United States doesn’t count as a mission field (“having a heart for the United States” is a “smoke screen” for lazy people, 75)– and woven all through chapter four is this concept that we need to think “globally” about the Gospel which, according to him, means taking our version of Christianity to other countries.

What he fails to recognize is that many other nations have deep Christian roots– but they don’t look like American Christianity, so he dismisses them. For example, there are Kurdish Christians with a religious tradition reaching back to the fifth century. Then there’s Jordan, which has one of the oldest Christian communities anywhere in the world, but were one of the targets of the Christian crusades. Ethiopian Christian history stretches back centuries– to long before they built a monastery in the sixth century.

When people like David conceptualize “the Christian tradition,” they’re most likely not including the traditions of Jordan, Ethiopia, Turkey, or India. They don’t look like American evangelicals, so they’re dismissed as “not actually followers of Christ” (76).

His view of “developing” nations is racist.

This chapter is not the first time this has come up– in every chapter up to now he’s spent a great deal of time making sure we understand how woebegone and beggared other countries are. People living in garbage pits, people without access to clean water, people who struggle to find food.

Except many people in American don’t have clean water. Ten people have died in Flint because of poisoned water, and many children there will grow up with permanent brain damage. But it’s not just Flint– St. Joseph has had unclean water for almost a decade (along with many other counties all over the South). Many children go hungry on snow days because the only place they can get breakfast or lunch is at school. America is the seventh wealthiest nation, but we’re barely capable of providing adequate healthcare to our population– more women die from pregnancy and childbirth in America than in any other developed nation.

David has this concept of evangelicalism being beset by concerns with “first world problems” like padded pews and projectors, but is blinded by American exceptionalism and a shallow, “single-story” view of Africa and Asia (which, just to be clear, are continents, not countries. Looking at you, Jen Hatmaker, with your “African” this and your “African” that). America, while wealthy, isn’t that spectacular, and other nations aren’t all shanty towns and open sewage. Just do an image search for Abuja or Vientiane or Ulaanbaatar.

He sees wealth as God’s blessing, and therefore as a reflection of God’s glory.

The principle argument of this chapter is that God created everything in order to glorify himself. People worshiping God is the “final, ultimate, all-consuming, glorious, guaranteed, overwhelmingly global purpose of God in Scripture. This is the great why of God.” He exists to be glorified, we exist to glorify. End of story. Then we get a letter from a church member who had recently come back from a short-term missions trip to Guatemala, which he uses to conclude the chapter:

After spending a week around precious childen who eat a small cup of porridge a day, the question I have come back to Birmingham asking God is why he has blessed me when others have so little. And this is what God has shown me:

“I have blessed you for my glory. Not so you will have a comfortable life with a big house and a nice car. Not so you can spend lots of money on vacations, education, or clothing. Those aren’t bad things, but I’ve blessed you so that the nations will know me and see my glory.”

… That is why God has given me income and education and resources. God saves me so that that nations will know him. He blesses me so that all the earth will see his glory! (84)

“Blessings” is a shorthand in evangelicalism for “money.” God gave this woman money instead of children who are starving because giving her money glorifies him. She had the money to go to Guatemala on a likely ineffective and ultimately harmful short-term trip and that means God was glorified dontcha know!

Yeah. Sure. That makes sense.

The problem is that David has spent this entire chapter quite literally railing against the concept that some people are “called” to be missionaries while those who aren’t are supposed to do what they can to financially support the missionary effort. And then he concludes his chapter with someone basically doing exactly that.

I’m confused.

February 8, 2016 by
Uncategorized

“Radical” review: 43-60

David opens up this chapter of Radical with a horrifying story.

In it, he relates how a seminarian from Indonesia (his name is Raden) was in a village where the local witch doctor challenged him to a fight. Even though Raden was trained in martial arts, he declined by saying “My God does the fighting for me.” Supposedly, at that moment, the witch doctor starts gasping for air and within minutes has “fallen over dead” (44). Raden goes on to use this as an opportunity to “share the Gospel” with the villagers. Everyone, as you might expect from these sort of “missionary tales,” converts on the spot.

Over the next page, David totally embraces the concept that God took direct action to literally kill a man so that Raden’s message would appear more powerful and convincing to the villagers. While he says that this isn’t a method we should try to duplicate (no shit, David), he doesn’t doubt that God did do this– which makes me wonder why he thinks this isn’t something we should attempt again? Apparently, the death of one man was worth it to God at least in that instance. Why not others? If God did it, why shouldn’t we “make pronouncements that lead to their deaths” (45)? The whole point of this chapter is that we’re completely ineffectual without God’s involvement. Isn’t it true from David’s perspective that if God did something– even when it looks like murder– it’s ultimately a good thing? “God is sovereign” and all that?

However, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging that question.

~~~~~

Throughout the rest of this chapter, David returns to one of the principle messages from chapter one– that the American evangelical church has adopted the “American dream” and strayed from our original design and purpose. He re-launches into this argument with:

To this point, we have seen how the American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the gospel. This differentiation is heightened when we contrast trust in the power of God with reliance on our own abilities. (45)

All I could ask was uhm… how exactly have we seen that? He’s ranted a bunch about how wealthy we are in comparison to underground house churches in Asia, and he’s condemned “the American dream” a bunch, and he’s ranted about what the Gospel really means a bunch, all without giving me anything truly concrete to work with. He doesn’t think easy-believism is the reality of the Gospel, and has shouted a bunch of Calvinistic stuff about how we’re sinners and God hates us, and he thinks padded pews might need to be tossed out to save us from our apathy, but … it all has just been a rant so far. He hasn’t put forth a substantive argument.

Here, though, he tries a little bit by giving us a slightly-less-fuzzy articulation of “The American Dream”:

… we can do anything we set our minds to accomplish. There is no limit to what we can accomplish when we combine ingenuity, imagination, and innovation with skill and hard work. We can earn any degree, start any business, climb any ladder, attain any prize, and achieve any goal …

The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset it our own ability … But the gospel has different priorities. The gospel beckons us to die to ourselves and to believe in God and to trust in his power. In the gospel, God confronts us with our utter inability to accomplish anything of value apart from him. (46).

Ah. He means meritocracy.

Like him, I’m frustrated with the concept, largely because it’s a lie. My partner is an excellent example: he’s intelligent, talented, and a dedicated, earnest worker. He accomplishes a lot at his job, and is routinely recognized for his significant contributions. I’m proud of him, and he deserves every award, every raise, every glowing performance review.

But.

But, he’s only there because he has a master’s degree from one of the best engineering schools in the world. He has that degree because his father paid for it out of pocket. His father was able to do all of that because his father paid for him to get an engineering degree. His grandfather was able to do all of that because he was an engineer at the booming Chrysler company. His grandfather could do all of that because he came from a reasonably comfortable farming family who were able to survive the Great Depression and make sure their kids were all able to go to college and do things like become extremely successful engineers and neurosurgeons.

At least four generations of wealth, prosperity, health, and education led to the place where my upper-middle-class white male partner is an up-and-coming leader in his department. That’s meritocracy for you: the prevalent belief that the rich and educated don’t help each other.

So yes, in a way, I share David’s frustration with the concept. However, instead of recognizing any of that, he slams to the complete opposite end of the spectrum: he believes in our utter inability to accomplish anything of value apart from God.

I really don’t want to live in David’s universe because it seems like a maddening, frustrating place. Through the next few pages he relies on the word desperation, saying:

Think about it. Would you say that your life is marked right now by desperation for the Spirit of God? Would you say that the church you are a part of is characterized by this sense of desperation? (60)

… which reminds me of a conversation I keep having with people. If they’re approaching religion from a typical evangelical way of understanding concepts like “personal relationship with Jesus,” and they read my blog, they’re probably going to walk away from here feeling somewhat dissatisfied with my lack of … well, evangelical-ness. I’m not bursting with talk of how God has worked in my life, our recounting ways that I’ve been just so blessed. There’s no stories here about how the spirit of God moved on my heart, or how I was convicted or “given a word,” according to whatever parlance you’re used to.

So, from David’s understanding, no, I’m not desperate for the Spirit of God, but it’s not because I don’t think we should be. I just have a different perspective on what this means. In many ways– most ways, probably– I am extremely desperate. Desperate, at times, is the only word to describe what I feel.

I am desperate for the unceasing tide of misogyny I have to wade through every single day to end. I am desperate for the police brutality and white supremacy in my country to be repented of and eradicated. I am desperate for trans people to be loved and accepted, for them to be able to grasp the healing and wholeness that is– or should be– out there.

Yes. Desperation is the only word that fits. And I pray. I do. I’m still uncertain what possible point prayer serves, but my soul eternally cries out to someone to just make this all stop.

But then I realize that the “someone” I’m asking for help is me. And it’s you. Unlike David, I don’t think we are “utterly incapable of accomplishing anything of value” without God’s direct intervention. I believe that God, unlike what David argues, uses likely and unlikely tools (53). Sure, they asked someone with a speech impediment to become a public speaker. But, they also asked Deborah to become a judge of Israel, and the record we have of her leadership is one of boldness, confidence, and competency.

Evangelicals like to tell stories like Gideon and Moses and Peter and Saul– the unlikely men, the people who seemed most unsuited for XYZ position. They embrace these narratives and argue that our abilities, our talents, are fairly irrelevant to God. In fact, the more pathetic and broken you appear to be to everyone else, the more likely They are to use you. Just to be sure that everyone “gets the message” that it only happened because God did that, and not because that person was smart and capable.

But what about Joseph, who was an excellent administrator? What about Lydia, who was a beloved community organizer? What about Phoebe, a proficient leader? Or the person(s)who eventually recorded the Gospel of John, a thematically beautiful written work?

All of this, to me, begs the question: what do people like David really mean when they say we can’t do anything “apart from God”? Do they mean that God gave us all the talents and abilities, so anything we do is ultimately their doing? Do they mean that God took direct action and planted the ideas for the granaries in Joseph’s head, a la The Chairman from The Adjustment Bureau? That God put the words in place before the author of John could write them down?

This is why I find these arguments frustrating. In a way, they’re unfalsifiable. Whatever David does mean by the “Spirit of God enabling us,” there’s nothing one way or the other that supports or disproves him. He can say literally anything he wants.

February 3, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 23-42

And we’re jumping right back into the Radical review. After I did the introduction and first chapter, I tweeted something about how the subtitle should have been “I take hyperbole literally,” and after reading through the second chapter again (titled “Too Hungry for Words: Discovering the Truth and Beauty of the Gospel”), I’ve realized it’s not just hyperbole. It’s everything. David takes everything as literally as possible.

I have the tendency to interpret things overly literally, especially when I’m tired, and even I can recognize sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphor, and the distinctions between exposition and poetry. Like, look at this:

Jesus told us everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and Paul went so far as to say that we are captive to the devil himself. (31)

Honestly, fellow, if you have to premise something with “they even went so far as to say” maybe, just maybe, you should take a step back and ask yourself—if they’re really going so far, do they mean it literally?

David also has a pretty serious problem with taking his own understanding of Scripture and elevating it to something pretty close to Scripture itself, and that’s me being generous. There’s this:

We are each born with an evil, God-hating heart. Genesis 8:21 says that every inclination of man’s heart is evil from childhood … (30)

And this:

Why is [Jesus] in such agony and pain [at Gethsemane]? The answer is not because he is afraid of the crucifixion. He is not trembling because of what the Roman soldiers are about to do to him … (34-35).

Three things: first of all, if the verse you’re about to quote says “the imaginations of a man’s heart are evil from his youth,” running around making the claim that means we’re all God-haters from the moment we’re born doesn’t make much sense. Second, while it’s entirely likely that Jesus was also worried about whatever is in the Cup he’s asking to be passed, it seems dismissive and uncompassionate to point-blank declare that Jesus wasn’t afraid of the crucifixion. Jesus was human like as we are. Assuming he couldn’t possibly be afraid of the coming crucifixion (35) seems just a touch Arian to me.

The third and last is that David is a pretty committed Calvinist, and he’s refusing to even acknowledge that there are other approaches to Christian theology. According to him, he lays awake at night terrified for all the people who aren’t an avowed Calvinist like he is. To him, everyone who isn’t a Calvinist is completely and utterly wrong and we will die in hell.

He does this sort of thing throughout the book, and it never ceases to be frustrating. I’ve never been impressed by men who are this arrogant.

The second biggest problem I have with Radical he also introduces in this chapter: asceticism. If you’re not familiar with asceticism, it’s typically a religious attempt to abstain from indulgences or pleasure. There are varying degrees of this, ranging from things like Lent to wearing a cilice and whipping yourself. In my case, it showed up in things like my Sunday school teacher telling me to wear uncomfortable shoes in order to “mortify the flesh.”

In many respects, Radical is a modern argument for Christian asceticism. If David wasn’t so virulently Protestant he’d probably have realized he’s really just recycling St. Francis of Assisi and stopped writing the book. Here, he questions music, padded chairs, air conditioning, decorations, and a bit later on, even sermons (27, 40).

Why all of this bothers me is that it has gnostic overtones. When we buy into a harsh divide between our souls and our bodies, it’s easy to take some passages from the Bible and make them be about all bodily impulses as being evil and corrupted. There’s a long tradition in Christianity of sexual abstinence—in fact, it’s possible that at least one of the early church fathers castrated himself (Origen, according to Eusebius). Even if they didn’t go as far as castration, you can see the leftover movement in the modern Catholic requirement for priests to abstain from sex and marriage.

The problem is, this leaves out things like other Scripture passages (like Paul’s instruction that we sing psalms and hymns in Ephesians), and ignores the fact that the Christian religion is one very much concerned with embodiment. Jesus is God made flesh, God with us, Immanuel. The two sacraments we all agree on—the Eucharist and Baptism—are fundamentally about recognizing that our bodies and our souls are inseparably the same, and that spiritual acts are physical ones and vice versa.

In my opinion, arguments for asceticism—whatever religious or secular place they come from—always ignore this reality, and arguments that ignore reality can’t be successful. I’m especially sensitive to this as a chronic pain sufferer—take away indoor heating and padded chairs and I’m unable to come to your church service. Make church services last six to twelve hours like what he talks about here and I will not be able to fully participate in your church.

The third and last significant problem with this chapter is that he’s very much of the “Christians talk about how God is love too much, we need to focus on how God is wrathful and hateful and a holy judge” persuasion. Like here:

Yes, God is a loving Father, but he is also a wrathful Judge … And in some sense, God also hates sinners … On psalmist said to God, “The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong.” (29)

Leaving aside for the moment that the psalms are poetry and therefore treating an outpouring of a psalmist’s emotions as literal factual truth about the nature of God themself is more than a little ridiculous, let’s take a crack at his “God is also hateful and wrathful” assertion. He positions their wrath as being in tension with their love, as though God’s love and wrath are opposites. I’d like to posit that they are not opposites, but that one results from the other. God is wrathful because they are loving.

This springs from my understanding of the context—if you examine almost every time that God is being portrayed as wrathful, it is in response to someone being oppressive. In almost every case it’s the Israelites doing things like refusing to observe the Year of Jubilee, like in Amos. Supposedly God gave them every opportunity not to turn into an oppressive Empire that preferred the wealthy and powerful over the poor and needy, and they took every opportunity to become precisely that. And when that happens, the prophets and the psalmists spend a lot of time condemning it, writing about how they believe God feels about it, too. According to them, God’s usually pretty upset and for good reason.

During Jesus’ ministry, it seems he spent most of his time addressing the injustices he saw. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, lifted up the poor in spirit. The times he’s shown as angry are in reaction to the elite using their positions to abuse those below them—like the moneychangers in the temple, or the Pharisees giving their followers a “back-breaking burden.” Jesus loved, and because he loved, he grew wrathful when he saw oppression and injustice.

But, according to David, God is wrathful, and because someone thousands of years ago sinned, we’re all born completely and totally evil – “you are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, and in your present state you are not even able to see that you need life” (32)—and Jesus had to bear all the fury and wrath “stored up from the beginning of the world” (35) in order for God to be able to come down from his mountain again (33) and tolerate being around us.

Just … is God actually that petty?

There are a few things in this chapter that I could almost agree with him on, like his rejection of a “superstitious sinner’s prayer” (37). I’ve even compared the sinner’s prayer to a magical incantation, so obviously this idea is something we both dislike. But we almost immediately diverge from each other, because he’s a Calvinist and I’m not. He’s still viewing Christianity in terms of saved and unsaved and I’ve moved past that to being a Christian means following Christ.

Maybe somewhere in this book we’ll fall more in step with each other. I doubt it.

January 27, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 1-22

The first time I heard about David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, I was in my second year of graduate school. It had been out for over a year at that point, and a colleague I worked with recommended it to me after a conversation we’d had about the corruption and greed common in American evangelicalism. This book had left a lasting impression on my friend, but I wasn’t as struck by it as he was.

Partly that’s due to the fact that I didn’t grow up in American evangelicalism, so David’s condemnations weren’t directed at me or my religious culture. He was describing a slightly different sort of radicalization than the one I’d grown up with, but, in the end, I realized I’d spent most of my life trying to live by a fundamentalist application of the same interpretations, the same principles– and I’d already figured out that, honestly, they’re just not realistic, healthy, practical, or even a way of living that reflects the whole breadth of Scripture.

However, it is a massively popular book. It’s acquired over thirty thousand ratings on Goodreads, thirteen hundred on Amazon, over four hundred on Barnes and Noble, over three hundred on Christianbook, and most most of these reviews are positive, averaging at 4.5/5 stars. Many of the Christian writers, speakers, and theologians I pay attention to have recommended Radical at some point– Francis Chan and Jonathan Merrit wrote blurbs for the book, and Rachel Held Evans has promoted it.

It’s one of the few books that seem to have bridged the audience gap between conservative and progressive Christians, and I hadn’t seen anyone critique it with any depth until I started reading the 1- and 2-star reviews on Goodreads. After all, shouldn’t someone like me be jumping all over this particular bandwagon? He talks about Jesus’ teaching for us to sell everything that we have and give to the poor– isn’t that exactly what I’ve spent a significant amount of time shouting about?

But, like I said above, I don’t think David’s approach and interpretation incorporates the natural balance that appears not just in the epistles, but in the Gospels, as well. And I think that the interpretation he advocates could be harmful to many Christians.

* * *

The first chapter, titled “Someone Worth Losing Everything For,” functions as a long introduction to the themes David will be arguing for. He opens with the contrasting experiences that prompted him to examine some of the assumptions broadly held in American Christianity (concepts like being “blessed by God” is equal to being wealthy, although he doesn’t articulate it that plainly): his visit to persecuted churches and the Sunday he became a pastor of a megachurch. His conclusion:

We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves. (7)

Abandoning ourselves is one of the themes of Radical, and as you can probably imagine it’s one of the things that sent up a red flag for me on this re-read. While I do agree with David to an extent about what’s inherent in Jesus’ call to follow him, the phrase abandoning ourselves can lead down a dark and unhealthy path. There is beauty and Christlikeness in self-sacrifice, in service to others, but while I think it’s terribly important to actively love others sacrificially, I have learned that there are limits. Even Jesus took breaks. Even Jesus withdrew and took care of himself when he needed to.

But the idea of abandonment doesn’t necessarily include the need for boundaries and the acknowledgment of realistic limitations, and as someone with chronic and debilitating physical and mental illnesses, the kind of lifestyle David says all Christians should live isn’t possible for me. People like me don’t seem to exist in David’s (coughwhite-and-able-bodiedcough) world.

While I can agree with his criticisms of American Christian greed (like his observation on one church’s new 23 million dollar building and another church’s gift of $5,000 for refugees featured on the same magazine cover), I read statements like:

We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. (13)

 … and I can’t help but think but you’re twisting him too, David. He spends this chapter highlighting the times Jesus made statements like “sell everything that you have” and “put down your nets and follow me” or “hate your father and mother”– and yet he completely ignored people like Mary, Martha, and Lazarus who didn’t sell everything they had, who didn’t abandon their livelihoods or home or family and were still considered Jesus’ disciples. Or the numerous people (mostly women) behind the scenes who gave Jesus food and money and a place to sleep for the night.

The most significant problem I have with this chapter though, appears here:

First, from the outset you need to commit to believe whatever Jesus says. As a Christian, it would be a grave mistake to come to Jesus and say, “Let me hear what you have to say, and then I’ll decide whether or not I like it.” If you approach Jesus this way, you will never truly hear what he has to say. You have to say yes to the words of Jesus before you even hear them. (20)

That doesn’t make any sort of sense, and isn’t something Jesus required of his followers– not even his apostles, for crying out loud. Thomas demanded hard, physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection, and according to the Gospels, Jesus gave it to him. He heard “the words of Jesus” as communicated to him by the others, and said “no, I need more than that.”

What David is asking his readers to do is foolhardy and ridiculous. I think I understand the sentiment driving his words here– he’s attempting to argue that following Jesus is a package deal and we can’t pick and choose (which is really ironic right about now since it’s what he’s spent this chapter doing). However, telling fellow Christians to uncritically imbibe his interpretation of Jesus’ teachings — which is the only thing this book can possibly be — is asking Christians to forget the warnings about following Paul or Apollos or Peter.

He’s setting us up. He’s putting the idea in place that if you disagree with him, David Platt, the youngest megachurch pastor in America, you are not really committed to Jesus. Men who put themselves on pedestals like this– however unconsciously they might be doing it– should make us all skeptical, if not outright suspicious.

December 14, 2015 by