Another pop culture book I read on my recent reading jag was Blue Like Jazz. A New York Times bestseller written by Donald Miller, I was curious what all the hubbub was about. He makes a few good points, and I'll list them, but I see this book a little differently than a lot of people out there because overall I was unimpressed.
Donald is right on the money when he says that we love God because He first loved us, and that it's because of His love for us, and consequently our love for Him**, that we obey Him. This is taken right out of Scripture itself (1 Jn 4:19; Titus 2:11-12).
"Rick says that I will love God because he first loved me. I will obey God because I love God. But if I cannot accept God's love, I cannot love Him in return, and I cannot obey Him. Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God's love will. The ability to accept God's unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God's kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love." (pg 86)
Then again toward the end of his book he says this:
"And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God's love will never change us if we don't accept it." (page 232)
Donald get more points, from me anyway, when he talks about the typical 'Trendy Writer" on pages 91-94 of his book:
"Trendy Writer talked about how Khwaja Khandir is his fishing guide. He described Khwaja Khandir as the Islamic version of the Holy Spirit: Khwaja Khandir tells him where the fish are and teaches him things about life like how to manage his money or achieve inner peace or please his wife. It was all hokey and hoo-ha. I felt as if I were being visited by the ghost of Christmas future, and the ghost was saying, 'Hey, Don, you're going to end up like this guy: A yuppie Christian writer with no backbone!' ... For me, Trendy Writer coming to town was the beginning of something. It was the beginning of my authentic Christianity. Trendy Writer, Khwaja Khandir, and Tony the Beat Poet were the seeds of change. I knew Christ, but I was not a practicing Christian. I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the golden cows of religiosity and philosophy. It was one of those enlightenments, one of those honest looks in the mirror in which there is no forgetting who you are. It was a moment without make-believe. After that moment, things started to get interesting."
I couldn't agree more. Why are so many Christians taken with every trendy book or speaker that comes along? Ironically, though, I put Blue Like Jazz in the "trendy pile."
Why? If you look closely you'll notice that Donald never really defines what "a spiritual person" or "Christian spirituality" (subtitle of his book) is. He comes close on page 57, "And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul." and on page 103, "I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything." Then at the end of his book (page 239) he says, "I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper."
Do you see it? Donald's idea of spirituality is all feelings-based. What a scary place to be! Emotions and feelings change constantly. They should never be the driving force behind what we do or don't do. Donald is putting the cart before the horse. True Christian spirituality is based on faith in what God says is true. In other words, it's taking God at His Word. When we're in the Word, believing the Word, looking at the world through "Word-colored glasses," living out the Word, that's true Christian spirituality. The Word is the horse, feelings are the cart — they come after because the Word is pulling them along, keeping them on the right track.
Basing everything on feelings is typical of post-modern thinking: You come up with a list of things that you think are necessary to follow — what feels right to you — and the rest doesn't matter. And if someone should happen to call you on anything you're believing or doing, well they're just being judgmental and unloving (chapters 12 and 18). Basically, it boils down to this: It doesn't really matter what you believe (because "who knows anything anyway") or how you live, just as long as you're following Jesus (and whatever that happens to look like to you).
The ramifications of this kind of thinking are even more troubling. If, as Donald says, Christianity should be replaced with Christian spirituality ...
"For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained" (pg 115).
... which to him is all about experiences and what you feel (because nobody "knows anything anyway"), ...
"At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow" (pg 205).
... then Scripture is no longer authoritative — experiences and feelings are. Another reviewer of Blue Like Jazz explains this particularly well:
"A million to one is very low odds that "any" of our theology is right. What about the theology of the atonement? Is our chance of understanding that a million to one? What about the theology of Jesus Christ's return? Can we possibly know whether or not He is coming back? And what about the theology of biblical inerrancy? Can we even trust the Bible? With the odds Miller suggests, no, we can trust nothing about God's Word at all. Praise God, that Miller's odds are completely wrong!"
**There are two words for love in the original Greek Scriptures — phileo and agape. Phileo means "to be a friend to (fond of [an individual or an object]), i.e., have affection for (denoting personal attachment, as a matter of sentiment or feeling); agape means "love, i.e., affection or benevolence — embracing especially the judgment and the deliberate assent of the will as a matter of principle, duty and propriety — the former [phileo] being chiefly of the heart and the latter [agape] of the head." In other words, agape love is not just a feeling, it's also a decision. Agape love is the only love believers are instructed to have for God.
Donald is right on the money when he says that we love God because He first loved us, and that it's because of His love for us, and consequently our love for Him**, that we obey Him. This is taken right out of Scripture itself (1 Jn 4:19; Titus 2:11-12).
"Rick says that I will love God because he first loved me. I will obey God because I love God. But if I cannot accept God's love, I cannot love Him in return, and I cannot obey Him. Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God's love will. The ability to accept God's unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God's kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. If we hear, in our inner ear, a voice saying we are failures, we are losers, we will never amount to anything, this is the voice of Satan trying to convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love." (pg 86)
Then again toward the end of his book he says this:
"And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God's love will never change us if we don't accept it." (page 232)
Donald get more points, from me anyway, when he talks about the typical 'Trendy Writer" on pages 91-94 of his book:
"Trendy Writer talked about how Khwaja Khandir is his fishing guide. He described Khwaja Khandir as the Islamic version of the Holy Spirit: Khwaja Khandir tells him where the fish are and teaches him things about life like how to manage his money or achieve inner peace or please his wife. It was all hokey and hoo-ha. I felt as if I were being visited by the ghost of Christmas future, and the ghost was saying, 'Hey, Don, you're going to end up like this guy: A yuppie Christian writer with no backbone!' ... For me, Trendy Writer coming to town was the beginning of something. It was the beginning of my authentic Christianity. Trendy Writer, Khwaja Khandir, and Tony the Beat Poet were the seeds of change. I knew Christ, but I was not a practicing Christian. I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the golden cows of religiosity and philosophy. It was one of those enlightenments, one of those honest looks in the mirror in which there is no forgetting who you are. It was a moment without make-believe. After that moment, things started to get interesting."
I couldn't agree more. Why are so many Christians taken with every trendy book or speaker that comes along? Ironically, though, I put Blue Like Jazz in the "trendy pile."
Why? If you look closely you'll notice that Donald never really defines what "a spiritual person" or "Christian spirituality" (subtitle of his book) is. He comes close on page 57, "And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul." and on page 103, "I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything." Then at the end of his book (page 239) he says, "I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper."
Do you see it? Donald's idea of spirituality is all feelings-based. What a scary place to be! Emotions and feelings change constantly. They should never be the driving force behind what we do or don't do. Donald is putting the cart before the horse. True Christian spirituality is based on faith in what God says is true. In other words, it's taking God at His Word. When we're in the Word, believing the Word, looking at the world through "Word-colored glasses," living out the Word, that's true Christian spirituality. The Word is the horse, feelings are the cart — they come after because the Word is pulling them along, keeping them on the right track.
Basing everything on feelings is typical of post-modern thinking: You come up with a list of things that you think are necessary to follow — what feels right to you — and the rest doesn't matter. And if someone should happen to call you on anything you're believing or doing, well they're just being judgmental and unloving (chapters 12 and 18). Basically, it boils down to this: It doesn't really matter what you believe (because "who knows anything anyway") or how you live, just as long as you're following Jesus (and whatever that happens to look like to you).
The ramifications of this kind of thinking are even more troubling. If, as Donald says, Christianity should be replaced with Christian spirituality ...
"For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained" (pg 115).
... which to him is all about experiences and what you feel (because nobody "knows anything anyway"), ...
"At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. And wonder is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow" (pg 205).
... then Scripture is no longer authoritative — experiences and feelings are. Another reviewer of Blue Like Jazz explains this particularly well:
"A million to one is very low odds that "any" of our theology is right. What about the theology of the atonement? Is our chance of understanding that a million to one? What about the theology of Jesus Christ's return? Can we possibly know whether or not He is coming back? And what about the theology of biblical inerrancy? Can we even trust the Bible? With the odds Miller suggests, no, we can trust nothing about God's Word at all. Praise God, that Miller's odds are completely wrong!"
**There are two words for love in the original Greek Scriptures — phileo and agape. Phileo means "to be a friend to (fond of [an individual or an object]), i.e., have affection for (denoting personal attachment, as a matter of sentiment or feeling); agape means "love, i.e., affection or benevolence — embracing especially the judgment and the deliberate assent of the will as a matter of principle, duty and propriety — the former [phileo] being chiefly of the heart and the latter [agape] of the head." In other words, agape love is not just a feeling, it's also a decision. Agape love is the only love believers are instructed to have for God.
No comments:
Post a Comment