Bunch of Nonsense
Music, Books and Life in the SpiritArchive for March, 2008
New Book
Today I started reading a new book that just came out that I hope is good. Its entitled, “Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) by Kevin Deyoung and Ted Kluck (foreward by the great theologian David F. Wells). It certainly has an interesting structure, rotating chapters from Deyoung (a pastor-theologian) and Kluck (a journalist). Some of the chapters seem kind of provocative, like “Thank You for Smoking: On Dialogue, Futurism and Hell” or “A Funreal For A Friend: On Churches, Story and Propositional Language” or “Modernism: The Boogeyman Cometh” or “Real Topeka People: In Search Of Community” or finally “Why I Don’t Want A Cool Pastor.” I don’t know. It looks good. Its published by Moody, an excellent publisher. It looks like its might get into some of the emergent tenets like the postmodern matrix, dialogical preaching, non-linear story telling and de-constructing doctrine. Should be fun. Maybe I can write posts as I go. Who knows, maybe I’ll blog more, but then again… might not happen.
book review of The Shack
I was told I MUST read this novel. I’ve been told its amazing, folks come in the store buying multiple copies for friends, they couldn’t put it down, etc.,. Alright, I read it. First the good news. I have to give William P. Young credit for pulling his book out of the huge mire that is the self-published world (a major feat for sure) and he certainly has a hit on his hands. Good for him. Unfortunately, for me, that’s the end of the good news. As for the bad news, I’m really going to try and not be mean spirited as the book seems to have been written with good intentions. First off I would say this, the book is a the kind of novel I would call a non-story novel, if that makes any sense. Brian McLaren’s novels are like this. They are not a story as much as a platform to dispense truth. And The Shack sure believes it has a lot of truth to dispense. It’s the story of a man whose daughter is kidnapped and murdered in a shack in a remote forest. Three years later he receives a letter from “Papa” asking him to come to the shack. He goes. He meets Papa. Papa is a black woman who he discovers is God The Father. (Did this guy see the Matrix?) He soon meets an Asian women (God The Spirit) and a middle eastern man (God The Son, Jesus). From that point on the story stops as these four characters have long theological discourses on the meaning of suffering, judgment, free will, forgiveness, God’s sovereignty, faith, etc.,. Of course every book should be well written, but for this idea to work, I believe the writing would need to be completely brilliant, like maybe Shakespeare might have come close. Unfortunately, The Shack starts out with purple high school prose and kind of goes downhill from there. There are passages in this in which the writing is simply awful. The dialog of these characters simply do not sound anything like the way people actually talk. And it NEVER sounds like the Jesus of the New Testament. Read the New Testament and you’ll see what I mean. Jesus always said the most amazing, unexpected things, usually very succinctly. Everything he said was endlessly profound and stunningly original. That’s a good word for him, stunning. He stunned people. These characters are pretty much the opposite of that, kind of long winded and at times just plain nonsensical. His attempts to show the God characters as joyful (for me) comes off as glib and kind of silly. You can see how some of the things these God characters say could have been lifted from scripture, but other times Young seems to be making things up from whole cloth. He never says anything that I would call heretical, but there is some theology in here that is certainly borderline. Occasionally there are passages that work (particularly regarding forgiveness) and the ending for me really helped. But these were few and far between and too little too late. Still, people seem moved by it and I guess if they won’t read anything else, its better than nothing IF it leads to reading something better on the subject and IMO there are scores of better books on these subjects. I would suggest John Piper’s “The Pleasures Of God” for one. I think I’m going to go and re-read it right now!
