Bite-Sized Gospel [Justin]
I’m reading The Purpose-Driven Life at the moment, and I can understand the disapproval it has received from many in the emerging church.
Like many things modern, it presents a bite-sized Gospel that can be digested in little pieces. Everything in it is handy and portable, and if the book itself is not convenient enough, you can get Scripture Keeper Plus to help you memorize those all-important decontextualized verses.
Decontextualization is the problem, as Jimmy at Fluidfaith has pointed out regarding The Passion of the Christ. If Jesus’ death is given no context, it loses its real meaning and ceases to be good news, becoming only a tragic story portrayed with an almost voyeuristic realism.
I am personally tired of hearing American bloggers (like myself) rant about the modern institutional church, and if that is all this post is, I’ve failed in my purpose (after all, What on Earth is This Post Here For?). Rather, I want to point out, in a thoughtful way, the ways in which books like this one perpetuate the ritzcrackerization of Christianity.
First, Warren introduces most of the 1000+ scriptural quotations with “The Bible says…”, a formula we get pretty familiar with after two or three pages. If you view the Bible as a kind of gigantic book of Proverbs, this isn’t really a problem. The Proverbs are perfect for this kind of quoting (though there is certainly a poetic and narrative structure in the book):
He who winks maliciously causes grief,
and a chattering fool comes to ruin. Proverbs 10:10
This verse is pretty quotable, and you don’t lose much by pulling it into something else without any background.
But what about the rest of the Bible, the parts that are story and epistle and history? What happens if we take these out in useful, bite-sized pieces? I think we are unfair to the text when we demand that it be useful to us.
For example, you’ve probably heard the verse “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.” (1 Tim 5:23). It’s been used a lot of different ways, mostly to prove a point about hermeneutics (like I’m doing now) or to be funny (like I did in high school). Context means a lot. It’s not everything, but it’s a lot.
Second, the book is divided into 40 bite-sized purpose-driven chapters. Why? Readability, of course. Web pages do this, and it’s a great idea. People don’t want to wade through 65-page chapters. Even in dense material like Beyond Foundationalism, there are headings and sub-headings to give the reader a break.
But I think something else is being communicated here: God has truths for you, and they come in little 5-page chunks. They are summarizable in attractive little boxes at the end of each chapter. And they tell you everything you need to know about life. Sure.
Third, Warren presents the bite-sized gospel at the end of chapter 7. In case it’s too inconvenient for you to, say, actually become a Christian before reading the rest of the book, you are provided with a nice little 3-paragraph sermon on how to accept Christ. Then you’re free to continue learning God’s purposes for your life.
We can do better than that. As NT Wright discusses in The Challenge of Jesus, Jesus is not just a fountain of timeless truths. His message has a context, just as his life and death and resurrection had a context. We have much continuity with that context, because it is found in a story that began before Jesus was born in Nazareth and still wasn’t over by the time I was born in New Jersey. It continues alive today because God is still working out his story, still shaping the world through the advancement of his Kingdom. That’s a big gospel.
Scripture Keeper Plus-
Well thanks alot! After I clicked on that link I lost my breakfast all over the keyboard!
Peace
I agree with so much of what you say but wonder if lightening up might be in order. For several of my friends, this book was the first time they had ever been challenged with the knowledge that they exist for God’s pleasure - not just to evangelism. This shouldn’t be revelatory, but it was for many. As for the book not having it all, well…
I got tired of the one liners and didn’t make it all the way to the end, but the book had some fair material.
I agree that it’s got a lot of good stuff. I wouldn’t say that anything Warren says is wrong; it’s all very biblical, as far as I can tell.
I’m mostly considering the imbalanced emphases and removal of scripture from context. These things present fewer problems for the Boomer generation, but I think my generation would hear better from someone like Erwin McManus.
Even so, Warren’s book will be a huge force in the culture of the church over the next few years, and all of us have to deal with that in some way.
I think it’s fine to write a book describing (or at least built upon) your Christian world view like Warren has done, but it’s a bad idea for a church to take that and effectively make it gospel by preaching it from the front every week. That’s the real problem here.
I would agree that carving up the Kingdom into bite-sized morsels is really deficient — and I loved the expression “ritzcrackerization”; I’ll have to incorporate that into my vocabulary. Any time a word brings a good summation and a smile to my face, it’s a good thing.
The only comment I’d like to make is that, if more “modern” approaches tend to ritz-cracker everything into over-simplifications, we pomo’s have a pendulum-like tendency to make the Kingdom so dense and other-worldly that normal, everyday people listen (or read) our conversations and go “what the f*** are they talking about?”
Sometimes, when I spend too much time with my non-Christian friends, and then come home and surf my favourite blogs, it feels like I’m re-entering a weird religious subculture called ‘emergent church”, which is no less foreign to non-Christians than ‘modern church’.
Don’t take that as a flame — I’m only thinking out loud — and I’m as committed to finding ways to “unlearn churchianity” as I am to reaching out to my non-Christian friends.
It’s just that after spending three or four hours playing in a pub, talking to people who couldn’t give a rat’s patookus about ‘emergent’ or ‘modern’ — and they only see those distinctions as further proofs of Christianity’s irrelevance to “normal life” — sometimes I wonder if we’re all still missing the point somehow.
The journey/struggle continues…
Peace.
Very well said - something we all need to hear from time to time. Thanks.
I suppose I said recently that I wanted this blog to be more readable by non-Christians, but I guess I haven’t really done anything about that in the way I write.
Justin,
I have refused to read the Purpose Driven drivel so far. But I did read Beyond Foundationalism, which was more up my alley. What did you think of the book?
You should have been here at ACU for some of the Lectureship this year. There was some good stuff going on.
Take it easy!
I thought Beyond Foundationalism was great. I didn’t have time to blog about it much as I’d have liked, but I did post a few entries:
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here
Here, and
Here
These posts are mostly on the early chapters (1-2), since I spent the most time on those chapters and got the most out of them.
I found the first part of the book quite illuminating, but for the work of doing theology, the latter part of the book was most interesting to me.