Untitled

Way back when America was great and I heated my home with a wood-fired stove, I attended a First Baptist Church in the middle of town. This was in the South, of course, and was of the Southern Baptist ilk, steeple and all. It was a first for me, but my wife was Baptist through and through and bubbled with joy with almost every sermon and happenstance.

For me, independent and a little rebellious, it wasn’t quite so. The people there were as sweet as pecan pie, but as a West Coaster without a single Baptist bone in my body, I kept my eyes open for extracurricular activities. I started meeting with a small group at someone’s house on Wednesday nights, where we talked about our week, drank coffee, ate cake, and gave permission to everyone to be as weird as the Spirit led. I would never claim to be weird, but I was certainly happy for other people to be. This is the West Coast way, after all.

We had a speaker come once to our church – a seminary guy – who was going to teach us about worshiping like those crazy Jews in the first-century church. Now, I AM FROM SEATTLE, and brotha? I have seen plenty, but this guy’s teaching to us about the radicals in Peter’s church would have made a dictionary page dry up and blow away. He said that Peter might have said something like…AND THE LORD BE WITH YOU! And all of us, with smiles and shouts, would come back with AND THE LORD BE WITH YOU! The speaker enjoyed the heck out of this and made the congregation shout louder and louder and smile bigger and bigger. It was weird.

I don’t know. Maybe for Miss Bell, who was eighty-three and watched the church grow from a tiny group to filling up an entire building, this was pretty exciting stuff. We rebels talked about it at our next Wednesday get-together, and the leader of our little group chuckled and said, “Well, you know what they said when they introduced him. He’s a seminary guy.” This was not a compliment.

That’s the best I can do for this book. He’s a seminary guy.

And that doesn’t have to be bad. I have a rule that as a writer of books myself, I give any writer two stars just for putting in the work of doing the thing. I’ll toss in another if it’s coherent and readable: not all are, you know. This is all those things, but I imagine it will leave many people feeling less than full.

Both Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel tell me not to miss this book because the author is a real scholar. Truthfully? I’m not sure this means a single thing when talking about the supernatural life.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying it’s a bad book. I’m saying that every writer has to grapple first with the question of who their book is for, and this one isn’t for me.

The author begins by arguing that ‘while most Bible-believing Christians retain a mild belief in the supernatural and in miracles…they live as practical atheists…wanting to avoid looking ignorant to the world around them.’ He argues that this is not faith. Faith, he says, is action and belief based on knowing. I think he is wrong here, and argue that faith is the opposite: belief and action based on not knowing, but doing it anyway.

Since Christians live with such a dearth of knowledge, he says, – and I don’t get it either – you can DONATE to the Jesus Film Project to receive their monthly newsletter. Okay, this is really odd advice to me. It wouldn’t be if he included it in the back of the book as an aid to build your faith, or even as an aside within the copy, but to include it as a bullet point in a list of activities to increase faith smacks me as plain odd. I’m not familiar with the project, so I can’t speak to it, but people have been living with a supernatural G for millennia now with little but prayer, reading, and devotion.

The book reads like a seminary class syllabus. Nothing is really wrong here, but not everyone will enjoy the presentation. The writer is trying to give you a logical way of feeling illogical. None is needed. He’s a professor, after all, “one of the leading evangelical thinkers of our day,” says his Amazon bio. As such, he approaches the material as a professor, helping the reader understand what a miracle is and what a coincidence is and parsing events with sure and unwavering evangelical theology.

Frankly, I don’t think he succeeds in taking the reader on a journey of living supernaturally in Christ, as the subtitle claims. He might, and if he does, you might agree with the shocking number of Amazon readers who give the book a super rating. For me? It’s a three out of five. Readable and cogent, but nothing you wouldn’t pick up from prayerfully reading Acts and the Gospels. And no donation is needed!