| Title | : | Searching for God Knows What |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0785263713 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780785263715 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 246 |
| Publication | : | First published February 29, 2000 |
Searching for God Knows What Reviews
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Where do I begin... First, this is the first Donald Miller book I've read. (It seems like every other reviewer has read Blue Like Jazz, so I feel obligated to admit I haven't.) Secondly, I really expected to -- and wanted to -- like this book. And I did like it, but only 3 stars' worth. Here's why.
The first thing is the writing style. I totally get that Miller wanted to be informal and conversational, but he spent so much time meandering around whatever topic was at hand that it drove me nuts. I felt like a plane circling an airport... eventually, we'd come in for a landing, but only after we circled the landing strip a few more times. Also, I could always tell when he was about to hit on something "profound," because he used the same sentence structure over and over again. He'd start a paragraph with, "The thing is..." or "The truth is..." Then, after he made his point, he'd sum up with, "It's _______, really." The thing is, he'd just said it so many times. It's redundant, really. (Why yes, I did do that on purpose.)
Secondly, and more importantly, I didn't feel like he really had anything new or original to say. Now, to be fair, this book was published seven years ago -- maybe it WAS new and original for the year of 2004. But I'd just finished reading two other books by two other disillusioned Evangelical Christians (Introverts in the Church and Mere Churchianity, if you must know), and I found the other two books far more profound. Don't get me wrong, he DOES have a few great ideas. The concept of us getting our self-worth from other people, when we should be getting it from God, is gold. I think that's something we can all relate to. The narrative about the pecking order in middle school was especially interesting to me, because I am a middle school teacher and I unfortunately witness things like that all the time. But honestly, I feel like this book could have been distilled to about 50 pages, as a lot of it just felt like fluff and repetition to me.
All in all, I do feel like it was a decent read, and there are a couple of chapters I would like to read again. Just don't expect anything particularly life-changing from it. :) -
3.5
I read Blue Like Jazz and it resonated with me. I read this after Blue Like Jazz and was expecting more insight than delivered. My thoughts are more than likely very correlated to the mental/emotional place I was, so you may not have the same experience. I suggest reading other reviews to see if this may fit your needs. -
In Searching for God Knows What, Miller unpacks why the Christian faith cannot be whittled down to a three-step self-help program or some simplistic mathematical formula comprised of a few mere propositional beliefs. I was amazed, honestly, at how deftly this book laid out so much of the thinking God has been instilling in my own life this year...in Miller's understanding (and I agree), everything goes back to a time before the fall, when man was still living in peaceful, right relationships with God, with his fellow man, and with his environment. Once Adam & Eve were deceived into disobedience to the God who created and deeply loved them, they lost the security they had known as a result of their perfect relationship with God. Ever since, it has been obvious that man was designed to need to derive his sense of value from an outside source, but since our relationship with that source was broken, we've looked to acquire that sense of value from other men. This has created what Miller describes as a lifeboat mentality in which we are all vying to prove our importance and why we should be kept in this proverbial lifeboat (indicating in the process that other individuals who don't possess the same valuable qualities we do ought to be selected to be thrown overboard). Clearly, this sort of thinking has some very negative implications that play out with us manifesting ever deeper levels of brokenness in human relationships that first broke at the fall when our relationship with God was broken. The good news of Christianity is that in Jesus -- as a result of His redeeming death & resurrection -- our relationship with God can be restored, which means we can recover the security God designed us to live in.
Too often we miss all of this, and Christianity becomes a mere argument we add to our slate of reasons why we should be kept in the lifeboat. However, when we begin to see the bigger picture and recognize the story God has been telling from the beginning of time, we begin to grasp that this was never meant to secure our position in the eyes of man but rather was meant to restore our security in God, which then allows us to throw away the lifeboat mentality and frees us up to live in humility, loving God and loving others and thereby fulfilling the law that was intended to restore the peaceful, right relationships man experienced before the fall with God, with his fellow man, and with his environment.
Highly recommend this book, particularly to those who, like me, have grown up in church during a modernistic age that has so focused on propositional truths that we've nearly completely missed the narrative of God's work in the world from the beginning of its creation. I imagine Miller's thoughts here have opened many hearts to the depth of beauty in God's story. Quite possibly my favorite of his books, and there could not have been a more perfect time in my life for me to read it than toward then end of a year in which He has truly transformed my thinking in these very areas.
On a side note, I purchased this book at Powell's Books during my first visit to Portland -- a trip that was largely inspired by my reading of other books by the Portland-based Miller (as well as books by fellow Portland-area author Matt Mikalatos) that have helped inform the process of transformation that has been taking place in my thinking this year. It was fun, then, to read his mentions of various Portland locations throughout this book after having been there myself. It really felt like a sort of culmination of this past year for me, not only as it relates to my understanding of my faith but also as it relates to the books I've read that have been instrumental in what God has been doing in my heart and the common thread of being set in Portland that has connected so many of them. I think this book will always have a special place in my heart because of all this. =) -
Lately I've found trying to argue for/against a God with my atheists friends to be pretty challenging. After reading this one, I get the feeling that one of the big reasons why it's hard to argue propositionally for a God is because it's a relationship. You can't measure it with a Cosmo quiz. Trouble is, modern Christianity (and heck, the Pharisees... nothing changes) are obsessed with checklists and rules and spelling everything out.
Isn't love about a sort of loose interplay on each other's behalf? Being there? Doing things?
There are no 10 ways to make your man go wild. Well, maybe there are, but if that's all you've got, good luck. There's a lot more out there.
Love thy God and love thy neighbor. Big and broad. Those cover everything overstated twelve different ways in ever moral code ever. Not that those little rules are bad... there's just more.
Let it hang out.
This idea alone is worth the easy, engaging read. -
"It seems nearly heresy to explain the gospel of Jesus, this message an infinitely complex God has delivered to an infinitely complex humanity, in bullet points." Yet, as Miller explains with insight and humor, is all too common in today's society. People of all beliefs and agendas try to use God and Jesus to fight for their point of view and against all others, polarizing the world. This is not what Jesus taught. A true relationship with God is just that, a relationship, not a list of morality points or a list of things that make one set of people "better" than another; and relationships are complex things. No matter what you believe, read this book!
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The main premise, repeated ad nauseum, in Donald Miller’s Searching For God Knows What is that the Bible is relational – that is, not to be broken down into cheap bullet points and formulas. As one who’s long been frustrated with the fill-in-the-blank worksheets passed around at most of the church services I’ve attended (I rarely fill them out, preferring to get lost in the sermon and the atmosphere of church itself, as much as possible) I was intrigued by the theme and anxious to see what Donald Miller had to say about the subject.
Ultimately, Searching For God Knows What is my least favorite of Donald Miller’s books. That said, he does a decent job of fleshing out a number of Biblical characters and illustrating the timeless truth that the Bible is primarily a story about man’s relationship with God. In particular, I credit Miller’s book with getting me to reconsider, entirely, the Book of Genesis. While I still believe in evolution, Miller’s take on the story of Adam and Eve was lively and invigorating and got me to see the controversial first book of the Bible in a new light.
However, Searching For God Knows What annoyed me on several levels. One of my top complaints about the book are its gratuitous historical inaccuracies. Among other things, Moses didn’t write either the books of Job or Genesis. And the Gospels themselves are not eyewitness accounts of Christ’s ministry. While these mistakes don’t necessarily detract from Miller’s analysis of the material, I found them both distracting and off-putting.
Also irritating are Miller’s opinions on women and homosexuality. At one point, Miller disses the Religious Right to task for making unnecessary hay out of homosexuality and abortion rights. I credit him for that.
However, he frequently asserts that homosexuality is a sin and makes a number of derogatory comments about women, as well. In particular, there was one quote, on page 50 “I like Paul the best he said the hard stuff about women in ministry and homosexuality” angered me. Yet, this is neither the first, nor the last time that Miller harps on these issues.
While Miller is welcome to these opinions, the constant repetition of these views became both annoying and offensive. Even worse, it seemed to contradict his primary assertion that the Bible is a story about a God who ultimately wants a relationship with everyone. But that is not to say that Searching For God Knows What is not worth reading.
Searching For God Knows What contains many beautiful passages. Worth noting are Chapter 9: Jesus: Who needs a boat? which is one of the most eloquent and relevant explanations of Jesus that I’ve seen in years and Chapter 14: the Gospel of Jesus: Why William Shakespeare Was a Prophet. While I doubt that Shakespeare’s intention was, in fact, to portray Christ’s relationship with the Church in the love story of Romeo and Juliet, Miller’s analysis of the text was simply gorgeous. That chapter is my favorite part of the book as well as the one I remember best after reading it. Sections such as these might do wonders to win over a skeptical reader, provided they can overcome Miller’s more offensive remarks. -
Themes/things I gleaned:
We want the Bible to be formulas, but it's not.
Everyone wants to be validated, to feel important and valuable. Most everything humans do it about trying to get this kind of validation. But human love/validation has to be given again and again to give us a sense of security. God’s love, on the other hand, in the ideal state, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need ntohing more and it would cause us to love others so much we would be willing to die for them.
Adam was lonely long before the fall—and long before there was an Eve. (Adam spent all that time naming all the animals, remember? And there were millions of species to name….so it probably took him a few decades.) Anyway, the idea is that the human need for relationship isn’t a result of the fall; it’s how we were made.
Chapter on nudity and Adam and Eve not being ashamed: The general idea is that humans are wired so that we get our glory (security, understanding of value, feeling of purpose, etc) from God. For Adam and Eve this relationship was so strong, and God’s love so pure, that they felt no insecurity at all. But when the relationship broke, they knew instantly—all of the glory that came from God was gone. All of a sudden they were ashamed of their nakedness, and insecure, and in need of other people to tell them they were ok. I can appreciate this idea, but Miller went on and on in several places about evolution explaining how we descended from earlier primates but not explaining the need for clothes (so he can explain it being 100% about the insecurity once the relationship with God was broken)… this annoyed me because there are lots of good reasons for clothes: keeping warm, protecting tender parts, keeping it from hurting when you run, etc. Moreover, wouldn’t this also suggest that Christians who “know God well” would all run around naked?
Lifeboat Theory: If you have a bunch of people in a lifeboat and some have to be thrown overboard to save the others, people will offer up reasons why they deserve to stay on the lifeboat. This results in comparing selves to one another, and looking for ways to be BETTER THAN others. Miller posits that if we don’t get affirmation/glory from God, then we seek it from others—we are stuck in the lifeboat.
There is some material discussing how we lost the poetry of the Bible—how, in order to answer to the rise of science, rather than appealing to the higher realm of art and beauty, etc., the church tried to find scientific truths in the Bible, which of course aren’t there, and weren’t intended to be there.
I think you get a better idea of the book from reading the quotes I’ve included below—although I will comment that because the quotes I’ve included tend to be ones that sum up main ideas, you miss the richness of Miller’s great storytelling about various experiences that led him to his conclusions.
Quotes:
...formula books, and by that I mean books that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible.
Quoting a friend: 'Reality is like a fine wine. It will not appeal to children.' ...this truth helped me understand and appreciate life itself, as it is, without the false hope formulas offer.
Some would say formulas are how we interact with God, that going through motions and jumping through hoops are how a person acts out his spirituality. This method of interaction, however, seems odd to me, because if I want to hang out with my friend Tuck, I don't stomp my foot three times, turn around, and say his name over and over, lighting candles and getting myself in a certain mood. I just call him.
The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up…
I began to slowly realize that the God of the Bible, not the God of formulas and bullet points that some have turned the Bible into, but the God of the actual Bible, the old one before we learned to read it like a self-help book, had a great deal to say to me.
You go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics….what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable….. if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to taken off the naughty list and put on the nice list, then it doesn’t meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn’t interact with the deep need of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (but rather obvious) language we are all speaking. But if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.
I realize we want to blame all the world’s problems on individual responsibility, that we want to look at Scripture through a Western-financial lens, saying that everybody is responsible for everything they do, but this is only half true. Adam and Eve were deceived; they were misled. It’s a both/and situation. We are wired so that other people help create us, help make us who we are, and when deception is fed to us, we make bad decisions. War is complicated; it isn’t black and white.
In a way, the war in heaven, the war between God and those against God, is the war to explain all wars…if you really want to look back through history and find a perfect and innocent kingdom that was attacked by an enemy, you have to go back to the Garden of Eden. A perfect and innocent kingdom hasn’t been attacked since then.
At issues in the tragedy of the Garden is a relational crime. Adam and Eve were not satisfied with their relationship with God, and they wanted to change the dynamic by increasing their own power, a reality that simply wasn’t possible, save in the fantasy realm whispered to them through the words of the evil one.
[My comment: but WHY were they not satisfied with their relationship with God if they were made to need HIS affirmation and they HAD it, had no shame, no need to compare selves to others, etc.? Only because Satan suggested that to them?]
[comparison of us to Sasha, a boy born with disfigurement due to radiation at Chernobyl] As terrible as it is to compare Sasha to ourselves, I have to go there. I have to say that you and I were not supposed to be this way. as creatures in need of somebody outside ourselves to name us, as creatures incomplete outside the companionship of God, our souls are born distorted, I am convinced of it. … none of us are happy in the way we were supposed to be happy. We are in the wreckage of a war…As terrible as it is to think about these things, as ugly as it is to face them, I have to see the world this way in order for it to make sense. I have to believe something happened, and we are walking around holding our wounds.
How aliens would see humans: Constantly comparing themselves to one another. Driving influence behind every human’s social dev’t, emotional health, sense of joy, and greatest tragedies. Very few people understand this. It is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems.
All of our TV shows are trying to figure out who is better than who, or if they aren’t, they are presupposing that one kind of person is better than another and building their comedy or their drama from that presupposition.
I know without a doubt I am a person who is wired so that something outside myself tells me who I am.
A child learns early there is a fashionable and an unfashionable in the world, an ugly and a pretty, a valued and an unvalued. Where this system comes from, god only knows, but it is rarely questioned, and though completely illogical and agreed upon by everyone as evil, it remains in play, commanding our emotions as a possession. …. the great crime, the great tragedy, is not in the attempts to associate but rather in the efforts to dissociate.
[If the relations between God and man are disturbed,] then we feel the desire to be loved and respected by other people instead of God, and if we don’t get that love and respect, we feel very sad or angry because we know that our glory is at stake, that if there isn’t some glory being shone through us by somebody who has authority, we’ll be dead inside…
The most selfless thing God could do, that is, the most selfless thing a perfect Being who is perfectly loving could do, would be to create other beings to enjoy Himself.
What if a person isn’t supposed to be alone, isn’t supposed to have glory on his own, but rather get glory from the God who loves him? What if, in the same way the sun feeds plants, God’s glory gives us life? What if our value exists because God takes pleasure in us?
I know it isn’t a very Marlboro-man way to live your life, but what if the Marlboro-man way of life really sucks and makes you lonely all the time, and what if the way of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit, not to mention the disciples, is right; by that I mean, what if the way the Trinity operates explains the way humans are wired, and that we will be fulfilled when we are finally with God and, in His companionship, know who we are? What if when we are with God, we feel that we have glory, we feel His love for us and know, in a way infinitely more satisfying than a parent’s love or a lover’s love, that we matter?
It makes sense that if a plant is separated from the sun, it dies, and that if people are separated from God, they die.
Earlier, when I said Moses explained all of humanity, I meant that without God we are, by default, in the lifeboat.
When your team wins you say “we won” but when your team loses you say “they lost.” We like to dissociate from losers (lifeboat mentality). So often decisions aren’t being made based on whether or not the ideas of a political party are good ideas; decisions are based on associations and dissociations in the lifeboat. It becomes very dangerous….People see what they want to see based on what associations are going to help them survive.
In the context of the lifeboat (motivated by self-preservation), the characteristics of “other people” become inferior simply because they are not our characteristics. Logic is thrown out the window, or worse, used as a tool to validate our prejudices. Philosophies, ideals, and even religious convictions become weapons for slaughter.
Without Him, we feel that we are being thrown out of a boat. No life can exist outside the influence of the sun, outside the energy of light. It makes you wonder if our souls are any different.
[Jesus] had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day. He believed a great many absurd ideas, such as [turn the other cheek, give coat + shirt, give away money and follow him etc]. It seemed He believed we should take every opportunity to fail in the lifeboat game, not for the sake of failing, but because there wasn’t anything to win in the first place.
When I read about what happened to Stephen, Peter, Paul and the rest of the disciples, I know for a fact that Christ expressed immense love for them. I know in my heart that they were not living their lives they lived or dying the deaths they died because they were doing something “right.” Sure it was right, but these guys must have been loved by Christ, and their motivation came primarily from this idea. There is no other explanation for their devotion.
But the greater trouble with [reducing the gospel story to a list of important concepts] is that modern evangelical culture is so accustomed to this summation that it is difficult for us to see the gospel as anything other than a list of true statements with which a person must agree.
I think it is more safe and more beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with Christ?
A poetic presentation of the gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps.
When the church began to doubt its own integrity after [Darwin], we began to answer science, not by appealing to something greater, the realm of beauty and art and spirituality, but by attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations…. the poetry of Scripture, especially in the case of Moses, began to be interpreted literally and mathematically…
How many people have walked away from faith because their systematic theology proved unable to answer the deep longings and questions of the soul?
The circus, and I am talking about life now, really sucks. It feels like we all have these little acts, these stupid things we do that we hang our hats on. The Fall has made monkeys of us, for crying out loud. Some of us are athletes and others of us are physicists, and some of us are good-looking and some of us are rich, and we all are running around, in a way, trying to get a bunch of people to clap for us, trying to get a bunch of people to say we are normal, we are healthy, we are good. And there is nothing wrong with being beautiful or being athletic or being smart, but those are some of the pleasures of life, not life’s redemption.
Love creates rules, and forgives when they are broken.
God’s ethics, His conscience instilled in man and guided by Scripture, are the best ways to travel through a fallen world, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or what I have referred to as a lifeboat and a circus.
Paul even says that the law was given to the Jews to show them they couldn’t follow the law, to reveal to them the depravity of human nature, to show them the cancer that lived inside them so they would pay attention to the Doctor.
Morality exists only because we are fallen, not unlike medicine exists because people get sick.
The hijacking of the concept of morality began when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules. It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover. A person’s mind can do all sorts of things his heart would never let him do.
If we think of God’s grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt, but if we think of God’s grace as a relational invitation, an outreach of love, we are pretty much jerks for belittling the gesture.
Morality as a battle cry against a depraved culture is simply not a New Testament idea. Morality as a ramification of our spiritual union and relationship with Christ, however, is.
[about taking care not to make religion about choosing a moral stance, eg, on abortion or gay marriage…since so often this boils down to a lifeboat motive, and us vs them rhetoric, etc.]
God is not in the business of brokering for power over a nation; he is in the business of loving the unloved and pulling sheep out of crags and bushes.
It makes you wonder how many of the ideas we believe are the result of our being taught them, and we now defend them as a position of our egos. Even if a person subscribes to a certain take on life he feels is the right take, it’s not because he had a lot to do with it.
It is somewhat amazing…that all of Christianity, all our grids and mathematics and truths and different groups subscribing to different theological ideas, boils down to our knowing Jesus and His knowing us.
Apart from the booby trap of getting redemption from believing we are right and they are wrong, there is the booby trap of believing we gain access to God by knowing a lot of religious information.
I wonder..about how much of my faith I apply in a personal way, deep down in my heart on the level where I actually mean things. I know there are selfish motives mixed with my faith, that this community of faith that is the jury of peers and they applaud when I know a lot of fancy theological stuff, and that can really screw a guy up.
The tough thing about Christian spirituality is, you have to mean things. You can’t just go through the motions or act religious for the wrong reasons. It’s crazy isn’t it? It’s crazy because, as I’ve suggested all along, this thing is a thing of the heart. It’s intimacy with Christ, wrestling with the truth of the soul rather than a dog and pony show in the center ring of a circus.
We are all works in progress, we are all learning that the lifeboat mentality is sin, but it takes time. And bitterness is only a manifestation of the game.
I think the methodology God used to explain His truth is quite superior [to formulas, acronyms, etc.] What I mean by this is I feel my life is a story, more than a list; I feel…my brain telling me I am hungry or lonely, sad or angry, in love or despondent. And I don’t feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty, all this sun and moon, this smell of coming rain, the beautiful mysteries of women, the truck-like complexity of men. It seems nearly heresy to explain the gospel of Jesus, this message an infinitely complex God has delivered to an infinitely complex humanity, in bullet points.
Overall conclusion:
The lifeboat system of redemption seems so ugly in comparison to the love of God. We can trust our fate to a jury of peers in the lifeboat, we can work to accumulate wealth, buy beauty under a surgeon’s knife, panic for our identities under the fickle friendship of culture, and still die in separation from the one voice we really needed to hear. To me, it is more beautiful to trust Christ, deny our fathers and refuse our names, die to ourselves and live again in Him, raised up in the wave of His resurrection, baptized and made new in the purity of his righteousness. I hope you will join me in clinging to Him. -
Some fantastic chapters with Don Miller’s usual brilliance, although one or two definitely veer away from his style. Great read :)
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Donald Miller is searching for God knows what. Metaphorically. And literally. And he finds it. Relationship. Love. No formulas. Just a simple relationship of love.
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A different tone than Blue Like Jazz- which was a surprise hit when it came out. You can see the increase in maturity and thoughtfulness as he handles this one; not so careless with volatile subjects as he used to be. He's obviously experienced many complicated things since then. His thoughtfulness and honesty are what made Blue Like Jazz good, and this one's just as strong in regard to both those qualities.
The thing that bothers me when I read Donald Miller, is that he seems to assume non-followers of Jesus can gain more knowledge of him by revelation than they probably can in reality. What Miller has done is to distill his fundamentalist theological background down to the sweetest and truest things about following Christ. Then he seems to hope that everyone else can get there without going through the distillation process, and I don't think that's possible. Even though I so deeply wish it was...
To me, this only means that Miller's books are better suited for struggling Christians than baby Christians-which is fine, because there aren't enough good books for struggling Christians. Go to any Christian bookstore, and you'll find that quality books fitting this description were all written before 1970 (if you exclude Donald Miller and Phil Yancey). Hopefully Miller is the harbinger of changes to come. -
He has a long section about Jesus that I remember liking. His lifeboat theory is what i remember most from this book. Basically that people feel more accepted when they are leaving someone else out. Your not in unless you can point to who is out. It makes you feel extra smug when there is some outcast you can concretely point to. Erik Erikson's theories of identity are in line with this. When you are forming your identity you need two things. A group of people you identify with, and a group of people you alienate. Without a group of people to point at and say "I am not like them" it is harder to know who you are. I think this could also be a big basis for prejeduce. Racism is like an attempt at sureing up your identity gone awry. People unify easiest when they have a common enemy.
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Ehh, this seemed to be Donald Miller's moment of "I'm a christian lit. superstar and here's my new book to prove it." Poor writing -- not that most evangelicals would notice -- yet again, but I suppose in retrospect, it served a purpose in my life (though now, I forget what it was).
Truthfully, I might just feel that this is when Donald Miller chose to permanently stifle himself by allowing some evangelical publisher to brand him as the "cool" christian author who "pushes the boundaries" by talking about microbrew and the Northwest's political climate, instead of just allowing himself to be an author who writes about spirituality from his own experience. From here on you would only see Mr. Miller in elements of the subculture speaking at churches, private colleges, or christian conferences. Incidentally, that's where he lost me. -
Loved it. Don's honest and transparent questions about faith and love and life and existence are refreshing because every Christian has them, even the most hard-nosed devout theologian. Don is a great writer, and even when I don't agree with him (which is less often in this book than in BLJ) I feel like if we met we would talk about these things respectfully and lovingly. That's what I love about his books. It feels a lot like having a really profound conversation with a good friend.
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I’d give this one 2.5 if I could. Solidly average book. Nothing spectacular, but an enjoying read.
I’d recommend if you’re a new Christian, or an old one who wants to be reenchanted with Christ, and would like a simple read.
If you’re coming from Blue Like Jazz (as I was) don’t expect the same quality or depth of insight, but expect the same voice and accessibility. -
I first encountered this book in an ad in a magazine in the early 2000s. I was intrigued by the title and bought it the next time I was in a store. I have sat on it since then and decided, God's timing and all, that it would be my first book of 2018.
I was blown away. Miller's writing style suits me fine with the sarcasm, the blatant honesty, and the dry, yet spot-on, hilarity. The things he learns from the various experiences in his life point toward a way of understanding even the most mundane things that is missing in the world we live in.
I would argue that this book would be one of the best for a new believer or someone doubting their faith. Miller does his best to scrape through 2,000 years of muck that has gathered around the outside of the Christian faith to reveal what is at the center: a living, breathing man who wants to have a relationship with living, breathing people. -
Ok, five stars shouldn’t mean perfect. That’s for the true critics to discern. This book gets five stars because it’s that good and if you picked it up, you will be given loads of insight and you will likely recommend it to someone else!
Fellow Christians, this book will make you do some deep inward reflection about how you view Jesus, your church, and how you love others.
Fellow Agnostics, I don’t think this is the book for you. We Christians need our faith to encounter challenges that help us be better human beings at minimal, and thoughtfully loving Christ-centered people at most. This book offers a challenge to us who think we know our faith; it offers a reprieve to us who are looking for more than status-quo Christianity.
Please note: I don’t believe this books covers everything about the challenges of being a Christian. But it covers some points with great insights. -
Mr. Miller challenges cold orthodoxy without dismissing its central (and necessary) objectivity. Of course Jesus is relational. Of course Christianity is relational. I feel ashamed someone has to write a book to remind us or make it plain. And it is not due to the Bible lacking clarity on the point. I am so thankful that after so many years to have these words affirmed by another.
The Bible is SO NOT written like a Salvation pamphlet or doctrinal treatise. This to me this is an embarrassingly obvious detail for any theological analysis or discussion. As a trinitarian (a view I believe is solidly supported in scripture), I can not ignore the simple fact Jesus never explains THAT doctrine in a dialog.
No, He says things like John 6:53b: “...Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves."
Talk about getting your attention. I can not imagine a more powerful visual for forcing someone to look at you squarely in the eyes to see if you are sane. "Truly truly". It is so in your face, and so unlike any normal conversation, it instantly exposes your beliefs about the speaker.
I love how Mr. Miller reminds us of Isa 53:2b "...He has no stately form or majesty That we should look upon Him, Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him."; or the implication that His time in Nazareth left Him with a "hick" accent.
I do have some disagreements (his view of politics and flawed leadership leave many unanswered questions), but overall believe this book helps to focus on the person of Christ as revealed in His Word. I have found the insights very helpful in approaching God sincerely, and helpful in valuing others more freely. -
I don’t know if I could love a book more than I loved Blue Like Jazz, but I know for sure this one found me at exactly the right time. It spoke straight to the heart of many things I’ve been feeling and wrestling with and encouraged me deeply. Certainly upgraded to most-highlighted book on my shelves.
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truly one of the most transformational books I’ve ever read. shifted my thoughts on how God views us and how the Gospel is much more relational than we often consider
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This was an excellent read. I read it in iBooks and now need to copy all of my highlighting in order to look back an review those parts that really spoke to me.
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Interesting overall, feel it would have made a better article than book.
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My least favorite Donald Miller book so far. It might have just been personal preference, but it just didn’t resonate with me as well as A Million Miles or Through Painted Deserts—both of which I love! I liked the main idea of the book, but I felt like I could have read an article about it vs a full book and gotten the same takeaway. 🤷🏼♀️
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Chapters 5-8 were some of the best words I’ve ever read.
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A gift from long ago. The second Christian book I have ever read and, funnily enough, 3 years after leaving the faith. More Christians should read this book.
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I'd forgotten some things about Donald Miller's writing...namely, that he uses so much exclusive language (man, He, etc), and that his style is so casual as to sometimes be boring and repetitive. The concept of the book--that God wants us to be in relationship, not to follow a formula for faith--is, I think, pretty much right on. Near the end of the book he says "When Jesus gets inside somebody, the first thing that starts happening is the person starts loving people regardless of their race, their socio-economic status, or their looks." This is in comparison to people who are trying to follow a formula, which, Miller says, is more about redeeming your place in the world than about being redeemed by the grace of God. All good.
I still think he's a little over-focused on the afterlife (though he doesn't say so explicitly), and it's clear that he thinks that if you don't decide to have a relationship with Christ, then you're pretty much doomed. And again, it's mainly for "man"...
Twice during the book Miller references an incident in which he told a class at a Bible college that he was going to tell them the gospel but leave out something important--and then he talked at length about all kinds of things but never once mentioned Jesus--and the class could not figure out what he had left out. That's disturbing. Also disturbing is that in a book that purports to be about Jesus, Miller states that his favorite biblical writer is Paul (who never met Jesus) and the majority of his "gospel" quotes come from Paul's letters. He occasionally talks about the gospel of John, and Matthew gets a quote or two, but there's shockingly little JESUS material...and given that we're Christians, not Paulians, it seems that Jesus would be the beginning/middle/end of the conversation about what it means to be in relationship with Christ.
About 60% of the way through the book I almost gave up. I was bored, there was nothing new here, the style was driving me a little bonkers, and I didn't think I could take one more thing about what God is doing with "man." I stuck it out, though I confess to skimming the Romeo and Juliet chapter at the end...
