Breaking Jesus out of the formula
Published by J. M. Adkison under on 5:34 PM
Alright-so right now I am on a Donald Miller kick since I am doing this book review for Searching for God Knows What. Side Note: When I become an author, I hope people will one day say "so right now I am on this J.M. Adkison kick..."(that would be amazing). Anywho, I decided to put the review on my blog since I haven't been updating it much-but if you are going to read this-please read it at thelink.harding.edu that way I can get a lot of hits.
So here is the review, titled: Breaking Jesus out of the formula.
“Sometimes I feel as though I were born in a circus, come out of my mother’s womb like a man from a cannon, pitched toward the ceiling of the tent, all the doctors and nurses clapping in delight from the grandstands…My body falls back toward earth, the ground coming up quick, the center ring growing enormous beneath my falling weight. And this is precisely when it occurs to me that there is no net. As I wonder…Who is going to rescue me?”
And thus begins Donald Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What,” a radical book on freeing Jesus from a formulaic, rigid religion and the box we tend to put him in.
Donald Miller is not your average Christian author. In fact, Miller is about as odd and crazy-minded as writers come. This is not your grandmother’s sort of literature, unless your grandmother happens to be a bearded lady who can identify with Miller’s carnival-style parables. His first novel “Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance”, came out in 2000, but was met with little success. Lucky for him, his next novel, “Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality”, launched him into the New York Times best-seller list, which put him on the express lane out of anonymity. His next book to hit the scene was “Searching for God Knows What,” released in 2004.
Many may be wondering why someone would be writing a review for a book that came out five years ago, and that someone would respond that he was writing this review because not enough people know about it. “Searching for God Knows What” dares to ask the questions: What if the deepest longings of your heart were there for a reason? What if the Gospel of Jesus was not “safe” at all, but full of intrigue, passion−and romance? Not only does Miller try to take Jesus out of the box, he drenches the box in gasoline and lights it on fire afterwards.
Now what exactly is this “box”? The “box” is a set of limitations or formulas humans bind God to in order to make him fit comfortably in our nicely organized, daily scheduled lives. The box can be a formula that goes like this: a person struggles with life, some sort of calamity happens in this person’s life, and that calamity brings this person to Jesus. The end result is this person living happily ever after. It is the idea that coming to Christ is a step-by-step process taken out of the self-help book known as the Bible.
Yet, we all know life is actually a large collection of unknown variables waiting to disrupt perfectly planned schedules and as Miller so eloquently puts it: “It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was.”
Miller is in no sense attacking the institution of the church or Christianity. He is trying to get Christians to stop viewing God as a cuddly Santa Clause they can fit into their daily planners and see Him as an unpredictable being who wants his children to live outside their comfort boxes.
“I did’t have a relationship with God; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right,” he says on page 31.
To say that Miller’s writing is “whimsical” would be nothing short of an under-statement. He writes with a dry sense of humor that is skilled in sending the reader into hysterics, making the reading both entertaining and enthralling. His ideas are quirky and very original, for example chapter seven is titled “Adam, Eve, and the Alien: How the Fall Makes You Feel” and chapter 14 is “The Gospel of Jesus: Why William Shakespeare Was a Prophet.”
One of the most attractive aspects to his writing is the simple fact Miller seems to write whatever pops into his head, and somehow brings these thoughts together to create a new way of looking at Christianity through an entirely different lens. However, this lens can often turn into a mind-whirling kaleidoscope as Miller is apt to lose you somewhere along his train of thought. Sometimes his ideas are so strange and random, you have trouble connecting the dots.
Yet, what really adds to the quality of this book is the genuineness the reader can sense in Miller’s writing. He does not pretend to be a all-knowing guru with the secrets to following God, he never fails to let Jesus have the lime light. He is just one eccentric man amongst a sea of people trying their hardest not to be eccentric, trying to make heads and tails of this art form called Christianity.
So here is the review, titled: Breaking Jesus out of the formula.
“Sometimes I feel as though I were born in a circus, come out of my mother’s womb like a man from a cannon, pitched toward the ceiling of the tent, all the doctors and nurses clapping in delight from the grandstands…My body falls back toward earth, the ground coming up quick, the center ring growing enormous beneath my falling weight. And this is precisely when it occurs to me that there is no net. As I wonder…Who is going to rescue me?”
And thus begins Donald Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What,” a radical book on freeing Jesus from a formulaic, rigid religion and the box we tend to put him in.
Donald Miller is not your average Christian author. In fact, Miller is about as odd and crazy-minded as writers come. This is not your grandmother’s sort of literature, unless your grandmother happens to be a bearded lady who can identify with Miller’s carnival-style parables. His first novel “Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance”, came out in 2000, but was met with little success. Lucky for him, his next novel, “Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality”, launched him into the New York Times best-seller list, which put him on the express lane out of anonymity. His next book to hit the scene was “Searching for God Knows What,” released in 2004.
Many may be wondering why someone would be writing a review for a book that came out five years ago, and that someone would respond that he was writing this review because not enough people know about it. “Searching for God Knows What” dares to ask the questions: What if the deepest longings of your heart were there for a reason? What if the Gospel of Jesus was not “safe” at all, but full of intrigue, passion−and romance? Not only does Miller try to take Jesus out of the box, he drenches the box in gasoline and lights it on fire afterwards.
Now what exactly is this “box”? The “box” is a set of limitations or formulas humans bind God to in order to make him fit comfortably in our nicely organized, daily scheduled lives. The box can be a formula that goes like this: a person struggles with life, some sort of calamity happens in this person’s life, and that calamity brings this person to Jesus. The end result is this person living happily ever after. It is the idea that coming to Christ is a step-by-step process taken out of the self-help book known as the Bible.
Yet, we all know life is actually a large collection of unknown variables waiting to disrupt perfectly planned schedules and as Miller so eloquently puts it: “It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was.”
Miller is in no sense attacking the institution of the church or Christianity. He is trying to get Christians to stop viewing God as a cuddly Santa Clause they can fit into their daily planners and see Him as an unpredictable being who wants his children to live outside their comfort boxes.
“I did’t have a relationship with God; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right,” he says on page 31.
To say that Miller’s writing is “whimsical” would be nothing short of an under-statement. He writes with a dry sense of humor that is skilled in sending the reader into hysterics, making the reading both entertaining and enthralling. His ideas are quirky and very original, for example chapter seven is titled “Adam, Eve, and the Alien: How the Fall Makes You Feel” and chapter 14 is “The Gospel of Jesus: Why William Shakespeare Was a Prophet.”
One of the most attractive aspects to his writing is the simple fact Miller seems to write whatever pops into his head, and somehow brings these thoughts together to create a new way of looking at Christianity through an entirely different lens. However, this lens can often turn into a mind-whirling kaleidoscope as Miller is apt to lose you somewhere along his train of thought. Sometimes his ideas are so strange and random, you have trouble connecting the dots.
Yet, what really adds to the quality of this book is the genuineness the reader can sense in Miller’s writing. He does not pretend to be a all-knowing guru with the secrets to following God, he never fails to let Jesus have the lime light. He is just one eccentric man amongst a sea of people trying their hardest not to be eccentric, trying to make heads and tails of this art form called Christianity.
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