“Blue Like Jazz” is another one of those books by an evangelical Christian that describes a long, exotic path through an allegedly real and intellectually credible world encountering various challenges to Christian culture that ends up– eureka!– exactly where it began, in a traditional, evangelical Christian faith. The message is– I am like you. I have the same standards for intellectual and scientific credibility that you thinking people do. I have just as low a threshold of tolerance for bullshit, deceit, distortion, and glibness as you do. And I know that many high-profile evangelists appear to be smarmy corrupt charlatans. And by golly, that don’t mean that what they’re preaching is wrong….
Donald Miller may not be conservative politically, but his discussion of Christianity itself, what belief means, who Jesus was, and how God operates in the world, is alarmingly like Billy Graham’s. In fact, I doubt the two would really find much to disagree about, even if Miller once protested against Bush. I can see “Uncle Billy” smiling indulgently and saying, “shucks, you young folk! Why, I’m glad you’re concerned about global warming. It’s better than having promiscuous sex.”
In fact, it’s quite striking how conventional his faith life is. He goes on and on about how he re-examines some major political or psychological idea and turns it upside down and learns that he is so humble that he was very mistaken when he had previously thought he was not humble enough.
If the issue is that most evangelicals don’t really have the passion to really live out the requirements of their beliefs… he’s scaring me. That is precisely what makes some evangelicals most like Jihadists: the absolute conviction that we are right, because God told us we were right, and nobody else can prove otherwise, and therefore we must take control, for God.
But Miller doesn’t really discuss the content of his faith very much. He talks a lot about going to church or not going to church and tithing or not tithing and how he hangs around with people who cuss and watch “South Park”, leaving one to wonder why he even accepts the idea that he should tithe. It might be a perfectly good idea. It might be an irrelevant relic of a completely different time and place. But he doesn’t explain why, other than to say that God wants him to. How does he know this? Because his friend Rick tells him? How does Rick know? What authority decreed this? Well, of course, probably scripture. But here we get a blank: how does he know what scripture means? Any searching intellect would ask these questions.
Why does Donald Miller’s brain seem to suddenly lose it’s curiosity when it comes to actually discussing the content of faith?
Miller seems to regard an evangelical faith as something hermetic and isolated. You either accept it or you don’t. That appears to me to based on the assumption that the Christian faith is a mysterious but insular little thing that is not affected by your actual behavior. Or is it that your faith is not necessarily indicated by your actual behavior?
10 Real Issues Donald Miller doesn’t deal with
in “Blue Like Jazz”:
1. Is the bible “infallible”? If it is, what does that mean? Should we stone adulteresses?
2. How do you know that a “good” humanist is going to hell, while you’re going to heaven?
3. Is there a hell? How do you know? Where on earth did you find out about it? Who told you? How do you know it’s true? Do you accept everything you are told without question? (There is no hell: go back to your bible and research the issue. Even most serious Christian apologists acknowledge that the concept of “hell” came from the Greeks, not from the Old Testament or the gospels.)
4. I’m curious about why you find Bush’s foreign policy something you can question, but not the virgin birth? What is the difference? Both involve tantalizing, ecstatic conceptions and then the pain of passing something impossibly large through a tiny factual reality. We will all require stitches.
5. Does God work miracles today, here and now? Should you pray for specific things you want?
6. At one point, Miller describes how, after his friend Rick persuaded him to start tithing, no matter how much money he was making, he suddenly started making more money. Oh no– seriously? Was this God answering prayer? Earthly reward for piety? Coincidence?
Donald Miller sees “Romeo and Juliet” with a girl and spoils the effect of the evening by observing that Romeo and Juliet were actually dead at the end of the play.
I think he meant to suggest that he himself was above the kind of sophomoric wisdom of Shakespeare’s play– that true love is magnificent and fulfilling and wonderful. Unfortunately for Miller, that isn’t the real message of the play in the first place, though that is the way most people tend to understand it nowadays. Shakespeare meant to show us that excess, of passion, of will, of impulse, leads to tragedy.
Donald Miller makes it clear that he is disgusted by the sense that Christians are “selling” the gospel, advertising it as a cure-all, fix-all, miracle cure for what ails yah.
But on his website, here is how he describes his newest book:
Every person is constantly seeking redemption (or at least the feeling of it) in his or her life, believing countless gospels that promise to fix the brokenness. Typically their pursuits include the desire for fulfilling relationships, successful careers, satisfying religious systems, status, and escape. Miller reveals how the inability to find redemption leads to chaotic relationships, self-hatred, the accumulation of meaningless material possessions, and a lack of inner peace. Readers will learn to identify in themselves and within others the universal desire for redemption. They will discover that the gospel of Jesus is the only way to find meaning in life and true redemption. Mature believers as well as seekers and new Christians will find themselves identifying with the narrative journey unfolded in the book, which is simply the pursuit of redemption.
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