Book Reviews

I have just finished Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell and Don Golden. The book begins with a reminded that, in our world, we are "East of Eden" and we been moving further and further east as violence has become more and more normalized. They explain the natural progression of violence as one that begins with disobedience to God, furthers to family violence, travels further to societal violence and sin (Noah), and travels finally to the whole world attempting to build towers to nowhere.

The book first follows Israel is chapters one through three. The first chapter is about freedom from oppression as the Jews are freed From Egypt, the second chapter is about the rebuilding of Empire under Solomon and the Jews forgetting their identity as a freed people and enslaving others, and finally the coming of Jesus in chapter three as "David's other son."

Chapter four goes into the life of the early church as a group dedicated to spreading the message of Jesus to the whole world, whereas chapter five shows how a belief in America as a doer of good may be misleading. He spend the majority of chapter five showing why he believes America is an empire.

The authors go into more detail in chapter six to talk about the signficance of the blood on the doorposts at passover and how Jesus and the Eucharist are a continuation of that tradition. The epilogue finishes by challenging us to leave an "empire of indifference."

Let me quickly highlight one strength and one weakness here (I will be posting more on some of the individual chapters in the future). One general strength is the way the authors are able to paint a new picture of Christian theology without using all the buzz words usually associated with it. This book will speak to new Christians who need an axis on which to understand the Bible as a narrative. The book will also speak to those who are tired of hearing the same thing over and over again in the evangelical church.

That said, one weakness of the book is the danger of seeing the Bible through only one hermenutical lens. The book almost seems to say, "The whole narrative of the bible only points to one thing...empires are evil." While I agree that this is one theme of scripture, the book doesn't really address how the rest of the Bible might be brought into this grand metanarrative. Granted, this may not be something the author's could have fixed because their approach to scripture was very narrow in this regard and were attempting to hit a few target points.

They hit these target points very well, but we just have to be careful how much we let one of these lenses dominate our theology of scripture