Richard Sibbs: The Bruised Reed

If you have read the previous four or five posts, you find my thoughts on The Shack. Quite frankly, it made me feel dirty while reading it. I know such sentiment places me in a minority in regards to the many good evangelicals who read and find solace in books of this kind, but there I stand.

As previously mentioned, I have picked up where I left off in reading The Bruised Reed by Richard Sibbs. I cannot recommend it more highly. It is one of those books where most everything found there-in in quotable and Christ-centric. In reading it on my netbook using the Kindle application, I find myself highlighting so much that sometimes little text is left without a highlight.

The Bruised Reed is not a book for those looking to find five steps to overcoming temptation or discouragement. You will not find tips on living a higher Christian life of complete victory, health, wealth, and prosperity. You will not find too many exhortations to just buck up and get out there and tithe more, witness more, be more involved in your church. You will not find exhortations to gin up some super-duper, extra-special audacious faith to make ‘the sun stand still’ as is so common in the fad-driven American church.

Within this book,though, one finds the Messiah, the God-man Christ applying the sweet balm of the Gospel to the troubled souls of Christian sojourners. You will find a merciful and kind Shepherd who will not beat you up with the Law, but instead you find a kind Messiah who knows you are but made of dust and understands your weakness. Indeed, it is in your weakness that He is most glorified. I would like to share with you with some quotes, pulled, for the most part randomly, from the Bruised Reed.

Ungodly spirits, ignorant of God’s ways in bringing his children to heaven, censure broken hearted Christians as miserable persons, whereas God is doing a gracious, good work with them.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 138-139).

Suffering brings discouragements, because of our impatience. `Alas!’, we lament, `I shall never get through such a trial.’ But if God brings us into the trial he will be with us in the trial, and at length bring us out, more refined. We shall lose nothing but dross (Zech. 13:9).

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 709-711).

Consider the names he has borrowed from the mildest creatures, such as lamb and hen, to show his tender care. Consider his very name Jesus, a Saviour, given him by God himself. Consider his office answerable to his name, which is that he should `bind up the broken hearted’ (Isa. 61:1). At his baptism the Holy Ghost rested on him in the shape of a dove, to show that he should be a dove like, gentle Mediator.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 150-153).

And as there are differences with regard to temperament, gifts and manner of life, so there are in God’s intention to use men in the time to come; for usually he empties such of themselves, and makes them nothing, before he will use them in any great services.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 107-108).

He shed tears for those that shed his blood, and now he makes intercession in heaven for weak Christians, standing between them and God’s anger. He is a meek king; he will admit mourners into his presence, a king of poor and afflicted persons.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 157-159).

…this bruising makes us set a high price upon Christ. Then the gospel becomes the gospel indeed; then the fig leaves of morality will do us no good.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 122-123).

After conversion we need bruising so that reeds may know themselves to be reeds, and not oaks. Even reeds need bruising, by reason of the remainder of pride in our nature, and to let us see that we live by mercy. Such bruising may help weaker Christians not to be too much discouraged, when they see stronger ones shaken and bruised.

Richard Sibbes. The Bruised Reed (Kindle Locations 128-131).

I think what attracts me to this book is that it is a refreshing alternative to all the quasi-legalistic human-centric stuff that floods the Christian marketplace. Instead, it gives the reader the true Gospel, what God has done for you. Only when you begin to understand that God is not glorified by your performance that you begin to understand the Gospel.

As an aside, I think The Shack and The Bruised Read are, to some degree, competing approaches to how God renders mercy to suffering Christians. In The Shack, we find an a-biblical god that is more a therapist, it seems, while in The Bruised Reed, we find a Messiah who is a good Shepherd. Only in The Bruised Reed to I really find true Gospel balm, and unlike Young, Sibbs does not throw the Bible under the bus to bring the immanence, the nearness of a tender God to the reader.

Perhaps, when I run into those times when the font of my bloggeria intermittently  sputters and runs dry, I shall share more quotes from Sibbs.

The Shack: Part 4…I can go no further..

Let me preface this latest, and perhaps last, installment of my rambling  thoughts surrounding The Shack by saying that, without regard to the negative reviews I have read, I wanted to like this book. I wanted to find an authentic depiction of a struggle with fundamental tensions regarding the nature of a good God in a world of suffering. However, my experience in The Shack thus far leads me to think I would be wasting my time to wade through to the completion of Young’s excretal narrative. My primary objections to Young’s thoughts are theological, rather than literary, though I have those objections, too.

As a follow-up to the previous installment on my review of The Shack, I think Young almost verges into the realm of tri-theism in his depiction of a Trinitarian God. It was a subtle issue for me because, if I were prone, quite honestly, to stray from orthodoxy, I would probably drift in that direction. Too, it is hard for me to define why I see such an aberration in The Shack, but I know it is there. I think my impression stems from the distinctiveness, the separateness of the personalities found in Young’s god. I also find the physical incarnation of all three members of Young’s trinity to be disconcerting and unbiblical.

Further thoughts and concerns regarding Young’s unfolding of the Trinitarian nature of God refer to the lack of hierarchy found in his trinity. At one point, Papa tells Mack, “We don’t need power over the other…Hierarchy would make no sense among us.” However, we find the Christ being obedient to the Father, even unto death, an obedience found in a hierarchy based on mutual love, not power, but a hierarchy non-the-less.

Further mutations to orthodox Trinitarian theology occur when Young depicts Papa, his female African-American incarnation of the Father, bearing scars of the Messiah’s crucifixion, bringing confusion to each member of the Trinity’s redemptive role in securing the salvation of His children. Here we find, without regards to my concern for his seeming tri-theism,Young perhaps swinging towards a kind of modalism wherein there is actually little ontological distinction between the members of the Trinity.

The key is this: if one thinks good theology is but of a peripheral concern when approaching books that are, even if nominally fictional, theological in nature, that make clear, but questionable, doctrinal statements about God, then I will not be able formulate a convincing case for my concerns. One will be content to simply find solace in the easy sentimentality found in the Shack without regard to this influential book being a theological train wreak.

I am at a decision point, and I decide this: I will lay The Shack aside, review it no further, for I find myself parroting the same concerns as other discerning readers and reviewers. As said previously, I am already bent towards an often unhealthy cynicism, and this type of reading feeds that part of me. I want to read, now, something to clean the cerebral palate. I will go back to reading some old, dead guy named Sibbes.

The Shack: Part Three…or…the treacly trinity

There is so much to say, so much heartbreaking error in this book, I hardly know where to start. Here we find (and I have managed to arrive at Chapter 8), having dismissed early on, it seems, the authoritative nature of the Biblical texts, Young creating his own uniquely user-friendly trinitarian god.

In that eponymous shack, we find a clumsy Jesus, and the treacly trinity giggly like school girls over the spilled sauce, who we must now ponder His ability to hold one’s soul securely in His hands if He cannot hold a bowl without dropping it.

We find, too, Young’s god perpetrating crass racial stereotypes. He seems to portray Father God, his Papa, as, at least in this therapeutic incarnation, a cross between Aunt Jemima and the Oracle, the black woman who baked cookies in The Matrix. Mack later comments on Jesus’ unassuming appearance, and specifically on His big Jewish nose, the product, Jesus says, of the men on His mothers side of the family. Isaiah 52 and 53, this is not.

As I think about the god of The Shack and how this god interacts therapeutically with Mack, I think of a clichéd, puerile, and idealistic depiction of a group therapy session. There is lots of talk about love,  but there is an absolutely and stunning lack of gravitas in Young’s God. His is not so much a God to be worshiped in awe, but more so a depiction of how we think our better angels would look writ large.

Referring back to Young’s choice and reason for his god’s gender, I do agree that we should not anthropomorphically over-simplify our thoughts of God, and I think that this is a valid point that Young attempts to make from time to time in The Shack. I agree, too, and in my gift for recognizing things blazingly obvious, that the Father, being spirit, is not gendered in the same way as are the gendered creatures of His creation, but it is significant the Godhead refers to Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus instructs us to pray, “Our Father, Who Art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name…..” Father God has ontological reasons for us to refer to Himself as Father, and those reasons, I think, transcend any post-modern objections to the patriarchal social constructions of antiquity. It is with great arrogance and presumption that we assume to refer to the Creator in ways other than how He refers to Himself and how He instructs us to refer to Him.

As a literary aside, I do not think Young, thus far, does a convincing job of  communicating the visceral darkness of The Big Sadness. Young portrays Mack more as petulant than broken. For this, too, Young should be ashamed.

Perhaps in the next installment, Part 4, I will pontificate on Young’s treatment of trinitarian hierarchy, or lack thereof, in The Shack.

As for me, the hour is late, and I now prepare to journey to the land of Nod. 3AM, my time to awake to prepare for work, is not so far away.

The Shack: Part 2

In part one of my review of The Shack, I ended the post with a quote from the book that, if truly taken to heart by the Christian, would tend to undermine the foundation of the faith, the authoritative nature of the Biblical texts, and would do so with such a breezy dismissal that it takes one’s breath away.

The fact that large swaths of the evangelical church could entertain this book after  reading no further than the aforementioned quote, and more, endorse it, is a subject of great concern for me. Before elaborating further, I must admit that, beyond the unbiblical casualness exhibited by all parties at Mack’s encounter with Young’s version of a triune god in that shack,  I understand deeply the yearning for an authentic experience with God. I understand the burning desire, even if theologically errant, to have hard things explained and to be given a coherent reason for suffering. However, like Job, we will ultimately find that we must sometimes be content with the fact that God is God and owes us, the limited and created things, no explanation. For fallen people, that is a hard thing to swallow.

We must also affirm that the Biblical texts are a sufficient revelation of God’s nature, of redemptive history, of His self-revelation that we need not look to subjective experience or extra-biblical revelation to define the nature of God or what He desires to communicate with mankind, without regard to where we reside on the scale of modernity.

Young also does his readers a great disservice, he lies, when he infers that the God of the Hebrews was in constant individual communication with His children of antiquity, that modernity and the church militant limits itself when it limits itself to the Bible. At no point in Biblical redemptive history do we find God gushing over all ‘His kids’ with personal messages and revelation.

If I had a dime for every time someone has said something ridiculous under the auspices of divine revelation, that ‘God told me this’ thing, or the “God revealed to me that’  thing, I would be a less financially limited man.The Apostle Paul would be jealous of God’s informality with  today’s Christian.

More to follow…..

Also, to those who do not wish to navigate my bloggeria so much, here is the quote from The Shack to which I refer:

…the thought of God passing notes did not fit well with his theological training. In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?

A book review, part 1: A bit behind the curve on this one..

Recently a friend from work lent me her copy of the Shack. I have read the reviews, am aware of the controversial nature of the book, and know that my perceptions of this read are going to be colored by the aforementioned. Even so,  and even if the wave of controversy surrounding The Shack has long since crested, I will now put down other titles I am reading, focus on The Shack, and render my thoughts on the book as I read my way through it.

First, I know that The Shack was, and is,  dearly loved by many. It’s lengthy stay on the New York Times best-seller list attests to that fact. I think it brought a sense of solace to many and made God seem warmly imminent, perhaps for the first time in their lives. I think many people have their own “Shack” somewhere in their history, and I know I do. We all, to some degree, struggle with the very real and very theological problem of persistent evil in the world, and The Shack is one such story of struggle, perhaps a theodicy of sorts.

Next, as mentioned earlier, I am aware of the theological controversy surrounding this book. The reformed tribe, among others, found egregious error, even heresy, in much the theological assertions in The Shack. Others pontificated that this is not a theological textbook, but a mere novel. “Lighten up, man!’  However, I say any theological talk, be it in a novel or a systematic theology, especially when it is warmly received my much of the American evangelical community, is worthy of critique, and what follows is mine.

The First Five Chapters:

From the first page, I find Young’s writing, quite honestly, a bit cloying, as if written by an earnest fourteen year old school-girl with but a modest amount of talent with the written word. Second, I hate overt emotional manipulation. Before going further, let me state that I am a bit of a romantic, at times. At the end of the movie, The Gladiator, my eyes were a bit moist. I found the framing device of Saving Private Ryan a bit sentimental, but, again, my eyes were moist when Tom Hank’s character dies at the end of the film. I have to admit, too, that as a father, Young’s writing made me feel Mack’s pain. I did get a bit misty.

However, is it possible to construct a more cynically and emotionally manipulative framing device than the one presented by The Shack?

First, we find Mack and Missy having just had a discourse on the nature of grace and sacrifice in Mack’s recounting of the story of the Multnomah princess, supposedly an analog of the Gospel, though I think a profoundly weak one. In that story, the princess voluntarily sacrifices her life by jumping off a cliff to her death, something apparently required by an Indian prophesy to save the men of the tribe who were all dying from some illness.  As an omen, perhaps, young Missy later asks Mack if God would ever ask her to jump of a cliff? Mack, his heart wrenched by Missy’s question, says no.

Soon after, we find Josh and Kate, two of Mack’s five children, involved in a canoeing mishap wherein Mack, his instincts as a life-guard in his younger days rising up at this moment of crisis, dives into the water and saves his son Josh from drowning. Upon returning to shore, crisis over – at least that one -  everyone safe and sound, Mack finds his youngest daughter, ten years old, if memory serves, ominously missing. The stage for The Great Sadness is set.

As the story unfolds, Missy’s body is never found, but the dress, now blood-stained, worn when she was abducted by her killer is located. It is found in a shack in the woods.

I am at the point now where Mack has received an invitation, via a message in his mailbox, from a character called  Papa to visit him at the shack, a proposal of which Mack is understandably quite dubious, though intrigued.

Again, is it possible for a Young to construct a more emotionally manipulative framing device, the abduction and murder of his ten year old daughter by a serial killer who preys on young girls for a narrative than the one he constructed in The Shack? He has built a literary device of great manipulative and visceral power seeming designed so as to emotionally deconstruct any critical thought.

I will end this initial installment with a quote, found below, starting at the end of page 65 of the soft-cover edition. My next post, when time allows and sooner rather than later I hope, will be to deconstruct this wretched, sophomoric, post-modern intellectual detritus that passes for profundity and then perhaps examine the next few chapters….if I can muster up the where-with-all to stay the course…

…the thought of God passing notes did not fit well with his theological training. In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?