Proclaimer Blog
Know any perfect books?
Just finished reviewing Cross Roads (William Young's follow up to The Shack) for Evangelicals Now. You'll have to wait for the review, but what has got me thinking about the book is that there is an ambiguity about it. There are things that are good (or at least OK about it). There are others that are bad. Truth be told, most books have those kinds of elements – although maybe not as extreme. Not everything in every book is good. Few books are complete badness. That's why learning to read a book in a discerning way is so important. Most books are ambiguous to some extent. Perhaps this is why books have become shorter? There is less chance for them to say unhelpful or even wrong things.
The overall usefulness of a book, or whether it can be recommended to your congregations, largely depends on how those good things and bad things interact. In Cross Roads, the good things are closely linked to those which are not: hmm, worrying. It's almost impossible, I think, to assimilate what this particular book is teaching without travelling rather some rather rocky paths. For that reason, I don't particularly like it (and I'll explain more when I review it).
It made me think more broadly about the good books I love and use. I need to remember none is perfect. Two examples will suffice. For those of us who use books in evangelism and outreach, some thinking on this matter is necessary. I love Two Ways to Live, for example. But it is silent on being saved to belong to a community. That's hardly its purpose. Careful thinking means that if I use that tool (and I do) I will want to follow it up with some other stuff. It's not an ambiguity, it's simply a recognition that there are always other things to say. Equally, I recommend our young guys in church to read Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology in one of its 457 versions. But there are things there I don't agree with. I think books are a great God-given tool. But the church that uses them without discernment of any kind is surely a little naive. The wonderful value of both of these excellent tools, of course, is that they seek to drive people back to the Bible, something conspicuous by its absence in Cross Roads.
And that's what we want. We've only one perfect book and our ultimate aim is to get people into that. Anything less will always be substandard.