No, I’m not talking about the electronic store formerly known as Radio Shack; nor I’m talking about being at some cabin up north. I’m talking about the book that’s pretty hot right now. I bought the book soon after being published because it was buzzing in the blogosphere long before it made it to mainstream. It took its place on my ‘to read’ pile and has been there since then, however all the sudden the book made it to mainstream and everyone started talking about it so I had to read it. Actually this was my second attempt, the first time I tried it wasn’t engaging enough so I didn’t feel motivated to go back to it and it basically waited there for me to pick it up sometime after reading other books.
The two most common critics this book receives is that it was poorly written and that its theology is very sketchy. In regards to first one I’m going to say yes it is poorly written (this is coming from the guy whose english is his second language). However we need to take into account the author is not a writer, he just wrote that story for his kids whom motivated him to publish it and basically no body wanted to publish him so he published it himself, or something like that goes the story. I’m pretty sure those who rejected him are banging their heads against a wall right now.
To the second point I’m going to say two things, one the author has made it clear that this is a novel and by no means he claims that the story actually happened or the views exposed are true. Which I personally think is like when you tell something to someone and wait for their reaction and if you see they didn’t like it you just say ‘just kidding’…my wife hates it when I do that. That’s what I think Young is doing, he is telling everyone what he thinks and then he is just saying ‘just kidding, it’s just a a novel’. Yes, there are some aspects where he walks a very fine line and steps into dangerous territory, but that’s not the point. Those that criticize him for promoting bad theology are falling into the same trap he exposes in the book (which I think is very funny) and that is that we have fallen into a deep religiosity in our view of God and our relationship with Him. We have lost our sight and made God an accessory, we know so little yet we claim to know so much and out of it have transformed Christianity into something far from what it should be.
Imagine I pluck a single hair strand from someone you don’t know and I give it to you and asked you to tell me everything there is to know about that person, you couldn’t, you could tell me some characteristics but you couldn’t tell me everything there is to know about that person. The same way I think about God, we know so little that and based on that little information we have we defined God and basically put him in a box. For all we know I think God might be something totally different.
I think the great thing about this book is that it is able to speak in many different ways to people in different situations, to me it spoke about religiosity in Christianity. How did it resonate with you?
