Book Thoughts: Radical by David Platt

I bought Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream as a birthday present for Janelle in February and have heard a few people mention how good of a book it is.  A couple days ago a friend e-mailed me specifically to recommend the book to me; that was the final push to get me to finally read it.  I’m glad I did.

Radical was a quick read – I read it in a few sittings over the course of a couple days, between taking care of kids.  That doesn’t mean it’s shallow; it’s just readable.  The title and subtitle do a pretty good job of explaining what the book is about: the tension between following Jesus and pursuing the American Dream.  It’s a tension that should be familiar to any Christian or anybody that tries to take Jesus’ words seriously.  Platt describes it like this:

We look back on slave-owning churchgoers of 150 years ago and ask, “How could they have treated their fellow human beings that way?”  I wonder if followers of Christ 150 years from now will look back at Christians in America today and ask, “How could they live in such big houses?  How could they drive such nice cars and wear such nice clothes?  How could they live in such affluence while thousands of children were dying because they didn’t have food and water?  How could they go on with their lives as though billions of poor didn’t even exist?”    (p. 111)

This isn’t simple hand-wringing and guilt.  It’s an honest reflection from someone trying to take Jesus’ commands seriously.  Someone trying to read the story of the Rich Young Ruler, or the Rich Man and Lazarus, or Jesus’ commands to care for the poor, and not just turn them into meaningless platitudes but honestly live them out.  How do we do it?

These are questions that have run through my mind for years.  When I read something like the Rich Young Ruler, where Jesus tells a man to sell all his possessions and give them to the poor, I wonder what I’m supposed to do with that.  I have looked at my life and seriously wondered if I am living out the commands of Jesus for real, or if I’m just picking the commands I’m comfortable following.  The area where this hits me the hardest is when I consider how I do or do not care for the poor, the orphans, the people on the fringes of society.  Platt sees this as well:

So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor?  The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church. (p. 111)

I know Jesus didn’t just put those commands in there so I would feel guilty; He wants me to do something about it.  But what?

Radical is a good discussion of questions like that.  There are challenging stories from church history (a good reminder of what I first heard from John Piper – the importance of reading Christian biography), honest confessions from Platt’s own life, strikingly straight identification of many of the ways Christians today dismiss the commands of Christ – and perhaps best of all, a call to action at the end.

If I have one complaint (I have more than that) about most “Christian living” books, it’s that they’re mostly fluff that you feel good while reading (until you become black-hearted and cynical like me) but in the end don’t effect much change.  What I like about this book is that the final chapter provides a challenge in the form of the “Radical Experiment.”  Readers are encouraged to do five things.  These are not five prescriptive steps to turn you into a better Christian, or to make your life complete; they’re five things to help you along the journey as you work through what this stuff means for you.

Janelle and I have had some major stuff going on in our hearts and this book resonates with a lot of that.  As I read the book I didn’t really hear anything new per se, but it did help to hear some of the same questions I’ve been asking myself asked by someone else, and to see how they’re working through them.  So in the end I recommend if you’re a Christian you read this book.  If you’ve been dealing with some of the same questions, or even a vague uneasiness, as you read through some of the passages of Scripture I mentioned, this should help you along your journey.  And if you haven’t thought about or dealt with any of this stuff – you need to, and this book will help wake you up.