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.

Read this: Fahrenheit 451

I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 with my seniors and I think Ray Bradbury might be some kind of wizard.  This is one of those books you very well may have been assigned in high school but didn’t bother reading.  If that’s you, you did exactly what Bradbury thought you would.  You are who he thought you were.

Fahrenheit takes place in a dystopian future where firemen burn books and the houses that hold them.  The story follows a fireman, Guy Montag, as he begins to wake up to the reality around him.  He realizes his profound dissatisfaction with life after he meets a girl so strange so goes on hikes and has conversations with her family. 

Bradbury wrote this book in the early 1950’s and he meant it not as a warning about government censorship (books are outlawed) but rather as a warning against technology and the impact he feared it would have on society.  Here are just a few of the things that are true of Bradbury’s world:

• The prefer being entertained to paying attention to what’s going on.
• They are fat and happy so they don’t care about the world around them.
• Their government gets involved in wars but the people pay more attention to their TV shows.
• People are constantly plugged in to technology – TV, music, movies – so they don’t engage in real relationships or talk to one another.
• Suicide attempts are commonplace.
• The society is incredibly violent – young people kill each other and people smash things for fun.
• School is about filling students with facts and true thinking is discouraged.
• People make stupid statements about politics when they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
• People mask their unhappiness and dissatisfaction with sex, drugs, and having “fun.”
• People don’t want to read because they’d rather watch TV or be entertained.
• People don’t understand the point of learning something if you don’t need it to do your job.
• Headlines and sound bytes are more important than thoughtful analysis.

I could list specifics along with all those bullet points from the book, and I could link to stories from today’s news alone that show how those very same things are true of us, but I don’t think I need to.  You’d think I was simply railing against the world in 2011, but I’m describing the world of Fahrenheit. 

Here’s one quote, where Beatty, the fire captain, explains society’s descent:

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, beter it be all those than that people worry over it.  Peace, Montag.  Give the people contests that they win by remembering capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.  Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.  And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.  That way lies melancholy.  Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.  I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it.  So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex.  If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration.  But I don’t care.  I just like solid entertainment.

I seriously just want to quote the whole book.  It’s fantastic.  You should read it.  And you should wonder, like me, if Ray Bradbury is some kind of magical wizard, because he seriously called it.