by Shaun Keating

Created on: July 07, 2008

Someone, I don't remember who, gave me a copy of Blue Like Jazz prefaced with the statement, "I think you'll like it. It's totally your style." I assumed this was because they knew I smoke, drank and took me for some nominal believer who was trying to express my spiritual repression with cigarettes and hard alcohol. Then they said, "You're totally blue like jazz'." I felt like they were saying to me, "You have lost your way, you need this book to bring you back to the status quo, back to where I think you should be." I felt demeaned. And that is my main point about the book: it is demeaning and embarrassing to Christ.

I had heard about the book; they used words like "refreshing", "zesty" and "daring". With adjectives like this I was skeptical and dismissed it as being another book written by some "gnarly" author who thought he deserved to be read because he had been addicted to drugs/sex/alcohol/.

Miller pretty much took a bunch of unrelated topics and pasted them together into a rambling, off-beat (I hate that term), non-fiction bestseller. Marvelous; because I was thinking to myself as I was looking at the book, "You know what young Christians really need right now: another non-intellectual, entirely subjective, unsubstantial guidebook on how to act like uneducated, biased, closed-minded douche bags. I really hope that's what this book is." I cracked it open, read the first paragraph, confirmed my suspicions and then shelved the damn thing right next to Simon Magus, Monantus and Paul of Samosata.
He compares believing in Christ to penguin sex. In an interview with Dick Staub, (go here to read all of it: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/augustweb-o nly/8-4-24.0.html) Miller is quoted as saying, " I hear people all the time say, you know, it's absurd the things you believe. Christianity is absurd.' Sure it's absurd, but there are 500 other very real things that are just as absurd. That kind of thinking really helped me in terms of embracing my faith."

This has helped you embrace your faith? If you want to embrace your faith then go read a church history book, maybe an apologetics book. I realize that's a long, difficult word "apologetics". Learn about the countless men and women who died for what you call an absurdity. Learn about the foundations of your faith: the cold, hard facts about Christianity, the rich history. Who knows? You might, get this, you just might find something substantial with which to defend your faith, or to solidify it in your own mind. Then you won't have be a total cop-out, douche and pass off the Son of God by comparing your absurd trust in him to absurd penguin sex. "Yeah, well, look dude, there's, like, lots of things that are absurd. Just look at penguin sex." It is demeaning because there is a better way to defend what you believe other than rolling over like a scared dog. You've passed up an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel, declare the truth of the Messiah and instead taken the easy way out and admitted that He is an absurdity. That is not an acceptable defense, especially considering that what you are defending is so excruciatingly true and excruciatingly important. It is demeaning because Christ deserves more than being brushed off and put in a corner with "500 other absurd things". I'd like to know what those other absurd things are. Why not grow a pair, study (apparently this is a foreign concept) and learn about what makes your beliefs true rather than feeling your way through God and offering shabby defenses of Him?

I would like to close with this quote from the same interview with Dick Staub (see above for the link to the entire interview). "Faith seemed to contain a lot of paradoxes that I didn't want to hurt my brain thinking about."

Learn more about this author, Shaun Keating.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.