Sacrilege! Love the word. It's powerful, if widely misunderstood. Most people, if asked to define it, would likely say something that actually means something closer to blasphemy. It's one of those nuance words we don't always get, especially if you're not big on the verbal sins: heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege, corrupt communication, etc. I should start with a quote from Brian McLaren's New Kind of Christian before I even begin to review a book called Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus.
"I pick up most religious books, like the one you're holding, and know from somewhere midway through page one what the entire book will say, and I read on anyway and find out that I was right. I wonder: Doesn't the religious community see that the world is changing? Doesn't it have anything fresh and incisive to say? Is it even asking any new questions?"
The quote is from his introduction to a book that, even as an outsider to faith, I consider critically important in my development. I read the intro and bought the book on the spot. It was one of the most freeing things I've ever read. I use the quote because my experience with religious books has been similar to McLaren's. Even now with emergent and missional paradigms emerging (ha!) everywhere, the predictability factor is still very high in religious books. One need only think emergently or missionally or Driscolly to predict where the book is headed.
So it was with a great sense of doom that I received Sacrilege to review. In addition to the predictability equation, religious books possess a shock equation, such that: religious books are revolutionary or groundbreaking at an inversely proportional ratio to the titillation factor resident in the title. Any book called Blasphemy! will be anything but blasphemous. In fact, it will probably be a modern apologetic for the Four Spiritual Laws. Third, high praise from people who are the Christian equivalent of hipsters absolutely means a book is not terribly important or shocking. For example, if Len Sweet shows up on the jacket, you can rest assured it will shock no one, his effusive endorsement notwithstanding. To wit:
Hugh Halter has written a carefully constructed theological Molotov cocktail which explodes false myths while it fires up the Christian imagination for truth, beauty, and goodness.
Fuck me in the face.
This is no Molotov cocktail, and why Sweet has to drag the classic virtues into this is beyond me. Am I reading some new Neo-Platonist? Will there be an explication of Aristotle's Virtue Ethics? No. There will be a great deal of this, though:
Sacrilege is about removing religion from our faith.--pg. 32
I'm tempted to use profanity again. Really? Remove religion? See my previous post for my thoughts on this sort of trite nonsense. Here, Halter, makes the same mistake made by Bethke; they both believe Christianity in its purest form will be devoid of religion. Now, in addition to the errors pointed out in that thinking from the previous post, I'd like to point out that both also believe that religion as a term is interchangeable with legalism or rule-oriented faith. It's, of course, where Halter is headed.
Let me propose a crazy idea. Christianity (any faith) ought to have rules, and you ought to follow them. For one, it's how I know what faith you practice without you yammering about my eternal destiny. Two, it's how community formation happens. And three, and the very most important aspect, it's how you act non-dickishly in the world. Following good rules with consistency keeps me from calling you a hypocrite or asshat or douchebag or Republican. Enough of that. On to the substance of the book.
Halter's biggest problem is that he's thorough to the point of boring and trite. How many Bible verses and stories do I need to get the point? What are you offering that's new here? (Short answer: nothing.) Sacrilege for Halter means to "de-sacredize" something. What the reader gets is more of the same old "how to live like Jesus" bullshit without ever actually having to live like Jesus. He re-envisions old concepts like tithing, and suggests pastors encourage members to give 5% to the church and 5% to other charities, with the goal of moving them toward making 100% of their incomes available to Jesus. This is, of course, idiotic. No one does this. No one I've ever met trusts Jesus for 100% of their income distribution or income source. The most obvious thing that would happen to Christians who give away 100% of their income is that they would be broke. Halter surely means for us to be responsible, as in paying our bills first, but other than offering people a choice as to what to do with 5%, what revolutionary principle has he suggested? Wherefore art thou, Molotov?
He suggests different ways of being the Church. Sigh. Maybe community outreach on a fifth Sunday. Wow! This is so trite I can't believe anyone published it, until I saw that it was Baker, and then it makes sense. Innocuous ecclesiology from the boring middle dressed up to look like a real revolutionary text--the specialty of Baker Books. Yes, Halter's church is doing good things. Hell, he seems like he'd probably be a nice guy, except his bio says he's a consultant, but other than that, the photos in the book show all sorts of brown people his church has helped. I just don't know why he needs to write a book about it, especially a boring one. There is nothing revolutionary here, nothing new, nothing all that interesting. Keep doing the good deeds, and quit publishing how-to books, especially when the how-to has been happening for 2000 years.
