40 Days to Thinner Theology

I started listening to Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life today while I was driving to Charlotte. It's one of those critical-mass books, something that you wind up reading because everyone else is reading it. I couldn't work in the "help-people-find-their-purpose" business without having read it. (Yes, I suppose I could use a little help in that line myself, but my expectations were fairly low.)

I liked how Warren sets up the book as a forty-day spiritual journey. It makes sense to not only write the book, but tell the readers how you want them to read it. It takes a mere book and structures it as an experience. I was nodding right along until I got a gentle pitch for my Purpose-Driven notebook, and my Purpose-Driven card deck of Bible verses. For a moment there, I almost forgot I was partaking of a franchise.

Still, I feel this moral obligation to respect the author's intent; I always feel like an author deserves a chance to pull off whatever effect they're going for, and I feel like I might ruin it for myself if I don't surrender to the work and let it do what it wants to do to me. That's why I hate abridgements and never skip ahead in a book unless I've lost all respect for it. So I will play along with the chapter-a-day thing and see what happens. I had done essentially the same thing with Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path, White Clouds and found it to be very effective.

I liked how Warren cuts to the chase: "It's not about you." He cuts through a lot of self-help pablum very quickly by emphasizing that self-centeredness is doomed when it comes to finding meaning, and just for that I think he's a good healthy dose of perspective for our society.

I was also somewhat startled to hear an essentially fundamentalist Protestant talk so freely about the virtues and limitations of various translations of the Bible. When I was growing up in a Southern Baptist tradition, talking about translations was a serious faux pas; you never did anything to suggest that what we were reading was anything other than the unadulterated Word of God. It's a little refreshing for someone to say, "Gee, I think this translation says this idea a little better than that one," without it being an argument about "poetry" or a stylistic matter of taste. It's nice, in other words, for someone to take the ideas of the Bible seriously, rather than merely cleaving to some knuckle-headed literalism.

I was also somewhat surprised at how smart someone can sound when they make naked appeals to Biblical authority. "Philosophy? Mere guesswork! Self-inquiry? Useless navel-gazing! Want to know God's purpose for you? Just ask God!" After years and years of taking it for granted that finding meaning was a difficult and uncetain process, I had forgotten how seductive it can be for someone to say, "I have the answer, right here." No wonder he sells so many books.