The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane ClaiborneMy review
The Irresistible Revolution
is a book written from a place of love by someone who has put his love into action, and as such, I would recommend it to anyone who can read around its sometimes glaring flaws to find the challenging truths that make up the bulk of the book.Claiborne writes with humor, kindness, and humility. He challenges the status quo of American Christianity, calling us to love the poor. He shines light on and brings into question beliefs and practices of both conservative and liberal Christians. Above all, he challenges all of us to know the poor. He writes, "I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor." How else can we truly love them? Claiborne goes on to say, “I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end.”
He calls us from the isolation and – ironically – crowd-focused mentality of the church we have built in America to an all-encompassing love.
The problems come when Claiborne misuses Scripture to make valid points. For example, in Chapter 12, he makes reference to 2 Samuel 7, in which David decides to build a temple for God – a “permanent residence,” so to speak – but God tells David that he is not the man to build a temple. Claiborne uses this passage to validate his point that God doesn’t want us constructing multimillion-dollar church buildings. “God just digs camping,” he writes, seeming to completely ignore the next part of the passage, in which God says that David’s son will build Him a temple (v. 12-13).
The point is valid and he could have simply relied on Acts 17:24 (God does not live in “temples built by hands”) – a verse he references in the same paragraph – to make it, not to mention the time he spends prior to this talking about the church’s misguided endeavors to draw crowds, from which the desire to build these “temples” grows.
These instances of scriptural manhandling are not numerous, but they stick out like the Crystal Cathedral and will probably lead many readers to completely dismiss Claiborne.
The end product, though, is a challenging, convicting work that needs to be read. Christians should read this book for Claiborne’s heart, even if his head is not always in the right place.
View all my reviews.
2 comments:
good review. i really wrestled with this book, and it ended up changing me. i need to go back and read it again. it definitely delivers a swift kick in the pants at some points.
Thank you for your objective review. Everyone I know who has read this book calls it amazing, and I think there are some valid points he makes in reference to living out Christ's love for everyone. However, Claiborne's anti-capitalist and super-socialist political views, including bizarre "Biblical-environmentalism" make reading it difficult. He constantly derails his own points to make political jabs and rants that don't relate to his stated topics. The biggest problem I have with the book is, as you said, the blatant manipulation of scripture, it shocked and offended me. It is a common technique of his to use half of a verse or less and twist the scripture into a perversion of its original meaning, sometimes even an opposing meaning! He rarely cites his scripture making in more difficult for a reader to fact check, and he clearly has little to no education in Biblical studies or languages which may mean his manipulations are actually errors and unintentional. I have a real problem with this book, and its popularity frightens me. I feel Shane is a very talented deceiver, and Christians are far too easily taken in by a book that dares to speak scripture and Bash Bush in the same sentence.
A friend of mine described this book as "representing a perspective we don't often hear in church, a perspective we need to hear more."
I have to ask, "Why?"
Post a Comment