book review: radical

when i first heard about radical by david platt, i was beyond excited. i was smitten with the subtitle: taking back your faith from the american dream. finally, i thought, an evangelical has written a book that seriously engages social justice and the gospel. i was ready to have my life turned upside down.

and then i read the book. and got really pissed off.

now, to his credit, platt makes some great points throughout the book. his chapter entitled "how much is enough: american wealth and a world of poverty" is compelling, and i am thankful that an evangelical delved so deeply into the issues of american consumerism versus the $1-a-day lifestyle many in our world have. i appreciate that he challenges us to think about what it would mean to sell everything we have and give to the poor. and i love that he writes, "give. give generously, abundantly, sacrificially. give not because your stuff is bad. give because christ is in you." beautiful words.

where i take issue with platt is in his assertion that the most important question facing our world today is where people will go when they die. i don't think the crux of following jesus is a question of heaven or hell. in fact, i think twittling the gospel down to a choice between heaven or hell is quite possibly the most selfish of all explanations of what the gospel is. which is ironic since the whole point of platt's book is to reveal how the american dream has become deeply entrenched in christianity, causing us to relentlessly pursue the "what's in it for me" of christianity.

but i would argue that the american dream is really to blame for this question of "where are you going when you die" aspect of evangelical christianity that is so pervasive in our culture, and it honestly bothers me a lot that platt is so oblivious to how self-serving heaven-or-hell christianity really is. you see, when someone obsesses over where someone else is going when they die, i think they are really obsessing over that person's eternal comfort. hell is a terrible place, very hot with lots of fire. you wouldn't want to go there. but heaven is nice. you would like it there. and so when someone shares the gospel with an unbeliever and attempts to lead them to christ by asking them, "on a scale of one to ten, how sure are you that you will go to heaven when you die?" they, of course, would like to get into some kind of discussion where the unbeliever expresses a desire to go to heaven to which the evangelizer will share how jesus died on the cross so we can.

what is always tragic to me in these kinds of conversations is that jesus only enters the picture after both parties have agreed that heaven is a desirable place where we would like to go. jesus is only useful after we have decided what we want. even more unfortunate is that many people make decisions to follow christ based on heaven-or-hell christianity without even knowing much about who they are following. no wonder american christianity looks so unradical: once people get the heaven-or-hell question out of the way, they can go back to living however they want. jesus doesn't really matter.

i grew up in a church that preached heaven-or-hell christianity. when i got to college, i had the quinessential crisis of faith. and what got me through that crisis and over to another (and, in my opinion, better) side of faith was reading through the gospels. i read them over and over again. i wanted to know jesus. and what i found was a man and a God worth infinitely more than going to heaven or not going to hell. what i found was someone who was angered by injustice, compassionate to the lost, unafraid of touching lepers, generous to the poor, devastated by sin and its effects on our world...someone perfect in every way that i am not. someone who left everything because he believes we are worth risking everything for. someone who knows my mistakes and carried them while he hung -- cursed -- on a tree. someone who does not hold those mistakes against me but invites me to join him in his mission to redeem the world and gives me the privilege of becoming like him.

you see, jesus is the crux of the gospel. the most important question facing us today is not where people are going when they die. rather, it is whether they know jesus. while people reject christianity for a host of reasons, i believe many of them reject it because they are not compelled by a religion that is so obsessed with eternal destiny that it has no power to effect any real change in life right now. the truth of the gospel is that while we have rejected God, jesus redeems us from our rebellion and re-awakens the image of God in us. he gives us the power to be who God created us to be in the beginning. he gives us purpose when once we were just aimless wanderers. and he gives us a mission when once we were living for ourselves.

when i tell my kids about the gospel, i want them to make a decision to follow christ because they are so compelled by who jesus is, not because they like the idea of going to heaven over hell. if we make christianity a question of heaven or hell, then we commit the great sin that got us all here in the first place: thinking that we (and what we want) are more important than God. only when we truly realize we are the least important players in this great story God is writing will we begin to see what being radical is all about.

ps -- i actually think heaven is an important part of the christian faith. heaven is where redemption is finally complete, so christianity doesn't make sense apart from heaven. but heaven does not make sense apart from jesus, so my point is that heaven is not the purpose for being (or becoming) a christian.