Reader beware

Thabiti Anyabwile has drawn attention to a sticker appearing on books in a Christian book chain in America:

"We want you to know that the authors of books marked Read with Discernment may have espoused thoughts, ideas, or concepts that could be considered inconsistent with historical evangelical theology.However, we are making these titles available to our customers (along with the background and additional insight offered here through Read With Discernment) because we believe the books do present content that is relevant and of value to Christians and/or because pastors, seminary students, and other ministry leaders need access to this type of material, strictly for critical study or research to help them understand and develop responses to the diversity of religious thought in today's postmodern world. Our prayer for you is that in whatever you read, you place the material under the magnifying glass of scripture and read with discernment, asking God to reveal His truth to you so that, as Paul wrote in Philippians 1:9-10, "...your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you can determine what really matters and can be pure and blameless in the day of Christ..." (Holman CSB).

It is an interesting development, it should remind us to test with the scripture what we read even when it is bought from a Christian bookstore. But we also need to be careful to test what we listen to, in fact we need to be discerning full stop.

The Shack II

The book continues to challenge my assumptions about God and the Trinity. It does so by showing a loving familial relationship between the godhead with laughter and fun and love. It does not do so in a way that is biblical but by showing something so different from how we think about God. The difficulty is that this makes it hard to weigh biblically, though I think the challenge is needed, the way we think about the trinity often lacks warmth and misses that idea of relationship.

It also challenges us on our independence from God, the fact that we often hold things back from God. That actually God is good and is loving and we should live dependent on him.

But there continue to be things that are a concern. Why does the Father have nail marks in hand and feet? The emphasis that the Father suffered at the cross too, the challenge as to what the cry "My God, my God who have you forsaken me." Young maintains that we misunderstand it and that God never left Jesus.

It is a book that challenges us and our perceptions but not by using the Bible but by painting a fictional story. I find myself so far torn about the book - I can see friends of mine reading it and longing for a relationship with God, but there are things here that worry me about the God they would long for relationship with.