THE DUDE’S GUIDE TO MANHOOD by Darrin Patrick (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
Confusion about manhood abounds. This book offers 10 places to start.
The Dude's Guide to Manhood: Finding True Manliness in a World of Counterfeits by Darrin Patrick (Thomas Nelson, 2014, 208 pages)
Over a breakfast, Darrin Patrick encouraged me to go to seminary. A few years ago, he was my pastor. In some ways, through the occasional conference message, blog post, and published book, like this one, I suppose he still is.
I’m thankful for that.
A Dude’s Guide to Manhood outlines 10 authentic pursuits for men, including determination, loving a woman, loving work (excellent material), and contentment. The final 2 chapters show how Jesus is the hero and what it means to have Jesus as your hero (titles: “Get What You Want: The Heroic Man” and “Living as the Forgiven Men”).
The book has vulnerability, cultural connections, and direct challenges. It’s a solid road map in a world of forgeries.
With respect to the Bible, it’s a zero-depth entry pool, which is a strength not a weakness. A dude that can’t swim isn’t likely to let you throw him off the high dive. Besides, Patrick is building somewhere, wading into deeper waters, namely “Jesus is our hero”—yes, as an example, but more than that, as our savior.
In Piper’s blurb, he advises buying a bundle—one to keep, others to give. I only bought one, although I’m doing pre-marriage counseling now with a couple, and guaranteed the dude gets a copy from me.
(FYI: promotional website http://thedudesguide.org/)
A Favorite Quote
There will be no end to our striving, no conclusion to our pursuit to peel back the layers of the onion to find the magical fix for ourselves. The only way forward is to confess our faults and our shortcoming and to acknowledge the brokenness of our core motivations and our impotence before them. Only then can we begin to pursue the life of the heroic man and be transformed by Jesus, who was the hero on our behalf. (Patrick, Dude’s Guide to Manhood, 141)
I Don’t Need a Boat, but Get Me a Boat
Here's a reason I keep reading the Bible. Again. And Again. And Again.
Jesus withdrew with the disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed… And he [Jesus] told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him. (Mark 3:7, 9)
I take great comfort in the fact that Jesus does not need help doing anything—not mine or anyone else’s. Ever.
In the Old Testament, God says that if he was hungry—say, he wanted a sandwich or something—he wouldn’t ask for help (Psalm 50:12). When he created the world, the only “help” he got was within the Trinity. In the opening verses of Hebrews, the author notes that Jesus “upholds the universe by the word of his power.”
It doesn’t seem like God needs help.
In many ways, this is part of the litmus test of God-ness: If you need anything—food, water, sleep, praise, money, protection, love—then you are not God. If you don’t need, then you are God.
But then I read verses like Mark 3:9, and I take great comfort that Jesus wanted his disciples to help him. In this verse, because the crowd might actually have “crush[ed] him,” Jesus asks his disciples to get the escape boat ready.
Really? Why?
In Luke 4, a crowd wanted to toss Jesus over a cliff, and he just walked through them. I’ve never quite understand how that went down, but it happened. And if this crowd in Mark 3 got too lively, and Jesus needed to bail, then there was water right behind him. He could just walk away on that, right? Wouldn’t that save time and effort? Wouldn’t that even achieve the secondary purpose of showing his God-ness?
This is why, every day, I keep reading my Bible. I want to be tethered to it until I die.
In the Bible, I’m continually surprised—pleasantly surprised—by Jesus. I’ll learn one thing about him—say, he is God and doesn’t need anyone’s help—and then I learn something else—say, he desires the help and ministry of his friends.
I imagine it felt good for the disciples to be told to do something for Jesus, like get a boat ready. For most of those guys, it was in their wheelhouse. I bet they rushed off, their labors fueled with dignity—like EMTs with the sirens whirling: “Jesus needs a boat; let’s go, let’s go; come on, move it; the crowd could push him into the water.”
The tendency, in our human-ness, is to discount either God’s self-sufficiency or that our efforts matter to God. There is mystery, but somehow, these cohere. He is the God-man. And this gives my labors—our labors—for the kingdom meaning, value, and worth.
God doesn’t need my parenting, my preaching, my tithes and offerings, my “quiet time,” my evangelism. But he wants them.
Jesus needs another Christian to start another blog, like he needs a sandwich.
But if he asked me for one, I’d try to make him a good one—a toasted panini with double meat and feta cheese. I think he’d like that.
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ENCOUNTERS WITH JESUS by Timothy Keller (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
When I read this book, I felt like a good friend introduced me to another good friend. You'd probably like to meet him too.
Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions by Timothy Keller (Dutton, 2013, 240 pages)
In Encounters, Dr. Timothy Keller explores 10 encounters with Jesus: 5 encounters that Jesus had with non-Christians in the Gospel of John (e.g., Nicodemus and the woman at the well), and 5 encounters with aspects of who Jesus was and what he has done (e.g., his obedience and his ascension).
In doing so, we, as readers, are forced into these same encounters—not, however, as mere spectators, but as those that must make a decision about Jesus: neutrality is not a legitimate option. “Jesus demands a radical response of some kind” (46). And in our response to Jesus, we encounter “Life’s Biggest Questions” (a fitting subtitle).
A strength of the book, as with all of Keller’s material, is the balance between accessibility and profundity—which, incidentally, in my opinion, has a deep resonance with Jesus himself—accessible, yet profound, at least for those that risk the encounter.
At our church, we recently used this book in a class, particularly the first five chapters, to leverage just these kinds of encounters—encounters with Jesus and encounters with the big questions of life—but also with one additional aim: to learn how the Master (that’s Jesus, not Keller) interacted with non-Christians. We emphasized how Jesus witnessed to others and how we might in turn then display Jesus to others. In this regard, Keller was, we might also say, a masterful example of engagement.
A Favorite Quote
Jesus then demands a radical response of some kind. You could denounce him for being evil, or you may flee from him because he’s a lunatic, or you can fall down and worship him for being God. All of those reactions make sense; they are consistent with the reality of his words. But what you can’t do is respond moderately. You must not say to him, "Nice teaching. Very helpful. You are a fine thinker." That is simply dishonest. (Keller, Encounters with Jesus, 46)
Fresh Words, Fresh Language, Fresh Blood
Not stale, not rehearsed, not clichéd language—we need fresh words, fresh language, fresh blood. In these, there is life. And in the pursuit of these, I launch a blog.
For some time, I contemplated starting a blog. When I made the decision to move forward, an unanticipated question arose: What shall be my first post? You always remember your first. Recently, while listening to an episode from Tony Reinke’s podcast Authors on the Line, I found my answer.
In the episode, Reinke interviewed Pastor Douglas Wilson (also posted on desiringgod.org here). The main talking point was the use of metaphor; but a subtheme, as least as I heard it, was how to communicate effectively.
Early in the interview, Reinke asked Wilson this question:
Was there an ‘ah-ha’ moment in your life or ministry when you discovered the importance of non-fiction imagination to communicate divine truth?
Here is Wilson’s response:
The first resolve was when we were first establishing Credenda as a magazine. I grew up in an evangelical household; I’ve been around missionary newsletters my whole life; I’ve seen Christian magazines and publications and books, etc., for a long, long time. And one of the things that they all had in common, or seemed to me to have in common, was their boringness, their blandness.
So in the acceptable world of evangelical discourse, you have the bland leading the bland… When we were first setting out with Credenda, this was a central resolve… I wanted to write about theology, and history, and doctrine, and culture in a way that was engaging and interesting—not boring. It might be infuriating or it might be exasperating, and you might be tearing your hair out, but you don’t want to put it down. (emphasis added)
Pastor Wilson’s point: Christian writers are [on the whole] bland and boring, and I do not want to be either.
It’s not my place to say whether the appraisal was accurate then or if it remains true today. I have not been around Christian publications long enough or broadly enough to say either way.
And part of me wonders if Wilson, if asked, would say his critique of a few decades ago still holds today. Perhaps he would say that it is still true, at least broadly, though there are many great exceptions. This would be my evaluation.
But to Wilson’s own takeaway (namely, to move beyond bland and boring), I feel a strong resonance. When he says, “I wanted to write about theology, and history, and doctrine, and culture in a way that was engaging and interesting—not boring,” I say, “Amen. Preach it, preacher.”
I see this as a sensible and timely pursuit, not simply because I personally like to read the type of writing Wilson wants to produce, but also because of the cultural shift away from the historic message of Christianity.
Two Ways to Lose the Christian Message
There are two ways to lose the historic message of Christianity.
On the one hand, we can lose it by cutting ties with the actual historic message—the centrality of the announcement of the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. This is the death of severing the veins from the heart. Blood will not flow when the pathways are disconnected from the source. And of this type of ‘death,’ I do feel that I know enough to say that it is rampant today—a lifeless Christianity, not lifeless because Christianity is lifeless, but because it’s not Christianity. As an example of this ‘death,’ consider how often Christianity becomes mere rule keeping devoid of the gospel. That’s not Christianity; it’s mere religion disconnected from the source of salvation, the foundation of forgiveness: the person and work of Jesus.
However, on the other hand, we can lose the historic message of Christianity by saying the message in the same way that we have always said it. This is the death of recirculating oxygen-depleted blood.
I was reminded of this recently when I asked my young children what made someone a Christian. Their first answer: “Ask Jesus into your heart.”
Well, okay, I guess that could mean something helpful, but what does this phrase even mean? It’s an example of language that has lost meaning because it’s expected; it’s been recirculated too many times.
Not stale, not rehearsed, not clichéd language—we need fresh words, fresh language, fresh blood. In these, there is life. And in the pursuit of these, I launch a blog—a first I want to remember.
May God use it to “fan into flame” (2 Timothy 1:6) the craft of speaking and writing the historic message of Christianity in accessible and riveting language. May God use it to pump fresh, oxygen-rich blood into the body.
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