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Searching for God Knows What
By Donald Miller
Nelson Books, 2004. 239 pages.
Donald Miller is a self-described evangelical Christian who also displays a bent for unorthodox opinions and manners of expression. In Searching for God Knows What he makes the case for an approach to Christianity that is relational rather than propositional. “The essence of our spirituality lies in a relationship with God,” Miller writes. He has no patience for formulaic religion; at the same time he wisely acknowledges that relationship is much harder than formula. He decries the impostors who claim to speak for God while being in reality “more concerned with money, fame, and power than with grace, love, and social justice.” Such impostors, he says, “worship a very small god, a god who exists simply to validate their identities,” a god who should be renounced.
Miller extols the virtue of the poetry and stories in the Bible, remarking that the Bible began to make sense to him when he got over the idea that it was a self-help book. In terms of commonly-held notions about and characteristics of evangelical Christians, Miller is something of a contrarian. Insistent as he is on relational faith, he posits a morality centered in love: “If you want [those who are immoral] to be forgiven by Christ, if you want them to live eternally in heaven with Jesus, then you have to love them. . . . So go ahead and declare war in the name of a conservative agenda, but don’t do it in the name of God. That’s what militant Muslims are doing in the Middle East, and we don’t want that here.”
Miller is a refreshing evangelical voice, though he does have some drawbacks. His relational approach is hampered by a very high Christology that makes Jesus so remote that a relationship with him is difficult to imagine. Frequent references to the certainty of an afterlife render the here-and-now far less relevant than the hereafter. Miller’s insistence that “Moses most likely wrote the book of Job, and when he was finished he wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy” repeats a traditional but largely discredited notion and causes the reader to view his exegesis with suspicion. While he states that “the stuff that helps me believe Jesus was actually God is really the social stuff,” he provides, as certain proof, strict typological readings of Old Testament passages, not even entertaining the possibility that the New Testament writers (I call them poets and assume they engaged in writerly liberties beyond those of news reporters) may very well have written into and out of the tradition that gave birth to Jesus, rather than merely reporting facts.
Still, Donald Miller offers an evangelical take that is in good part counter to the mainstream evangelical approaches that are at the heart of much division in America today. He is a welcome voice, especially suited to young Christians who are trying to make up their own minds about how to face complex social and personal issues from a Christian perspective.
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