JonBoyd.org · God in the Flesh by Don Everts

Let me get something out of the way immediately. Here is the worst sentence in this book: "Anyone with the time and money and inclination can become an expert in theology."

source: InterVarsity Press

I think that's a very bad sentence indeed (and I'll explain why in a moment). But I still like this book a whole lot, and I heartily recommend it. Here's why. First of all, I just absolutely love the graphic design of the cover. Frankly, I could have bought this book just for the cover, and that doesn't happen often.

More importantly, reading Don Everts's God in the Flesh is like spending a week hanging out with someone who has been going through a period of learning a lot about Jesus — and learning from Jesus, listening to him afresh. People like that tend to be energized, zealous, turned on, pumped up. Everts himself points out how excited he got as he wrote this book, digging into the four Gospels and seeing Jesus from a fresh angle — and his excitement shows through.

The genius of this book is that fresh angle he's looking at Jesus from. He deliberately sought out seemingly boring verses in the Gospels: "Common verses. With plain words. They are what I consider the 'stage directions' of the Gospels. Verses that tell what happened in between all the action" (35). What he found is far from boring! He has written a whole book about what people were doing right before and right after all the memorable bits. As he puts it, "It's significant, I began to realize, that in the Gospels we don't just have a bullet list of quotes from Jesus. We have stories of the way Jesus was, how folks responded to him, who touched whom, where folks went and how folks dealt with Jesus" (35).

This strategy pays off handsomely. Everts's close reading of these "stage directions" draws him into one remarkable personal encounter after another with the person and teaching of Jesus. He is repeatedly flabbergasted by the impact of Jesus, and he distills his insights into a set of what he calls "potentially dangerous questions." These are "[q]uestions that hang around and haunt me even after I give them an appropriate answer," ones which "just might make room for God to speak into our lives" (22). (Two good examples are: "Is it possible to focus on Jesus too much?" [50] and "Would Jesus have done it just for you?" [125].) By paying close attention to the different ways people responded to Jesus, Everts asks telling, sometimes devastating, questions about how we respond to him ourselves.

So, as I say, Everts is both in-your-face and occasionally over-the-top in this book. He's provocative, not deliberative. Mostly I like that. It's clear that he's really a speaker more than a writer by disposition, and that means passion, enthusiasm, and ardor (with a liberal sprinkling of sentence fragments). He doesn't always measure his words, but if you're willing to see his exaggerations as homiletic hyperbole and his brashness as preacherly zeal, then I think you read him rightly. It's invigorating.

But as much as we can benefit from hanging around with someone who's personally galvanized by fresh current running through their Christian discipleship, we can also learn a lot from someone who has dug deep into theology and biblical studies. Everts doesn't seem to appreciate that so much, and here lies a potential weakness of the book. He occasionally, off-handedly diminishes the contributions that scholars can make to our spiritual understanding. Hence his ill-advised sentence, quoted above: "Anyone with the time and money and inclination can become an expert in theology" (83). This is like saying anyone can become a successful baseball hitter or a skilled musician, and it could have been written only by someone who is not himself an expert in theology. It's just plain ignorant.

It's too bad that Everts's passion has outrun his better judgment here. He does have a useful critique to offer about dead readings of the Gospels that leave Jesus, his disciples, and us ourselves dead in turn. And it's undeniable that the technical theology produced by the modern academy is all too often dead and deadening. But alas, I think we'd have to agree that academic theology has no monopoly on spiritual deadness. I shudder to imagine the damage that he might be doing to a young reader's budding interest in becoming a Christian theologian. Undoubtedly, scholars already walking a path of spiritual and intellectual development will simply discount his remarks. I only hope that they won't also discount the whole book — for herein can be found fresh insight, in abundance, for a passionate life with Jesus.

Although I often feel burdened by the long list of books I don't have time to read, it recently occurred to me that life is going well for me if I read even one or two really good books in a year — books that make an impact and sink deep. Everts's God in the Flesh has been one of those for me in 2005.

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