Don’t buy this book.

McCormac is enough of a genuis to make any tale fascinating, no matter how sordid, and that’s just what he’s done here.  He’s told the tale well, but the story is just too sordid.  I am not trying to suggest there is no redeeming value in it.  It is a powerful and haunting tale of depravity…but I do fear that that’s all it is.  So, as far as that goes, it’s interesting, but, when I can see the same thing by watching the news each night, I do wonder what the point is.

The story follows a Tennessee hillbilly named Ballard.  Ballard is mentally, socially, spiritually, and psychologically stunted.  Come to think of it, that may be too much of a compliment.  He’s a degenerate in pretty much every possible way.  His discovery of a dead body by the side of the road seems to send him spiraling into a murderous rampage of lust and debauchery that is nothing less than shocking.  Ballard’s tale is one of isolation, misery, and jarring amorality.  His demise is pitiful and well deserved.

The story left me feeling like I had just witnessed a parade of nihilism.  Unfortunately, I felt dirtied by the experience.

McCarthy is a great writer, but this tale is just too grotesque to be of any real and lasting redeeming value.

Unlike The Road (the movie version of which, inexplicably, showed up in one theater in Atlanta but nowhere closer to me ((WHY?))), I actually saw the movie version of No Country for Old Men first.  The movie was next to brilliant (but, of course, it’s a Coen brothers film, so you know…), but having just finished the book I can now apply that wonderfully worn but almost always true cliche’ to this story:  the book is better than the movie.

Bottom line:  McCarthy can write like a tornado.  His prose is stark and brutal.  It’s very deceptive.  There are almost no rhetorical frills to it and almost no overly complex sentences but, when you finish reading McCarthy’s work you wake up a couple of days later feeling bruised, like you’ve been sucker punched by your Grandpa.  If you just got lost in all that, let me just assure you that, yes, that was a compliment.

Mrs. Richardson wanted to sit this one out, having just read The Road.  She loved The Road, as did/do I, but it was a dark read and she wanted a respite.  So, of course, a few nights back I say, “Listen to this scene,” and, of course, she says the next morning, “He’s a really good writer!”  And there you go.  We read most of it together.

Depending on how much Cormac McCarthy’s views are similar to those of Sheriff Bell (and I suspect they’re very similar), he may just be my new best friend.  Bell’s sporadic reflections, italicized throughout, were worth the read.  He drops wisdom about family, God, truth, faith, war, patriotism, and, of all things, abortion.  This last point very much caught me off guard, pleasantly.  Bell recounts sitting next to a liberal woman at a conference who wants to make sure that her daughter grows up in a country where she can get an abortion.  Bell wryly assures her that there does not seem to be much threat of that changing.  Then he goes on to say (and I paraphrase):  “I suspect she’ll always be able to get an abortion.  She’ll also be able to have you put to sleep too.”  Bell then notes that that ended the conversation.

Brilliant, I say, and true!

Chigurh is more brutal in the book than in the movie, if that’s possible.  Little scenes the movie left out gave me chills.  After shooting up the Mexican dope dealers after his gunfight with Llewelyn, Chigurh stands over one of them ready to execute them.  The dope dealer looks away.  Chigurh says, “No.  I want you to look at me.”  Then he shoots him.  It’s at moments like these that you enter and understand the Sheriff’s suffocating anxiety about what’s happening to the world.  Chigurh is amoral, cold, soulless almost.

Llewelyn is a tragic figure.  You pull for him, of course.  He’s a good guy, especially in how faithful he is to his wife (and isn’t that a rarity in big-time stories like this?), but he’s proud.  His pride is his undoing.  There are hints throughout that his time in Vietnam is playing into this.  But, in the end, Llewelyn just isn’t a Chigurh.  When he has Chigurh at gunpoint in his hotel room (another scene not in the movie), he won’t shoot him.  Part of you thinks, “If you shot that guy, your troubles would be mostly over.”  But that’s just it.  Llewelyn isn’t a Chigurh.  He’s not a killer.

I’ll just finally note that I am still chewing here on McCarthy’s point.  I think I get it then it seems to elude me.  But I’ll say this:  it resonates with me.  I feel that I understand it even if I can’t articulate it.  The closing dream is key:  Bell’s father going ahead with fire in a horn.  It’s an image that McCarthy really likes and he uses it throughout The Road.  Oddly enough, it reminds me of the end of Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder stands before the small flame in the Brideshead family chapel, then walks out smiling.  (Heck, it reminds me of of Gandalf’s secret-flame-guardianship-announcement on the bridge of Khazad-dum!)

I somehow think that the key to understanding McCarthy is in that reappearing flame.  It’s awful small in his stories, but it is not extinguished.  I suspect it makes McCarthy smile in his less morose moments.  I’m starting to think I might know what it is.

Roni and I have recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s stunning novel, The Road, and I am struggling with how to describe this book.  It is Faulknerian in many ways (the tone, the dialogue, the stream-of-consciousness, the bleak, brutal surroundings) and I was not surprised to find that McCarthy’s first literary agent was Faulkner’s as well.  Yet it is also a very distinct work that has come from a very distinct pen.  McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for The Road, and it is easy to see why.

The story, at first glance, is simple enough:  a man and his son trying to survive (mainly along the road) in a mysteriously apocalyptic landscape.  I say “mysteriously” because we are never told what happened, though the prevailing view among readers seems to be that a massive ecological crisis has occured.  I do agree with that view, though some kind of nuclear holocaust can’t be ruled out either.  Regardless, most people are dead, and most animals as well.  The food supply is gone, and those humans who remain have either embraced a despairing life of animalistic cruelty (i.e., cannabalism) or have taken a higher road and are simply seeking to survive.  The man mentions “communes” once or twice, so you gather that there are small pockets of people somewhere out there trying to rebuild some rudimentary form of society.

But the book is much more than it appears at first glance.  It is a deeply and profoundly spiritual book.  I was not surprised to read a recent interview with the director of the movie version in Christianity Todaysaying that McCarthy insisted to him that the references to God and the spiritual impulse of the book not be diminished in the film.  I daresay that any fair-minded reader will agree that such an omission would do serious harm to the fabric of the story.

God is “in the air” of The Road:  from the boy’s simple but resolute faith, to the man’s occasional Job-like cries of despair, to the continuous references to carrying “the fire” (a theme McCarthy ends No Country For Old Men with as well), to the mysterious old man’s observation about the boy’s belief in God.  There is more, but I do not want to say more about the actual story.

I’ll only add this:  McCarthy is a profound and powerful writer and the book is stunning on many levels.  Mrs. Richardson raised a question out of the clear blue last night about the book that had been on her mind since we finished the last page two nights ago.  And that is the mark of a truly great work, isn’t it?  It stays with you, haunting you almost, and continues to work in your mind and in your heart.

Read The Road.

Eugene Peterson is known most for his paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, but to many pastors it is his work on pastoral ministry that forms his true legacy.  He is no stranger to controversy, and I occasionally note things in Peterson with which I disagree, but let me say with no hesitation that Eugene Peterson’s voice is important and well worth heeding.  I daresay that if pastors were to heed the wisdom of a book like Under the Unpredictable Plant (the last in a trilogy on pastoral ministry, the first two beingWorking the Angles and Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work), that much heartache and confusion could be avoided.

Using the story of Jonah as a metaphor for modern minsitry, Peterson argues that too many pastors are enticed by the lure of Tarshish.  By Tarshish, he means that fictional pastorate where the people are perfect and the problems nonexistent, where the pastor gets to bask in the spotlight and where all is a bed of roses.  He believes that the lure of Tarshish has led to an influx of careerism into modern ministry and results in scandalously short tenures among clergy who keep jumping from church to church in search of that perfect place.

Peterson admits that he himself knows the lure of Tarshish.  But, he warns us, Tarshish isn’t real.  The vast majority of pastoral work, he argues, isn’t glitzy and glamorous.  On the contrary, it’s a day-by-day walk with normal people in normal circumstances (or “a long obedience in the same direction” to borrow a title from another of Peterson’s books).  But, Peterson says, it’s in the normal life experiences of people where God is at work, if only we’ll open our eyes to see it.

For example, Peterson reveals how he used to see visitation with people as dull work, until he came to see that each person contains a fascinating story, a whole universe of experiences, and that, most importantly, God is at work in each person.  This transformed Peterson’s approach to visitation.  He came to see each meeting as a great opportunity to find out where and how God was working in the lives of each of his members.

This book hits me at the right time.  I found it powerfully convicting and prophetic and I found myself reading selections to my wife over and over again.  I daresay that every pastor should read this book!

My friend Kevin Griggs told me that I just had to read Jim Belcher’s book, Deep Church, primarily because of Belcher’s appeal to elements of Tom Oden’s paleo-orthodoxy programme as a potential “third way” between the quagmire that emergent and traditional churches have found themselves in.  It’s a quagmire in communication and in understanding, and Belcher believes it is fixable (possibly).

The book has gotten a good bit of press in American evangelicalism.  I gather most of the press has been positive, though there has been some negative push-back as well, maybe most notably from Greg Gilbert at 9Marks.  The 9Marks review is notable because Belcher is himself a reformed pastor of a PCA church who openly espouses a deep conviction on penal substitutionary atonement.  Gilbert feels, however, that Belcher has sold too much of the store in seeking a third way.  Others are applauding the work as a wonderful example of seasoned, careful irenicism whose proposals need to be carefully considered.

Well, I have to admit that I approached the book reluctantly and almost purely because of a trusted friend’s recommendation, but what I found there was very interesting, thought-provoking, and (largely) compelling.

On the positive side, Belcher helpfully defines terminology which is thrown about way too loosely in the squabbles between the emergents and their detractors.  For instance, he helpfully draws a distinction between “emerging” and “emergent,” and he does so in an effort to show that the camp is not monolithic.  This was particularly helpful to me.  I think Belcher reasonably demonstrates that the movement is not populated by an army of Brian McLaren clones (thankfully), and that not recognizing this fact greatly hinders progress in dialogue.

Furthermore, Belcher fairly critiques the emergent views on various issues as well as the traditional objections to the emergent positions.  In this, he has achieved a level of neutrality that is commendable and rare.  His handling of these respective positions really does calm the waters a good bit, particularly his discussion of foundationalism, relativism, and espistemological humility.  At the least he demonstrates that not all emergents are hardcore relativists who do not believe that truth is knowable.

Finally, his proposed “third way” is, I think, fairly reasonable, though moreso in some areas than in others.  Regardless, none of Belcher’s proposals will fail to challenge and stimulate the reader to think carefully about the crucial issues at hand.

On the negative side, however, I do think Greg Gilbert raises some fundamental questions in his review of the book that need answering, particularly in his query concerning how exactly a “third way” can be reached with some in the emergent camp that, by Belcher’s own admission, are soft on the atonement.  (This is not to say, by the way, that I find Gilbert’s review convincing overall.  For instance, I did not see the arrogance in Belcher’s book that Gilbert saw there.  Quite the contrary.  Furthermore, Gilbert did not seem to respect the nuanced position concerning the ecumenical creeds that Belcher, following Oden, is employing.)

In all, a very interesting book that is well worth reading and pondering.  Check out Deep Church.

As a seminary student at Southwestern Seminary, I picked up and read a little 1956 work on eschatology called The Blessed Hope written by a theologian named George Eldon Ladd.  To borrow that great phrase initially used to describe the effect that Barth’s commentary on Romans had on the liberal theology of his day, Ladd’s work fell like an atomic bomb on the playground of the dispensationalism in which I had been raised.  On hindsight, it did much more than that.  His argument against the pretribulation rapture from the position of a lack of historical attestation for that view coincided with a campus visit and lecture from Tom Oden on paleo-orthodoxy.  The two combined caused me to have a kind of epiphanious crisis in which I began to understand more about the importance of historical theology and, more importantly, about what the church is and who God is.  (If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you may not get the struggle that a lot of people feel when they have grown up in the radicallly ahistorical confines of free church Southern fundamentalism only to discover the shocking truth that what God did between the close of the canon and your birth actually kind of matters a bit.  But more on that later, perhaps.)

Anyway, The Blessed Hope was, for me, the death knell of dispensationalism and particularly of the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture.  As I’ve come to know more about the thought of George Eldon Ladd, I’ve come to appreciate him even more.

Now comes John A. D’Elia’s fascinating, enthralling, and heartbreaking biography of Ladd:  A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America.  It is a simultaneously devastating and sympathetic look at one of the 20th century’s greatest Evangelical minds…but not one of its greatest lives.

D’Elia reveals a tortured soul:  too tall and too skinny as a child, Ladd carried with him the label of “freak” throughout his life.  He seems to have been wounded deeply by the early cruelty of the children around him and by the absence of any real fatherly affection.  He married a woman who carried similar wounds.  Their marriage proved to be deeply troubled.  In the midst of this, their son had serious physical and psychological issues, and their daughter harbored deep resentments, apparently, towards her father and his neglect of his son, her brother.

Ladd was a deeply flawed individual…which is to say, Ladd was human.  It is safe to say that he seriously neglected his family in his relentless pursuit to achieve academic standing and credibility.  His life’s ambition was to gain respectability for evangelical theology, a noble goal to be sure, but it’s hard to distinguish how much of Ladd’s goal was the rehabilitation of evangelical theology and how much was the rehabilitation of George Eldon Ladd’s self-image.  Forever seeking to overcompensate for a fragile image of himself, Ladd hurt those closest to him in ways that are tragic and lamentable.  When Ladd’s greatest work (in his eyes) was published, a negative review from a liberal scholar (Norman Perrin) sends him into a kind of spiritual, moral, and psychological tailspin that becomes nothing short of bizarre.  (D’Elia correctly notes that the review itself could not have done this.  Rather, it simply opened a wound out of which poured many of Ladd’s long-festering demons.)  Eventually, Ladd turned to alcohol and died a broken man.

And yet, Ladd produced some of the most influential evangelical works of theology and scholarship in the last one hundred years.  Furthermore, D’Elia paradoxically reveals a man who seems to have deeply loved the Lord and treasured the gospel and thrown himself passionately into  more than a few noble, commendable, and God-honoring tasks.  Ladd even seems to have been aware of his own brokenness and the pain he had caused others, pitifully revealing this fact to audiences of students.

What to make of this book?  Well, it’s a page turner and was very hard for me to put down.  It was not a hit piece in the least (Frank Schaeffer anyone?).  It was sympathetic and balanced yet honest and revealing.  It is a sad but well-told story.  More than that, it is an important story and a powerful cautionary tale.

And what to make of Ladd?  Ladd was a tragedy in so many ways.  He never knew the effect his work had on scores of young ministers and laymen because he was too focused on trying to win the respect of the wider academic world.  He never considered that the work he had done would be opening the eyes of young seminarians in 1996 in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Was Ladd a believer?  Yes, I think he was.  Was he deeply flawed?  Yes, he clearly was.  Does Ladd’s work still have value?  By all means it does!  Should he still be read today?  Yes, yes, yes!  And can his life serve as a cautionary tale against seeking validation in all the wrong places and losing perspective on what is most important?  Indeed it can.

I daresay that nobody who reads this work will do so dispassionately.  You will be changed by this book.  You will see yourself on these pages and you will be warned.  You may just have your heart broken…not by Ladd’s tragic tale, but by how much you may just see yourself in his story.  I daresay that many ministers will resonate with this story of seeking approval, of achieving success, of gaining the respectability of your peers.  But hopefully they will be cautioned by this story about the dangers of fixating on these things at the cost of integrity, family, peace, and joy.

Above all, this book will help you remember that God works with jars of clay, some of them deeply broken…which is to say, that God loves His people, even, and especially, in their brokenness.